Asking for Money

While responding to my local public radio station’s fund drive last week, I thought of writing a post about the challenges faced by non-profits and charitable organizations, including spiritual services, asking for financial support.

I receive much thoughtful news commentary listening to National Public Radio and occasionally reference their reports on this blog, so I feel happily obliged to contribute to their services.  But I doubt if churches could “get away with” dispensing with regular programming to devote their time to fundraising.

Of course, there is plenty of fundamentalist, evangelical, and/or prosperity gospel religious programming that does, a point that John Oliver has recently hilariously ridiculed on his HBO show by establishing a faux church named, “Our Lady of Perpetual Exemption.”

But those of us on the progressive end of the religious spectrum tend to be more circumspect about much needed financial support. Perhaps that’s why some progressive religious blogs have paid subscriptions, but this blog has never required donations for access. Nor has it allowed advertising on the site, and there is no remuneration for sales of recommended books or use of its posts on other blogs.

When I served West Hollywood Presbyterian Church, many of us went to brunch after Sunday services. Once, while we were gathering money to pay our collective bill, I mischievously joked, “If only we could get this much in the offering plate!”

“But we don’t get fed at church,” one person remarked, to which I responded, “You don’t?”

At the time, the church was part of Pacific Presbytery, and many a time, both during presbytery meetings and when I served on its committee overseeing candidates for professional ministry, I witnessed seminarians transferring into the Presbyterian Church without seeming to change their fundamentalist, evangelical background beliefs, and I cynically wondered if it was because Presbyterian ministers are paid better than most.

MCC, the denomination that ordained me ten years ago, does not have the material resources of longstanding mainstream denominations, yet I have witnessed its pastors serve their congregations with zeal, despite frequently being underpaid. A common joke among the clergy is that one has to be partnered with someone with a “real job” to survive.

A churchwoman once told me that she was well into adulthood before she realized pastors were paid!

Fall is the time congregations usually have their stewardship drives. The end of the year is when charitable groups and other non-profits seek our donations.

I urge you to take these requests to heart.

And I invite you to consider a tax-deductible donation to this blog.

Blessedly, my “church” overhead is low—I don’t have a sanctuary to support or multiple employees. Ten per cent of your contributions (beyond credit card charges) goes to MCC in gratitude for its oversight, not only of contributions, but of how this emerging ministry does its work. I write an annual report, documenting what I’ve done during each calendar year, and pay an annual ministerial credential fee, as an “authorized, active, and accountable” MCC ministry.

Collectively, your congregation might consider putting “Progressive Christian Reflections” as a line item in your mission budget, because this blog serves as an outreach to progressive Christians in unsupportive congregations as well as those beyond the church.

But only do so if you believe you or someone “out there” is being fed spiritually by these reflections.

Gratefully,

Chris

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Or copy and paste this link into your browser: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Several posts referencing NPR are on the link in the second paragraph. Additional posts referencing local public radio can be found by clicking here.

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

A Flower's Tears

The flowers I was contemplating.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post last week that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Last Wednesday and today I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and this one from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s pastoral sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem:

A flower’s tears

are the dewdrops

that drip, orb by orb,

as sun rises.

A flower’s tears

are the raindrops

that stream, string by string,

as storms rage.

A flower’s tears

are the petals

that drop, one by one,

as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

Donations to this blog ministry may be given 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 © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Pride Is Faith

Today this post is appearing on my blog and that of Believe Out Loud, which will be running selected posts beginning today. Thanks be to God and to all those who made possible the U.S. Supreme Court decisions on same-sex marriage announced after this posted!

“Pride is faith in the idea that God had when God made us.”

–Isak Dinesen, nee Karen Blixen

I often quote this insight from Blixen’s memoir, Out of Africa, during LGBT Pride Month.

This morning on Atlanta’s public radio station, an interview reminded me of the religious objections to Atlanta’s Pride Parade, formerly in June, the month that marks the anniversary of New York City’s famed 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, considered the birth of the modern LGBT movement in the United States. (I personally prefer to think that our contemporary movement began nine months earlier—a good gestation period!—with the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church on October 6, 1968.)

Charles Stanley, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, was unhappy with the Pride parade’s route down Peachtree past his church. He once declared AIDS was “God’s curse” on gay people, the interviewee reminded listeners. Confrontations between church members shouting Bible verses and holding anti-gay signs on its steps and the offended marchers prompted the church to hire security guards to stand between the marchers and the church edifice, one subsequently torn down when the congregation retreated from urban life to the suburbs.

Across the street, St. Mark’s United Methodist Church, though to this day hampered by a denominational ban on any support for LGBT Christian causes, decided to pass out cups of water to the marchers.  Their senior pastor, Mike Cordle (misnamed in the interview as “Mark” Cordle), had decided to resurrect a dying city church by reaching out to the LGBT community.

Writing of this in my 1994 daily meditation book, The Word Is Out (Oct 25), I quoted Mark 9:41, “For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose their reward.” As one of those marchers, I wrote, “We may not have known we bore any resemblance to Christ, but these Christians saw Christ in us. Their reward was that we saw Christ in them.”

My late mother in California resisted the increasing volume of her Baptist worship, sometimes choosing instead to watch Charles Stanley on television. On one of her visits to Atlanta, she asked if I would take her to worship at First Baptist Church to hear Dr. Stanley.  I didn’t want to spoil her image of him, but I gently said that I thought he was anti-gay. She said, “Oh, he never says anything negative about homosexuality on television.” Being my chief supporter, that would have soured her view, having stopped watching Florida preacher James Kennedy because of his anti-gay rhetoric.

A gay African American neighbor, who once sheepishly admitted attending First Baptist Church, told me at the time, “They never broadcast his anti-gay sermons.” But I did not tell Mom, and dutifully took her to worship at their new location, a Big Box building with a church-like interior that was a cross between the perfection of Disneyland and the artificiality of a Hollywood set, which of course, it was. His sermon, itself a mix of pop psychology, self-help, and the gospel, was interesting and not objectionable. I encouraged Mom to wait in line afterward to have the book she had just bought in the church gift shop signed by Dr. Stanley. He was gracious as I fumbled with Mom’s camera to take a picture of them together. For her, he was a rock star.

The fall before she died Mom confessed to me that she had always known God loved everyone, but she had never understood that God loved her specifically and individually until then. I said in mock dismay, “Mom, haven’t you been reading my books?!” Yet Dr. Charles Stanley was partly the reason for her spiritual insight.

Both Rev. Stanley and Rev. Cordle would go on to have public marital problems.  I already knew the latter’s compassion toward gay people, but I hoped the former’s trouble might sensitize him to those who are judged for their sexuality.

I hoped Dr. Stanley might have learned Karen Blixen’s corollary to her insight about pride:

“Love the pride of God beyond all things, and the pride of your neighbor as your own.”

Related Posts:

The Boy with Green Hair

A New Underground Railroad

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  DONATIONS NEEDED AND WELCOMED! THANK YOU!

A Flower's Tears

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem: 

A flower’s tears

are the dewdrops

that drip, orb by orb,

as sun rises.

A flower’s tears

are the raindrops

that stream, string by string,

as storms rage.

A flower’s tears

are the petals

that drop, one by one,

as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight  just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A post for the 15^th anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday: 9/11: When We Were One

Donations to this blog ministry may be given 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 © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

"Arrogant Autonomy (or) Loving Excentration"

One of the books on my “intend-to-read shelf” after our move is the paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man. I’m not sure where or how I acquired it, probably in a used book sale, as its previous owner’s name appears inside the cover. Its title drew me, given our present bleak time politically, as leaders and electorates in various parts of the world challenge my usual optimism.

I haven’t read Teilhard since my youth, though I was happy to discover his insight well represented (with due credit) in one of J. Philip Newell’s books on Celtic Christian thought. In college I believe I read The Phenomenon of Man and am certain I read The Divine Milieu, because I humorously parodied (and analyzed) it in a paper, “The Divine Mildew.” I also attended a conference of the Teilhard de Chardin Society, which promoted his thinking about a future evolution of the human soul.

I recently read that longer lived people tend to challenge themselves physically or mentally, and reading the first essay, “A Note on Progress,” tells me that this book will surely extend my life by a year. As I read and re-read the chapter, I confess my broken knowledge. Yet Teilhard’s erudition is made tenable by exquisite phrasing and enlarging metaphors. It is from this chapter that I take the title of this post.

Neither my two-volume OED nor searching the internet revealed a definition of “excentration.” “Centration” means a focus on one aspect of a situation that neglects other possibly relevant aspects, so I suppose “excentration” means considering all relevant aspects, and given the context, Teilhard is referring to the need to attend to the larger picture of things as they are. “Loving excentration” must mean a compassionate, even altruistic consideration of all things (a philosophic version of public radio’s “All Things Considered”!). Thus it is inclusive and holistic.

As it turns out, I could’ve saved myself this effort by simply checking again J. Philip Newell’s references to Teilhard in his book, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, p 103: 

Teilhard coined the concept of excentration as his way of saying that we find our true selves outside of ourselves or that we find our true center in the heart of one another and at the heart of all life. 

“Autonomy” Thomas Merton considered to be the delusion/idol/sin of the modern human being, so “arrogant autonomy” could mean such delusion/idol/sin that unapologetically focuses on me or the self. I believe this could be expressed in everything from personal aggrandizement and personal success to personal salvation. It could also be extended to a tribe, race, nation, or species.

“A Note on Progress” suggests that our present view of a seemingly static reality belies the inexorable flow of evolution, one that has evolved human consciousness but is evolving still as we, through science, become more acutely aware of our place in history and our place in the universe.

“Plato and Augustine are still expressing, through me, the whole extent of their personalities,” Teilhard writes, later extending that understanding to Christ: “Christ, as we know, fulfills Himself gradually through the sum of our individual endeavors.”

At the same time we have become aware that the choices we make “will have repercussions through countless centuries and upon countless human beings,” not to mention “an entire Universe.” That he wrote this in 1920 makes it ever more prescient and prophetic about our own time of globalization, 24/7 news and communication, the internet, and climate change.

I wish that sentiment about repercussions had been included on the opening screen of U.S. voting machines last November.

The professor who introduced me to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin in a course on Process Theology once wryly commented in another context that major thinkers stopped talking of progress after World War II.

But in “A Note on Progress” Teilhard footnotes that progress is not “necessary or infallible” (emphasis his) but rather, “is offered and awaits us, analogous to that which the individual cannot reject without falling into sin and damnation.” And here I don’t think he means damnation at the hands of an angry god, but rather, at our own hands. 

A more realistic and more Christian view shows us Earth evolving towards a state in which Humanity, having come into the full possession of our sphere of action, our strength, our maturity and our unity, will at last have become an adult being; and having reached this apogee of our responsibility and freedom, holding in our hands all our future and all our past, will make the choice between arrogant autonomy and loving excentration.* 

This will be the final choice: revolt or adoration of a world.  And then, by an act which will summarize the toil of centuries, by this act (finally and for the first time completely human), justice will ensue and all things be renewed. 

In other words, we need to grow up, not just individually, but as a species. This, to me, is not just the Christian task, but more broadly, the spiritual quest.

*I have changed “Man” to “Humanity” and “his” to “ours” in this paragraph.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking on or copying and pasting in your web browser:  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.  

Mindful of the Gaps

Enjoy this blog more by going to the link provided in the first paragraph!

National Public Radio featured a report about why certain popular pieces of music spontaneously set people to dancing.  The occasion was Pharrell Willliams’s “Happy” going viral on the internet as people around the world videotaped themselves dancing to the music, even at risk to themselves, such as in Iran, where six teens were arrested for posting their video.

The neuroscientists interviewed have theorized that it’s the gaps between sounds in certain pieces of music that invite us to move, providing the “space” and motivation for our bodies to respond.  I think something similar happens spiritually in the gaps reciting liturgies or the Lord’s Prayer.

The mantra of the London subway, “Mind the gap,” could become in sacred music and liturgies, “Be mindful of the gap,” the silences out of which spiritual movement comes: the pauses in liturgies and psalms and eloquent scriptures (such as 1 Corinthians 13 or 1 John 4) as well as the intervals between notes and beats and rhythms and vocals in everything from Gregorian chants to Gospel songs. 

In my book, Communion of Life, I named it “the thoughtful pause,” the quiet and the calm required to absorb what has gone before (say, in a poetic or musical phrase) and to respond, anticipating what may come next. I believe prayer, contemplation, retreats, and (I’d like to believe) this blog may serve as “thoughtful pauses” that compel us to dance spiritually.

The lead neuroscientist, Maria Witek of Aarhus University in Denmark, explained during the NPR story that “Gaps in the rhythmic structure, gaps in the sort of underlying beat of the music—that sort of provides us with an opportunity to physically inhabit those gaps and fill in those gaps with our own bodies.”

Surveys found that the most effective drum patterns in getting people off their feet, she says, were “not the ones that have very little complexity and not the ones that had very, very high complexity, but the patterns that had a sort of a balance between predictability and complexity.” That balance of predictability and complexity may be needed in our own liturgies, readings, sacred songs, and sermons.

The anonymous fourteenth century author of the spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing could be considered among the world’s first bloggers, given the brevity of its chapters. Written for English monks, this mystic observed, “You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God. This brief moment produces the stirring that embodies the greatest work of your soul.” (Contemporary English translation by Bernard Bangley.)

Alongside music, the cadences of many preachers, the “call and response” of some African American worship, and the antiphonal responses of the Daily Office may all provide gaps that invite us to fill them with our spiritual dance—and by that I don’t mean “disembodied,” but one that moves our bodies as well as our souls.

When I was in college, the choir of our church sang a catchy Caribbean song. Our staid congregation stayed in their pews, smiling appreciatively, but resisting an urge to rise and sway and clap. To paraphrase Jesus, “If these Christians remain seated, the pews themselves will dance.” That didn’t happen, but when the choir finished, someone spontaneously cried out, “Do it again!”

And they did!

 

I recommend the current film on Netflix, Sound of Metal, about a heavy metal drummer losing his hearing, for its spiritual subtext. This post originally appeared June 11, 2014.

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely in Chris Glaser’s name to the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

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

Dust and Glory

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. 

“We have this treasure in clay jars,” the apostle Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians, “So that it may be clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” 

As I age I am especially aware of my cracked and wrinkled clay! I see it in the mirror, as my skin’s terrain shifts with time. I feel it in my body, my joints stiffening like the Tinman’s rusting hinges. 

Lent is a time to reflect on our mortality, but I think of it also as a time to contemplate our divinity—as process theology would say, our participation in the divine life. “For in God we live and move and have our being,” Paul quoted a Greek philosopher to proclaim a new theology in Acts 17:38. 

Henri Nouwen’s spiritual director once gave him this koan, this mantra: “I am the glory of God.” Where else is the glory of God manifest but in our bodies and in nature and in the cosmos? As Teresa of Avila observed, “On earth, God’s body is our own.” Ephesians tells us, “We are God’s work of art” (NJB, 2:10). 

Thomas Merton wrote “it is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, [God] gloried in becoming a member of the human race.” 

Listening to the news on National Public Radio and reading the newspaper each morning, I am constantly reminded of human absurdities and our terrible mistakes. That’s why I need a time of reading and reflection to remind me who we are. 

Some progressive Christians have reservations regarding the divinity of Jesus, "that God gloried in becoming a member of the human race." Henri Nouwen wrote in his book Creative Ministry, “We will never fully understand the meaning of the sacramental signs of bread and wine when they do not make us realize that the whole of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist becomes a ‘special problem’ only when we have lost our sense of God’s presence in all that is, grows, lives, and dies.” I would extend his understanding to say, “The divinity of Christ becomes a ‘special problem’ only when we have lost our sense of God’s divinity in all that is, grows, lives, and dies.” 

Affirming “I am the glory of God” is not “all about me” or “all about you,” but rather, all about us and all about God.  

+++

You may enjoy reading “Jesus’ Temptations” on the writings page of my website, my imaginative excerpt from the “lost” Gospel of Jesus.

Being Mindful of the Gaps

Please talk with me on BlogTalkRadio July 3, 3:30-4:30 p.m. ET.

Enjoy this blog more by going to the link provided in the first paragraph!

Recently National Public Radio featured a report about why certain popular pieces of music spontaneously set people to dancing.  The occasion was Pharrell’s “Happy” going viral on the internet as people around the world videotaped themselves dancing to the music, even at risk to themselves, such as in Iran, where six teens were arrested for posting their video.

The neuroscientists interviewed have theorized that it’s the gaps between sounds in certain pieces of music that invite us to move, providing the “space” and motivation for our bodies to respond.  I think something similar happens spiritually in the gaps reciting liturgies or the Lord’s Prayer.

The mantra of the London subway, “Mind the gap,” could become in sacred music and liturgies, “Be mindful of the gap,” the silences out of which spiritual movement comes: the pauses in liturgies and psalms and eloquent scriptures (such as 1 Corinthians 13 or 1 John 4) as well as the intervals between notes and beats and rhythms and vocals in everything from Gregorian chants to Gospel songs. 

In my book, Communion of Life, I named it “the thoughtful pause,” the quiet and the calm required to absorb what has gone before (say, in a poetic or musical phrase) and to respond, anticipating what may come next. I believe prayer, contemplation, retreats, and (I’d like to believe) this blog may serve as “thoughtful pauses” that compel us to dance spiritually.

The lead neuroscientist, Maria Witek of Aarhus University in Denmark, explained during the NPR story that “Gaps in the rhythmic structure, gaps in the sort of underlying beat of the music—that sort of provides us with an opportunity to physically inhabit those gaps and fill in those gaps with our own bodies.”

Surveys found that the most effective drum patterns in getting people off their feet, she says, were “not the ones that have very little complexity and not the ones that had very, very high complexity, but the patterns that had a sort of a balance between predictability and complexity.” That balance of predictability and complexity may be needed in our own liturgies, readings, sacred songs, and sermons.

The anonymous fourteenth century author of the spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing (which I’m presently reading in my morning prayers) could be considered among the world’s first bloggers, given the brevity of its chapters. Written for English monks, this mystic observed, “You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God. This brief moment produces the stirring that embodies the greatest work of your soul.” (Contemporary English translation by Bernard Bangley.)

Alongside music, the cadences of many preachers, the “call and response” of some African American worship, and the antiphonal responses of the Daily Office may all provide gaps that invite us to fill them with our spiritual dance—and by that I don’t mean “disembodied,” but one that moves our bodies as well as our souls.

When I was in college, the choir of our church sang a catchy Caribbean song. Our staid congregation stayed in their pews, smiling appreciatively, but resisting an urge to rise and sway and clap. To paraphrase Jesus, “If these Christians remain seated, the pews themselves will dance.” That didn’t happen, but when the choir finished, someone spontaneously cried out, “Do it again!”

And they did!

Related posts:

The Soul Feels Its Worth

In Praise of Praise

The Sound of Eden

+++

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You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

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

Glimpses of Glory

This week in our neighborhood, a ceremony on Martin Luther King Day officially celebrated the renaming of Confederate Avenue as United Avenue. 

My photo of that ceremony follows this post.

This is an excerpt of the talk I gave this past Sunday to the First Existentialist Congregation (UU) of Atlanta.

In August of 1973 I drove my ’63 Volkswagen through Washington, D.C. on my way to seminary in New Haven, Connecticut. I walked the capitol mall, and as I summitted a rise near the Washington monument, I caught a glimpse of the Lincoln memorial at the other end of the mall just as the sun was setting, and my imagination glimpsed the glory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on its steps intoning “I have a dream…”

Later I would learn that he had begun a very different speech, but the poet Maya Angelou shouted to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” and he wisely switched gears and gave a speech he had used to inspire and uplift others on an earlier occasion.

That summer day in 1973, I realized it was the tenth anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, and I literally had goosebumps at the thought, tears coming to my eyes.

I was a twelve-year-old boy in Southern California when that march was held. I knew little of the struggle for Civil Rights that culminated in that march. On that day, I was at a very different kind of mall, Topanga Plaza, one of the first grand shopping malls built in a trend that would sweep the United States. A large store window had multi-level shelves stacked with TV’s facing toward the mall’s interior, and every one of them was tuned to the news coverage of the March on Washington. I knew something very important was happening.

Weeks later, in our doctor’s office, I saw Life Magazine’s coverage of the march with its supersized photos and captions. Soon the film and book To Kill a Mockingbird would tell the story of racial segregation and injustice in the South from a child’s view in a way that could help a young boy like me understand and empathize. In public high school, teachers taught me more—not just about racial injustice in the South, but the de facto segregation in my own hometown of Los Angeles, and apartheid in South Africa.

Exchanges with inner city schools and the Watts riots furthered my education. Our high school principal, an African American, spoke so eloquently, it prompted my desire to write and speak as well as he did. Yet the real estate market practices of the time prevented him and his family from buying a house in our neighborhood—and this in supposedly “liberal” California!

One of the reasons I left the fundamentalist Christian tradition in which I was reared was because, when three black women visited our Baptist Church, I overheard one of our members say to another white woman, “I bet they were here to try that integratin’ stuff, but we showed them they were welcome even if they are Negroes.”

I remember exactly where I was when I learned Martin Luther King had been shot. I was 17, and not yet fully aware of all that he had done and all that had been done to advance racial equality, but, like seeing the multiple television screens broadcasting the 1963 Civil Rights March, I knew something important had happened. My brother had just heard it on the radio and came in the kitchen to tell my mom and me. My first thought was to pray for him, which I did. Then the news came that he had died.

I had been attending a more progressive church, and the following Sunday night, the youth pastor took his turn in the pulpit and read one of Dr. King’s sermons, “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” The first dimension King described was length of days that allowed a full flowering of a human’s potential. The second dimension was breadth, in King’s words, “breadth by which individuals concern themselves in the welfare of others.” The third dimension, King preached, was often ignored: that of height—in King’s words, “that upward reach toward something distinctly greater than humanity.” We often fail to reach for the spiritual dimension of life. He said of those who fail to reach for that spiritual dimension, “They seek to live without a sky.”

Like all good preachers of the time, King brought his observations together in a homely story:

A wise old preacher went to a college to deliver a baccalaureate sermon. After finishing his message, he lingered on the campus to talk with members of the graduating class. He spoke with a brilliant young graduate named Robert. His first question to Robert was: “What are your plans for the future?” “I plan to go immediately to law school,” said Robert. “What then, Robert?” continued the preacher. Robert retorted, “I must frankly say that I plan to make lots of money from my law practice and thereby I hope to retire rather early and spend a great deal of time traveling to various parts of the world—something that I have always wanted to do.”

“What then, Robert?” added the preacher with an almost annoying inquisitiveness. “Well,” said Robert, “these are all of my plans.” Looking at Robert with a countenance expressing pity and fatherly concern, the preacher said, “Young man, your plans are far too small. They can expend only seventy-five or a hundred years at the most. You must make your plans big enough to include God and large enough to include eternity.”

In my own words, I would echo King’s sentiment in this way: this is our moment to live and shape eternity, to live and shape the divine life of this universe.

That is what I wanted to do when I grew up, in my own small way, as a gay activist in the church and beyond.

Providentially, high school friends invited me to visit a Presbyterian Church whose liberal views they thought I’d like. The first sermon I heard there, the first Sunday of the year 1970, was a recounting of the previous ten years of the Civil Rights movement. Come to find out, the largely white congregation was participating in a program to overcome racism called Project Understanding. Through weekly forums and community outreach, the church hoped to be awakened to social justice concerns, including race, the Vietnam war, Native American issues, the needs of the adjacent Latino barrio, and eventually, even gay and lesbian concerns. It was a “woke” church before its time. The denomination to which it belonged had written a new Confession of Faith in 1967 that called for the reconciliation of races, religions, and nationalities.

It was part of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the northern stream of Presbyterianism in America, broken from its southern stream since the abolition of slavery and the Civil War, finally to be united as the Presbyterian Church (USA) here in this very city of Atlanta in 1983. The two denominations literally marched to the Atlanta City Hall as a physical representation of our new-found unity, and there Mayor Andrew Young, himself a United Church of Christ minister, welcomed us.

That’s probably more than you care to know about Presbyterian history, but I tell it to explain how I came to be at the 1983 March on Washington commemorating that first March in 1963. I was there as part of the Presbyterian contingent.

The first congregation I served after seminary closed its worship service joining hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” This dated back to its days supporting the Civil Rights movement. When I tried to edit this song out of the service, thinking of it as a dated relic, the congregation rebelled because it had become about more than black and white, it was about gay and straight, women and men and transgender, it was about every religious perspective, about every category of humanity by which we try to separate ourselves from one another.

In response to my talk, First Existentialist stood in a circle, joined hands, and sang the many verses of “We Shall Overcome.” In the talk, I also included the words of Bayard Rustin, the gay African American who organized the 1963 March on Washington, that I published in an earlier post, “Bayard Rustin Speaks.”

In thanksgiving for the life of poet Mary Oliver, who died last week, I invite you to read my many posts that referenced her.

Without controversy, residents removed "Confederate" from our street signs.

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