"Slow Down, A--hole!"

Please forgive the vulgarism, but I got this piece of unsolicited spiritual direction when speeding down a street in my neighborhood a few years ago.

Normally I do not speed. Anyone who has walked a dog along a street with no sidewalks, as I do, or has children, an outside cat, or neighborhood squirrels knows that speeding is dangerous to children and other living things! No excuse, but I was having a bad day. The dry cleaners misplaced the clothes I needed to fold and pack that day for an imminent cross-country move, requiring three panicky back-and-forth’s to their establishment before it closed for the weekend.

The strange thing about that patch of street where I was urged not-so-gently to slow down is that it was the site of a cautionary tale years before. I was not speeding then, but as I drove downhill, a boy seated on a skateboard crossed my path in a daredevil feat that would not have allowed me to brake in time had his timing been off. And he did so watching my face through my windshield with a broad mischievous grin.  His “innocent fun” could have ruined both our lives.

So the neighbor trimming his yard was absolutely right, and minutes later as I passed again, I stopped my car and rolled down the window and apologized. He clearly expected something else coming from my mouth (or my window), but was gracious in his response.

My apology originated, no doubt, from my mother’s spiritual direction to me as a child. In front of my class I had rudely rolled my eyes impatiently at Mrs. Porter, my beloved fifth-grade teacher, and her fellow teacher, my mother, heard about it and made me apologize the next day. Shame blushed my cheeks as I did so, and I learned early on Jesus’ admonition to first be reconciled with those you’ve offended.

A friend once shared a story of being mistreated by a teacher, expecting his mother to commiserate with him when he came home. To his great disappointment, she instead neutrally observed, “Maybe she was just having a bad day.” That became a kind of mantra for his family, bringing a smile as well as needed perspective whenever invoked. I could only hope my neighbor might similarly understand.

All this is to say that much spiritual direction we receive is informal and accidental and sometimes aggravating. But “if we have ears to hear and eyes to see” as Jesus suggested, we may discern every day guidance that may shape our spirituality.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!

Related posts:

“For God’s Sake, Chill!”

A Pre-emptive Peace

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Where Your Treasure Is

“Master, you are wonderful! You have renounced riches and comforts to seek God and teach us wisdom!”

“You are reversing the case!” The saint’s face held a mild rebuke. “I have left a few paltry rupees, a few petty pleasures, for a cosmic empire of endless bliss. How then have I denied myself anything? I know the joy of sharing the treasure. Is that a sacrifice? The shortsighted worldly folk are verily the real renunciants! They relinquish an unparalleled divine possession for a poor handful of earthly toys! … The world is full of uneasy believers in an outward security.”

I chuckled over this paradoxical view of renunciation—one that puts the cap of Croesus on any saintly beggar, whilst transforming all proud millionaires into unconscious martyrs.

Paramahansa Yogananda tells this story about Bhaduri Mahasaya in his Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) that I am presently reading. In a previous post I referred to Yogananda as founder of the Self Realization Fellowship whose grounds in southern California I frequented in college. While the supernatural experiences of Eastern tradition reported in this book are hard for this Westerner to believe, the philosophy is persuasive and powerful.

While I have not attained the saint’s dispassion toward rupees and “earthly toys,” many if not most of my colleagues in ministry will identify with the saint’s preference for the spiritual life. To whatever degree we have “gone without,” given the culture’s greater monetary valuing of other professions, we have realized our greater dependency on spiritual treasure—the satisfaction of pastoral care, of preaching and writing, of attending to matters of the heart and soul rather than simply to matter and materialism.

A church member once told me that she was well into adulthood before she understood that ministers were paid! And I’ve met people who think spiritual leaders should do what they do for the sheer joy of it, unlike other vocations.

“Worldly people do not like the candor that shatters their delusions,” Bhaduri Mahasaya explained to Yogananda. The gurus Yogananda writes about receive rupees in their slippers from followers. And though I am not a guru, I am grateful that a few of my readers have put rupees in my slippers!

When I was ordained by MCC in 2005 after a professional lifetime denied ordination by the Presbyterian Church simply because I’m gay, I chose for the Gospel lesson Jesus’ words on God’s Providence from the Sermon on the Mount, which reads in part, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly [Creator] feeds them.” It is the scripture that gets me through the tough times when I do not rise to the level of a saint’s disposition!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Donations are possible by mail or credit card. Thank you!

Related posts:

I Wanted to Be Famous

Has Been

Our Own Fiscal Cliffs

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in your congregation’s or group’s newsletter, including the blog address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

The Crazy Man in the Basement

The intimacies offered me in conversation and pastoral counseling as well as my own self-knowledge have convinced me that many and perhaps most of us live with a crazy man or a crazy woman in our basement. Perhaps that was the intended metaphor of Charlotte Bronte’s Gothic novel, Jane Eyre, that had a deranged relation imprisoned secretly in an upper room or attic. Yet I think my “crazy person in the basement” concept suggests something more basic to our nature than our upper regions, more visceral than conscious.  This is the one stoking our furnace and fueling our engine down below, so to speak. When one escapes, the host makes news, and endures judgment from those of us who think “we are not like them.”

What occasions this rumination was watching an entertaining romantic comedy about a British retirement home for gifted musicians entitled, Quartet (2012).  A character’s frontal lobe has been damaged and so cannot edit himself, bluntly expressing indelicate feelings, observations, and thoughts coming from, one could say, his crazy man in the basement.

What you read on this blog I carefully edit, because writing my posts is like working without a net—after all, I have no editor or copyeditor as I have had with all my other writings. Thus I read and review each post multiple times to make sure it says what I want it to say as well as to avoid misunderstandings.

But my whole life—and I would suggest others’ lives—is a product of similar, careful editing. I cannot speak for others, but Christ, culture, and Chris are primary editorial filters for me. I follow Jesus as spiritual guide, and he represents specific views of God, so Christ is also my God filter. Multiple cultures serve as editorial filters for me: spiritual, ethical, theological, literary, social, scientific, liberal, marginal—the list goes on. Most in need of explanation is “Chris,” but all this means is that my life must reflect and reveal what I believe about myself, and I believe this is common for most of us.

The crazy man in my basement is one who resists Christ, culture, and Chris. This is the one I sometimes meet when I become angry or anxious, infatuated or lustful, greedy or envious or vengeful, obsessive or pious, one who is fearful and fearless, vulnerable and arrogant, clueless and clever.

Christian mystics from the Desert Fathers and Mothers to the more contemporary Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating have recognized that the crazy man or woman in the basement rears his or her unwelcome head as our spiritual lives progress. Like the demons who asked Jesus, “What have you to do with us?” so our shadow selves emerge in the presence of God’s light, needing redemption and healing. This is considered a natural progression in spiritual growth.

Some keep the crazy person in the basement, often secretly, preventing their shadow side from encountering Jesus’ or God’s TLC.  Some externalize and scapegoat the crazy person, attempting to restrain the demoniac as the Gerasenes did, or allowing him to exile and stone himself naked and vulnerable among tombs, failing to recognize that “he is us.” (See Mark 5:1-20 and my post, listed below, “Exorcising Demons.”)

I believe what is needed is an honest encounter with the crazy man or crazy woman inside each of us. Only then may we come to ourselves, and through spiritual practices and the help of a spiritual community, spiritual director, or soul friend (anamchara), find our right minds.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!

Related posts:

Exorcising Demons

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in your congregation’s or group’s newsletter, including the blog address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Pentimento and Palimpsest

We watched the film Julia this past weekend. Vanessa Redgrave as Julia is at her most beautiful, I think, in this film. It’s a film about writers and lovers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, and Hellman’s adventure, after her play The Children’s Hour opened  on Broadway, smuggling Julia’s money into Berlin to save Jews during the Nazi madness. The authenticity of the story has been questioned, but it’s a high-minded tale worthy of truth or fiction, much like scripture.

Released in 1977, it brought back a flood of memories of my own past. “The longest sentence in the world,” Hellman once wrote, “begins with ‘I remember…’” I graduated from Yale Divinity School that year, was midway through serving on the two-year Presbyterian Task Force on Homosexuality, and began as founding director of The Lazarus Project, a first-of-its-kind ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. I was also one of a handful of openly gay candidates for ordination in the Presbyterian church. Both the support of colleagues and the interest of the media seemed to assure me of a promising outcome of my activism and ministry.

Monday was my day off, which of course was virtually nobody else’s day off, so I “recreated” alone, running on the beach, reading in a park, and sometimes going to the movies. That is how I came to be sitting in an almost empty Westwood movie theatre to see Julia by myself. But before the movie started, someone behind me leaned over a row of seats and tentatively called, “Chris?”  It was Troy Perry, founder of MCC, seated next to a friend and sometime bodyguard, and he invited me to join them, which I did. At the end of the movie, just like my mother, I was crying. Troy turned to me supportively but chided with a smile, “Oh Chris, you’re so sentimental!”

I recalled this as I cried once again at the end of Julia. Wade is used to me by now, so was unsurprised. But I was crying not just for the lost innocence depicted in the film, but for that moment that Troy and I shared in a Westwood movie theatre, just as our dreams were taking off—his founding an LGBT-affirming denomination and me hoping to help change the Presbyterian church.  So much seemed possible then!

This week I took Hellman’s paperback Pentimento from my bookshelves, the memoir of which “Julia” is one chapter. By the bookstore receipt that I obviously used as a bookmark, I purchased it on Halloween (Oct 31), 1974, for $1.95. The other book on the receipt, I imagine, was her memoir An Unfinished Woman, which has gone missing. I know I didn’t read these for any class, and I’m not sure what prompted my purchase. But I remember how much I enjoyed these memoirs.

“Pentimento” is the term for a painting that fades, revealing another painting behind, of which the artist is said to have “repented.” Hellman uses it as a metaphor for memory and memoir, explaining, “Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.”

Another favorite writer, Gore Vidal, entitled a memoir Palimpsest, which he thought of as an architectural term, but discovered its original use had to do with paper or parchment “which has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out.” Vidal observes, “This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text.”

That’s what I find myself doing these days, remembering and re-membering. And that, to me, is what scripture (and scriptural interpretation) is. It’s a remembering and a re-membering. In Hellman’s words, “an old conception, replaced by a later choice…a way of seeing and then seeing again.” And in Vidal’s words, “Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought.”

That’s also the process of the spiritual life.

Related posts:

Better to Follow than to Arrive

“I Love to Tell the Story”

Mark your calendars, L.A!  I will be offering a lot of “I remember’s” speaking during the 11 a.m. Sunday service October 13, 2013 of the West Hollywood United Church of Christ, formerly known as West Hollywood Presbyterian, as part of its year-long celebration of its 100^th anniversary! This is where I served a decade as founding director of the Lazarus Project.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in your congregation’s or group’s newsletter, including the blog address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!

Art Mystic

A couple of weeks ago I read about an artist whose work, in my view, parallels the mystical experience. Wil S. Hylton writes of one of James Turrell’s creations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 

The room was devoid of boundaries, just an eternity of inky blackness, with the outline of a huge lavender rectangle floating in the distance, and beyond it, the tall plane of green light stretching toward an invisible horizon, where it dissolved into a crimson stripe. … The shapes and contours I saw were made entirely of light. 

It reminded me of the first laser light program I saw in the days before laser light shows became commercial and often tacky. It was truly a work of art on the interior “canvas” of the Los Angeles Planetarium dome, accompanied by music, ranging from classical to jazz. The colors were so intense, I cried.

The only other time I remember crying at the intensity of colors was on a visit to Petra, an ancient and abandoned city in Jordan carved in stone whose mineral composition reveals intense striations of colors. (You will remember its stone temple from the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.) I felt so sorry for one of my trip mates who was too sick to leave the bus, unable to join us being led on donkeys through a very long and winding few-feet-wide passageway between sheer stone cliffs to Petra.

Having that experience, I could understand why Zorba would wire the narrator of Zorba the Greek to come see a beautiful green stone he had discovered. Zorba, based on an actual acquaintance of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, angers the narrator by his seeming obliviousness to the great famine he and his world are enduring on the eve of even greater disasters to come.

“To hell with beauty!” he writes, “She has no heart and does not care a jot for human suffering.” But then his anger dissipated, and he felt drawn to Zorba’s request: “Some wild bird in me was beating its wings and asking me to go. Yet I did not go. … I listened to the moderating, cold, human voice of logic.” In response, Zorba wrote, “You too could have seen a beautiful green stone at least once in your life, you poor soul, and you didn’t see it,” and the bad choice convinces Zorba there is a hell.

Hylton writes: 

The joke among Turrell’s friends is that, to see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost. … Not everyone enjoys the Turrell experience. It requires a degree of surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous. 

Notably, his work is yet wheelchair accessible.

This could describe a mystical experience—becoming hopelessly lost, surrendering, having comfort and certainty stripped away, rapturous, distressing, dangerous. And yet “wheelchair accessible,” which I suggest as a metaphor for available to all.

As with the mystical experience, “a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe his work” is needed, like “thingness of light” and “alpha state of mind.” “Without these terms it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work,” Hylton observes.  So too with mystical experiences, for example: “thin places,” “dark night of the soul,” “interior castle,” “showings,” “mindfulness,” “oneness,” “nirvana,” “kingdom of God,”  “in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all.”

Related posts:

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

In the Company of Birds

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blog. Consider using a post or quotes for your congregation's or group's newsletter, including the blog's address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.    

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!