Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: June 2012

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Boy with Green Hair

I am convinced that films often serve as the “sermons” of our time, interpreting what Jesus was all about.

As a boy, I was sometimes left to entertain myself on Saturday afternoons. Watching TV, I happened onto a film that touched my experience even before I could name it. I knew I was different and was pained by my difference because, like most children, I wanted to be like everyone else.

The Boy with Green Hair was about a war orphan my age who woke up one morning and discovered his hair had turned green. Now, I had to gather this from the dialogue, because we only had a black and white television set. Besides my nascent sexuality, which I could hide, I had an analogous experience: I had bright red hair. My father affectionately called me “carrot top,” which I didn’t mind, but hated it when a stranger called me “red,” usually in a less-than-respectful way.

So I could understand from several vantage points the discomfort of the boy with green hair who wanted to fit in, but had schoolmates make fun of him, fear him, even scapegoat him. The boy had learned the day before his hair turned green the truth that he was an orphan, having never been told his parents were killed doing relief work in war-ravaged Europe. Passed around by various selfish relatives, he finally landed with “gramp,” a compassionate, retired vaudeville performer and magician.

The orphan has a mystical encounter with fellow war orphans in the woods, one of whom tells him his green hair may be a sign of something good, a way to tell others of the cost of war. No one believes him, of course, and he finally submits to the pressure of conformity and has his head shaved, an act which causes all who tormented him to be ashamed. When read a letter his father left behind, assuring him of his parents’ love and encouraging him to warn others of the price of war, he resolves to let his hair grow back green if it wants to. He accepts his difference. I identified with him because I knew I was different, though being gay was then more unspeakable than having either green or red hair.

Not many years ago I discovered a whole community online that had similarly identified with the boy, having seen the film on television in the 60s, themselves experiencing in various ways what it was like not to fit in, those whose differences “orphaned” them. I also learned that the director of the film, Joseph Losey, was blacklisted three years later for refusing to appear and refusing to cooperate with the inquisition known as Senator Joe McCarthy’s Committee on Un-American Activities.

Another form of McCarthyism is expressed today by those who vilify “identity politics,” as if it were a new thing or a bad thing. But it’s nothing new, having been practiced by dominant cultures that required conformity to their identities to belong. And it’s only bad when refusing to welcome those of different identities.

A friend of mine, Mel White, used to do a series for churches entitled, “I Saw Jesus at the Movies.” I saw Jesus in this movie about pacifism and diversity and the courage and compassion required to achieve both.

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Chris will be leading “Claim the God in You! A Midsummer Retreat” in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13-15, 2012, hosted by the MCC of the Blue Ridge. Various events may be attended singly or together. The public is welcome! See details on the church’s website, clicking on the far right box: MCCBR Retreat.

Tax-deductible donations to this ministry may be given online or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Readers are this blog’s only means of support. Thank you!

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

"For God's Sake, Chill!"

“For God’s sake, chill!”

These cloying words of rebuke from an outside observer were addressed to none other than me as I sat with friends on a beach in Laguna, California, more than 20 years ago. My fellow players of a board game were using different rules than I learned growing up. I hadn’t gone so far as my sister’s ploy when losing to turn the board over to see if it was made in Japan! But I had let my displeasure show enough to register with a nearby beachgoer sunning himself, who called me up short with his, “Oh, for God’s sake, chill.”

How dare this outsider tell me what to do? He had no idea the trouble I’d taken to make this weekend jaunt to the beach possible for the four of us, checking schedules, booking lodging, making the picnic, chilling the beer, and bringing the (expletive deleted) game in the first place. If it weren’t for me, we wouldn’t be here enjoying the sun, sand, surf—and this stupid game!

But this outsider demonstrated that spiritual direction can come from the most unexpected people in the most unexpected places at the most unexpected times!

Though I told him to mind his own business and adopted an indignantly self-righteous attitude, I was immediately ashamed of my lack of generosity of spirit, my need for control, my thinking my friends “owed me” for making our outing possible. “Girl, what was I thinking?!” To think how dearly I loved each of them! Yet it’s the ones we care most about or care most about us that we hurt most often and easily.

“Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors,” we say in the Lord’s Prayer. Though we owe God everything, yet we often feel that others owe us for what we’ve done for them.

William Countryman points out in his book Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today that people in biblical times lived with an understanding of limited resources—there was only so much to go around. Thus greed was the greatest sin, because to desire something for oneself was to take it away from somebody else.

In this context—this world of limited resources—we have stories of Jesus feeding the five thousand and the four thousand from limited resources. In John’s version, he uses a boy’s meager lunch, blessing and breaking the loaves and fishes until there was enough for all.

When feeling less than generous, yearning for credit, expecting a certain outcome from my efforts, it’s good to remember the words of my Laguna prophet:

“For God’s sake, chill!”

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Wednesday, June 13, 2012

My Dog Ate My Scripture

On the eve of our flight to San Francisco so that I might serve as interim pastor in 2006, my late dog Calvin (himself an author) devoured most of a huge hardbound thousand-page concordance of the Bible. He ingested so many biblical references that he was still exegeting them on the grassy lawns of Park Merced for days after our arrival!

The last time Calvin dined on one of my books, it was Out of Solitude by Henri Nouwen. He was evidently put out that I was giving him too much solitude while preparing for my first seminar teaching Henri’s life and writings. He literally took the edge off that book, or I should say, edges and corners—because I now have a rare round and unbound edition. Shortly after that he ate one of two pages of detailed notes for one of my own books.

And to my amazement, during my first interim ministry in Atlanta, Calvin carefully removed the Sunday sermon from my bag on the floor and, when I returned home, nothing was left of either the file folder or its contents. I could honestly tell the congregation that my dog ate my homework! Thank goodness he wasn’t computer savvy, as I was able to print out another copy.

I no longer believed in a jealous God, but I now believed in a jealous dog! As Jesus with the mindful Mary and distracted Martha in Bethany, Calvin preferred my full attention, “the better portion.”

Jesus warned that many of us think we will be heard for our many words. What is heard above all else—by creature and Creator—is presence.

In Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel about St. Francis, a respected professor describes a visit in his dreams from a much beloved but recently deceased student:

He was dressed in a strange kind of robe. No, it wasn’t a robe, it was hundreds of strips of paper sewn together round his body—all the manuscripts he had written during the course of his studies, and on them were all the problems, questions, the philosophic and legal perplexities, the theological concerns: how to be saved, how to escape from the inferno, to rise to purgatory, and from purgatory to paradise…He was so weighted down with papers, try as he might he could not walk. … “Guido, my child,” I shouted at him, “What are these papers round you, these scraps that are preventing you from walking?”

“I’ve just come from the inferno,” he answered me, “and I am struggling to climb to purgatory. But I can’t. The weight of paper is preventing me…”

Calvin was my personal “hound of heaven” reminding me of the better portion.

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Chris will be leading "Claim the God in You! A Midsummer Retreat” in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13-15, 2012, hosted by the MCC of the Blue Ridge. Various events may be attended singly or together. See details on Facebook.

Tax-deductible donations to this ministry may be given online through the blog site or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Thank you for your support!

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Hang-Gliding and Mudwrestling: The Spiritual Life

During my workshops I like to use two metaphors for different ways of thinking about spirituality: hang-gliding and mudwrestling.

Some think of spirituality as hang-gliding high above your troubles and the troubles of the world, giving you perspective, so that, like God in that popular song years ago, you can see everything “from a distance.” And there’s some truth to this; spirituality can give us perspective in which we see the larger picture, the grander scheme, the wonder of it all.

But spirituality, to me, is often the task of mudwrestling, in which we wrestle with the powers that be, whether within our own psyches, within families and faith communities, in the workplace or the public square. We also wrestle with suffering and failure and disappointments, with disabilities and limitations and challenges. Some few wrestle with success or wealth or attractiveness. And this shapes our souls for good or ill. But whether they warp or enlarge our souls is the choice of the conscious spiritual life.

For many of us, religions in which we were reared caused the very pain with which we struggled. A friend, brought up as a biblical literalist, felt compelled to burn all of his family Bibles to embrace a new way of understanding scripture.

Yet I believe it’s in the Bible that we find people and a God willing to wrestle with one another. The spirituality of the Bible is more mudwrestling than hang-gliding, from the depiction of a God who wrestles mud into human shapes in Jewish scriptures to the depiction of creation itself groaning in childbirth in Christian scriptures.

Most obvious is the myth about Jacob wrestling with God in the middle of the night. “I will not let you go unless you bless me,” Jacob tells God. Thus Jacob is renamed “Israel,” which means one who strives with God.

I thought of this story one Sunday morning when reading The New York Times Magazine, featuring stories of how “Health is All in Our Minds.” Daniel Smith wrote about his and his brother’s lifelong struggle with debilitating anxiety in an article entitled “The Maniac in Me.” He eventually concludes with Kierkegaard that his anxiety is his “best teacher”—but not of itself, rather because of his “lifelong effort to think clearly and act well in spite of it.” He writes:

My brother and I grew up in a Jewish but largely secular home. Each of us had a bar mitzvah, but we managed to emerge from childhood with little understanding of, and littler faith in, religious texts. [My brother] is convinced that our lack of religion has handicapped us psychologically. “It’s not really fair, when you think about it,” he told me…. “We’re surrounded by people who came into this world with these portable little bundles of certainty, these neat foundational texts. They don’t have to go rooting around for comforting words. What do we have? What did we get? Nothing. A handful of movies and a few of Dad’s jokes. We’re at sea. We’ve always been at sea.”

On reading this I immediately thought of all the great characters in Jewish scriptures these anxiety-ridden brothers could have identified with: the stammering Moses, the reluctant Jonah, Jeremiah with feelings of inadequacy, Isaiah of the “unclean lips,” but especially the struggling Jacob.

That’s what I saw in the Bible growing up—people like me, wrestling with God, wrestling with the powers that be for acceptance, respect, equality, justice, and compassion. My own struggle shaped the soul I am today, shaping a spirituality within me of acceptance, respect, equality, justice, and compassion. What I wanted I now am better able to give. And I daresay many of you will identify with that sentiment. That’s probably why you’re reading this.

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