Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: 2014

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Hounds in Heaven

My name is Hobbes. I’m a 15-year-old female retriever mix. I’ve watched my human do this over 200 times, so I’ve decided to mark this post myself. It’s taken me a few weeks because I type slower than he does. Be grateful that I have substituted this for the post he wrote, which was just not right for New Year’s Eve: all about the gloom and doom of this past year—y’know, disease, torture, rendition, racism,* guns, rape, climate change, war, you name it.

The occasion? Pope Francis’s statement while comforting a child in the death of his dog: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”** He said this several weeks ago, but as I said, I type slowly and I like to chew on things for a while, the canine form of contemplation.

Paradise would not be paradise for my humans if I wasn’t there. As it is, I bring them a little heaven on earth, if I may say so. Remember, if Eve hadn’t come along, animals were made to be Adam’s companions, and we would never have let them be fooled by that snake. Eden was idyllic for us, too, as Adam and Eve were both vegans before The Fall. We too yearn to return to that Paradise in which all animals, including humans, will get along.

Of course Mr. Pope stirred up controversy, because what he said suggests that animals have souls. How can humans not see my soulful expression in the photo that accompanies this post? And what makes humans think they have a soul and we do not? Isn’t that presumptuous?

My late brother Calvin wrote about his philosophy in a book, Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog. In his chapter “On Evolution,” he questioned that dogs descended from wolves, but never doubted humans descended from apes. He asserted:

Rather, I believe that I and other dogs were created by God and made in God’s image. We are God’s mirror reflection. That’s why God backwards spells dog. Isn’t that one of the first things you English-speaking humans notice, the spelling thing? And who else but God loves as unconditionally as a dog? We don’t care who you humans are or what you humans do, as long as you take some time to be with us, praise us, worship us, and do our bidding occasionally. Isn’t that godlike? Even when you treat us badly or forget we’re around, the minute you turn about and give us the attention we deserve, we lick your faces and give you comfort. Isn’t that divine?

Beware, all those who mistreat or abuse animals in this life or allow us to be treated badly by others, because heaven will seem like hell to you, not because we are vengeful (that’s a human thing) but because you will feel so ashamed!

Instead, consider my brother’s hope for the world this New Year:

Avoid that misnamed “dog-eat-dog” world (after all, we’re not cannibals) and drool over a dog-sniff-dog world in which we smell one another’s delicious scents, see the wonder of all creation, dig out a safe lair for all (especially puppies), perk up our ears at worthy lead dogs, take opportunities to rest and play and nest, and sense the presence of our Mother Dog watching over all of us.

Then together, as one pack, we can sniff out life’s buried treats.

*I have a bone to pick with humans. Why breed so much diversity among us dogs, but resist diversity among yourselves?

** This is Chris adding this editorial note. I didn’t have the heart to tell Hobbes that the quote was subsequently attributed to Paul VI! She loves Pope Francis’s choice of name so very much! -CG

P.S. Since Hobbes posted this, Pope Francis, in his June 18, 2015 encyclical on climate change, wrote, “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.” He ends the encyclical with prayers, including, “Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey toward your infinite light.” Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for his column, “A Pope for All Species.”

See Hobbes referenced in The New York Times by clicking here!

Posts that have gone to the dogs:

A Bone to Pick with Scripture

My Dog Ate My Scripture

Let God Rub Your Belly

Miss the Rapture?

What Calvin Taught Me about God

So I can get more treats, please support my human’s blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

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

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Jesus Returns

The world tried to keep Jesus at bay.

Obscurity. Poverty. Illegitimacy. Displaced. Refugee. Semitic. Subjugated by empire. Resisted by clerics. Blasphemer. Heretic. Unpatriotic. Treasonous. Arrested. Tried. Tortured. Executed. Buried.

Odds were against a comeback.

Then the church elevated Jesus beyond reach.

Born of a virgin. Sinless. Messiah. Christ. Son of God. Divinity. Savior. Ultimate sacrifice. King. Godhead. Heavenly. God’s right-hand-man. Supreme judge.

Way out of our league, beyond our capabilities, out of this world.

Sophisticates simply dismiss Jesus.

Myth. Fairy tale. Unrealistic. Idealistic. Impractical. Parochial. Unnecessary. Confining.

Yet Jesus returns.

Jesus returns again and again to every generation, to every nation, to every culture. We may fail to see him because of color, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, and every other way Jesus is manifest in “the least of these” who are ignored by “the powers that be.”

The “second coming” has multiplied exponentially and yet we still miss out when we are distracted, literalistic, pessimistic, cynical, selfish, egotistical, xenophobic, or just plain stupid.

Jesus is as near to you as yourself. As near to you as another person and creature and landscape and horizon. As near to you as the deepest need, the greatest joy, the most passionate love, the most inspired art, the most enduring peace. Jesus is everywhere, if only we taste, touch, smell, listen, look, feel, think, contemplate, and breathe.

Jesus is as natural as we are. And we have as much potential to be his presence and recognize his presence in others when we make room for him in our schedules, provide for him in our economies, and allow his values to shape our policies and politics.

Move aside, headlines and headliners! Jesus returns.

According to the Gospel according to Zorba the Greek, Nikos Kazantzakis’ real life friend and fictionalized protagonist:

Christ is born, my wise Solomon, my wretched pen-pusher! Don’t go picking things over with a needle! Is He born or isn’t He? Of course He is born, don’t be daft. If you take a magnifying glass and look at your drinking water—an engineer told me this, one day—you’ll see, he said, the water’s full of little worms you couldn’t see with your naked eye. You’ll see the worms and you won’t drink. You won’t drink and you’ll curl up with thirst. Smash your glass, boss, and the little worms’ll vanish and you can drink and be refreshed!

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

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.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Banning Goldfish Bowls

Not long ago the city of Monza, Italy, banned the use of traditional goldfish bowls because their curved sides obscured a fish’s take on reality.

Makes me wonder, what next? Churches, with their stained glass windows? Theaters, with their only “window” being a stage? Possibly observatories and laboratories, with their high-powered lenses? All of these could be said to offer a distorted view of reality!

In their recent book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow use this curious anecdote as a beginning point to contemplate whether any of us have an accurate view of reality. We all may be looking through a curved lens, so to speak.

But, they add, a goldfish could still accurately predict movements outside their sphere, and that’s part of the scientific quest. They later explain that our brains are continually modeling the outside world, despite a hole (and therefore blind spot) where the optic nerve is attached in the middle of each retina, which emit pixelated messages that our brain constructs into a three-dimensional whole.

The field of vision is one place where the academic quest of deconstruction would not be helpful to understand the whole! Notice the breadth of possibility in this metaphor.

Last night I watched again The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand’s novel. My interest in its philosophical take on the world has been piqued by American legislators and business leaders who share Ayn Rand’s views on the individual, the absurdity of self-sacrifice, the absoluteness of the self.

I “get” the need to do one’s work, no matter the consequences. I’ve tried to do that my whole life. That’s what keeps me focused on my writing. But I extend that first sentence by adding, “no matter the consequences to me.” I am constantly aware of the consequences for others, because a writer usually has readers in mind. I care about readers, what words may inspire, challenge, and provoke. And, as a minister, I am keen on helping rather than hindering others on their spiritual paths, trying to discern what’s true, good, and beautiful. I’ve been blessed by readers, editors, copyeditors, and publishers who help me in that process.

The Fountainhead depicts an architect who does not want his work compromised. Admirable, in a way. But then, who is he building for? Will his structure take into account the humans who will inhabit it? And how does he know that without consultation, both with them and with other architects? Collaboration is key.

But then, that’s the “collectivism” the character deplores.

Last night I also watched the final episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s accomplished depiction of cable news. In this last season, the news network has been acquired by a young high tech mogul intent on increasing its revenue, viewership, and appeal to younger viewers. He does so by making every viewer a contributing “journalist” regardless of qualifications and without checks and balances for truth, privacy, and sensationalism, wreaking havoc.

This is the kind of collectivism I deplore.

During a “Big Chill” kind of weekend with former classmates, I learned that several were surprised I didn’t go into filmmaking. We had grown up together in L.A.; they knew I liked to take photos, make movies, and write. One told me he even watched movie credits looking for my name. I explained that, had my calling not been elsewhere, I would not have liked writing for Hollywood because everyone “in the industry” thinks they’re writers, and what’s on screen often bears little resemblance to the original.

As I reflect on my education, I wish I had been given more experience working in teams. What has helped make up that deficit is my vocation in the church and more broadly, the spiritual community. Spirituality is inherently collective, even for spiritual hermits, for all of us pray and write and care as one. And we have the spiritual resources over the ages of the many who have gone before us. That’s a core truth of spirituality: we are not alone, we are bound to one another. The apostle Paul thus depicted the Christian spiritual community as the Body of Christ.

That’s why I’m puzzled that some current aficionados of Ayn Rand claim a Christian identity. Rand was consistent in her individualism: being an atheist, she was not bound to a concept of spiritual relationship or community.

The more I read and the more I watch documentaries on the scientific quest, it’s clear we’ve gotten where we are because of collectivism in science as well. The recent PBS/BBC series, How We Got to Now, demonstrates this well.

To paraphrase Saint Paul, “For now we see through a goldfish bowl dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now we know only in part; then we will know fully, even as we have been fully known.”

Related Post:

Ayn Rand Was Consistent

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Tricked by Grace (My 200th Post!)

This is my 200^th post on this blog, created in 2011 to encourage and enhance the spirituality of progressive Christians. Thanks to 500 subscribers and an additional 3000 monthly visitors from all over the world! And thanks to Metropolitan Community Churches for including it among the denomination’s Emerging Ministries in 2012.

Please consider a gift to support this ministry today, either as an individual or a congregation. Your tax-deductible contributions are its only source of funding. Thanks to this year’s donors of nearly $1200 to date!

A few weeks ago I was reading one of Southern writer Flannery O’Connor’s last short stories, entitled “Revelation,” published posthumously in her collection All That Rises Must Converge. She takes the book’s title from Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings as both a scientist and a mystic she greatly admired.

The story is written from the perspective of an older woman who finds herself in a doctor’s waiting room, looking from person to person, engaging in small talk. Her judgmentalism is in high gear as she silently evaluates their appearance, their interactions and lack thereof, as well as sharing aloud the foibles of people in general with another woman. I was especially put off by her frequent use of the “n-word.” In that brief story I saw the unabbreviated word more often than I have seen it in recent decades.

Needless to say, I too was frothing with judgment (of the protagonist) as the story came to a surprising twist. Without giving the story away, something happens that upsets her certainty about things, and later, watching the sun set, she has an unsettling vision of what was to come: all the people she routinely judged marching nonetheless toward heaven, “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” The story continues:

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.

I cried with recognition. I was her. Flannery O’Connor tricked me, even as grace tricks us all. We think we will be saved by our many words—prayers, sermons, posts—or our many deeds—charitable, political, religious. But it’s grace that really saves us.

In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Stand Your Ground: Ferguson, Washington, Jerusalem

Possibly not even residents of Ferguson, Missouri fully comprehend what’s happened there in recent months after the shooting death of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson. Wilson was not indicted by a grand jury last week, prompting protests and rioting not only there, but in other cities, including my own, Atlanta, where black and white seem to work together better than in any city in which I’ve lived.

A CNN commentator complained about the extended “whine” of the Ferguson district attorney regarding initial reports by social media and the media in general, but I do think social media as well as the internet can enable a virtual lynch mob to form opinions without a full and accurate story, not to speak of due process. We love that when it topples despotic dictators, but we should be concerned when it may bias either a judicial outcome or public opinion, especially when sparking violence.

I have found it difficult to talk about these events even with people who share my political views, so strong are our opinions.

So I want to talk about the larger problem when it comes to conversation about this and all contentious issues. “Stand your ground” laws that permit use of violence to protect ourselves are simply outward signs of an inner, spiritual problem. “Standing up for yourself” has now become “stand your ground” when it comes to any issue, as if the ground you’re standing on is first, yours, and second, high holy ground.

When I believe the ground belongs to me and mine, when I consider mine the high moral ground, or even worse, holy ground, there is little room for listening to the concerns of another. This could apply not only to our conversations about Ferguson, but also about Washington and Jerusalem and every other place of conflict.

Forgive me for once again citing NPR, but a recent study reveals that people fail to “hear” opposing views because they doubt their opponent is basing their opinion on positive motivations.

Adequate incentive is required to begin to see another’s perspective: in the study, a financial incentive did the trick! I believe a spiritual incentive could as well. As Jesus said, go the extra mile, turn the other cheek, give your cloak as well as your coat, love your enemies and pray for those who oppose you.

What also interferes is that we defensively fear the other is assigning negative motivations to us.

When you’re standing your ground, it’s hard to share, and find common ground.

I personally experienced this recently while discussing a New York Times article about police experts speculating if Officer Wilson could have performed his duties in such a way to create a different outcome. On ABC News Wilson unequivocally rejected that anything he might have done could have avoided the tragedy. Now, in our litigious and “gotcha” culture, I understand that self-doubt and uncertainty become indicators of guilt or malfeasance, but if I had done something that ended in someone’s death—no matter the circumstances—I would have been wracked with guilt and doubt, wondering what I could have done to avoid or prevent that.

But trying to tell this to a friend came across as minimizing Michael Brown’s bullying and threatening behavior and maligning Darren Wilson, which I did not intend.

Both Brown and Wilson could be said to “stand their ground.” Republicans and Democrats, Israelis and Palestinians do the same. And it begets either stalemate or tragedy.

The day I write this I felt encouraged by another Times story by Manny Fernandez and Brent McDonald about someone trying to bridge the gap in Ferguson. Lt. Jerry Lohr, who manages the security of the Ferguson police headquarters, wears no riot gear and carries no baton. He treats protestors like people, saying “please” and “thank you.”

“Allowing people to talk on a one-on-one level does a lot as far as building bridges,” he says. “They may not agree with what I’m doing, but now they at least know my name and my face. I’m human again. They realize that I’m a person. I’m not just a uniform. We have to bridge this gap. It’s not going to happen overnight. This is going to be a long-term relationship, a long-term commitment, that both sides are going to have to make.”

Preach it, brother!

Related Posts:

A Call to Civility

Wise as Serpents

A Pre-emptive Peace

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.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

When "the Least of These" Overwhelm

During Saturday’s opening online session of an Advent retreat I’m leading, someone asked what to do when “the least of these” are overwhelming in terms of kinds, conditions, and count.

Of course “the least of these” comes from this past Sunday’s Gospel reading from Matthew when those who tend to the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned are welcomed into eternal life in the reign of Christ.

My response was that Jesus’ ethic of attending to the nearest neighbor could be a way to focus. I thought but did not quote the Stephen Stills hit, “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with,” advice borrowed from musician Billy Preston.

For example, the Samaritan proved “good” because he tended to the stripped, robbed, and beaten traveler along the road between Jericho and Jerusalem, while the priest and Levite passed by, perhaps on their way to the Temple. Ritual requirements of the time would have rendered them unclean and unable to enter the temple, given the man’s condition.

But most of us are not on our way to perform such solemn duties. Rather, we are picking up the kids or the dry cleaning or groceries for dinner. Unlike Jesus, we don’t live in a world expecting that the kingdom of God could break in before we get to Kroger’s. So we prioritize.

The questioner was lamenting that we are torn among many divergent needs in our communities. How do we handle that?

NPR recently reported a study indicating that people are more likely to give to a cause when it’s singular or limited. Feature a homeless person or an abused animal and donations pour in. But if you add “there are millions of people with no shelter” or “there are millions of animals mistreated,” donors are overwhelmed and feel their gift would make little difference, and give less or not at all.

From time to time I have felt guilty that I do not volunteer at a soup kitchen. I have had to remind myself that my blog and my books and my correspondence offer a bit of spiritual soup for readers’ souls, and given that it brings in very little money, I do most of what I do as a volunteer. It is my calling rather than a job.

I can’t do everything. Neither can you. But we can each do something.

Forget about the millions. Think about one neighbor. A Palestinian. An Israeli. A Syrian refugee. An Ebola patient. A wounded veteran. A violated woman. A transgender child. An undocumented immigrant. An elderly person. A youth with little hope. A homeless pet.

Then figure out how you can make that individual’s life a little better, either personally or through existing organizations. And for God’s sake, let’s all do what we can to influence public policy, the most extensive and inclusive way of helping “the least of these.”

This week I learned that the gay priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was once asked how best to believe. A spiritually “sophisticated” response was anticipated, but Hopkins said only, “Give alms.”

Maybe a case of spiritual “practice makes perfect”?

Other research indicates that the same area of the brain is pleasured when we give as when we meditate or win the lottery. So, let’s feel good as well as believe by attending to a neighbor, nearby or across the globe. It’s a better bet than playing the lottery!

Related Post: Our Own Fiscal Cliffs

Who made ya, baby? Consider reading this post for American Thanksgiving tomorrow: The Making of You

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here 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!

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

What Calvin Taught Me about God

Calvin as a puppy.

This is an abridged reprise of a column I wrote for the September, 1995 issue of the More Light Update, the publication of Presbyterians for Lesbian & Gay Concerns (now More Light Presbyterians) edited by James D. Anderson.

Total attentiveness.

Unconditional love.

Limited judgment.

Irresistible grace.

Providential play.

T.U.L.I.P.

This is what Calvin has taught me about God. And if it varies from the TULIP acronym for John Calvin’s teachings, it’s because this list summarizes what I’ve learned from quite another Calvin—our dog.

Calvin is a golden retriever/Labrador/shepherd mix we adopted from Atlanta’s Humane Society on the last day of 1994. We got a house partly because we wanted a dog. We heard a voice that said, “Build the house, and he will come.” And so it was.

“Only Chris would find mythological import in getting a dog,” I can hear you saying. But life is filled with opportunities for spiritual metaphor.

“Nothing more zealous than a convert,” someone else might be thinking—that is, anyone who knows me well enough to know that I was never a “dog person” before now. I had grown up being bitten by my brother’s dog on arbitrary occasions. My mother theorized that our dog’s behavior was the result of some neighbor children abusing Freckles when we were away.

Though enduring a relationship with an abusive canine never landed me on Oprah, it nonetheless inhibited my establishing close relations with any dog. I eventually learned to handle my fear and be friendly to friendly dogs and keep barking dogs at bay, but the idea of ever developing an intimate relationship with a dog was far from my mind.

The closest I ever came was a friendship with Smokey, a retriever mix that lived in a house I also lived in when I was in college. Smokey helped me overcome my caninephobia and dogged doggy stereotypes.

I took him to worship one Sunday for the children’s sermon to show them how he reminded me to play by dropping a ball in my lap while I studied. The kids took turns throwing the ball for him to retrieve, and I made the point that children play the vital role of reminding their parents to play. Smokey did not bite any of the children nor relieve himself on a leg of the Communion table, so I realized that at least some dogs could assist in worship and serve as limited role models.

But, if you’ll forgive the seemingly trivial comparison, it required an incarnation to completely overcome my dogma. Between the two of us, my [then] partner was the dog person and the motivating factor of our finding a dog. But when we went to the Humane Society “just to look,” it was I who pushed to adopt our puppy. Somehow I sensed we were a fit, the three of us.

Soon I was transformed. My partner could not believe my conversion. When I went to Los Angeles to visit my mother, she, too, was astounded at how differently I responded to her own dog, a beagle named Schultze.

But Calvin’s unconditional love had introduced me to a dog’s irresistible grace.

While I am aware of the creaturely paternalism inherent in “owning” a dog, Calvin is happily codependent. He follows us around the house and plops beside one or the other of us wherever we are. And Calvin, like Smokey, reminds us both to play.

We haven’t needed our alarm to wake us in the morning since our dog came to live with us. Calvin knows I’m the first to get up, so he starts licking me awake at the appropriate time. Later, when I call my partner to breakfast, Calvin does the same for him. It’s obviously more pleasurable than being awakened by an irritating buzzer.

Though we read a book about raising a dog, we made mistakes along the way. Thankfully, puppies have short memories, so we had many opportunities to do things better. We enjoyed unlimited atonement—though I doubt that would have been true if we had taken advantage of that and either poorly cared for him or abused him.

Rather than “obedience” school, we took him to dog training classes, which was more about training us than him. Trying to be model parents, we both attended every class with Calvin. I’ve said in a variety of contexts that I believe “control” is the central spiritual issue with which we all struggle, and I learned this was also true of dogs.

As “lead dogs,” though, we had to learn not to “pull against resistance,” because a dog will resist being forced to do something. Rather, Calvin was to learn “attentiveness” to us. I thought to myself that, equally important, we needed to learn attentiveness to him. How else would we know when he needed to go out? Or be fed and watered? Or play and rest? Or go to the vet’s?

We also learned how to get Calvin “down,” how to, in a sense, give him permission to chill when he gets anxious or hyperactive. How many of us could use someone doing this for us?

And finally, whenever he wants it, Calvin turns on his back with paws in the air to welcome our loving scratches and rubs.

What I’ve learned from Calvin prompts me to re-view my theology:

+God wakes us every morning by “licking” our bodies with sunlight and shower, bedding and breakfast, and for some, the touch of someone who loves us.

+Attentiveness is required to follow God’s lead. The spiritual life is all about attentiveness to the sacramental nature of existence, mindfulness of the present holiness. And, as a worthy “lead dog,” God is both attentive to our needs and intent on shepherding rather than “pulling against resistance” as well.

+Spiritually, we need to work through our control issues to sometimes “let go and let God.” We also need to re-evaluate the concept that God is in absolute control, since that appears to make God responsible for evil as well as making God coercive rather than persuasive. (Calvin seems to realize our limitations as lead dogs, too.)

+Practically, God is more concerned with the present than with past mistakes.

+Providentially, playing and resting and pleasuring in God gives us peace and joy in the present and a foretaste of the commonwealth of God to come.

But, in my lessons from Calvin, there is something yet more unique to the experience of those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. If I could change in my attitudes toward dogs, then those who fear us may similarly be transformed in our close relationships with them—relations already existing or that we form.

And yet more significantly for us: if I could experience the revelation that a dog may truly be a best friend, then those of us who have been repeatedly and arbitrarily “bitten” by God may yet have the revelation that God is truly our best friend, that the god that bit us was not truly representative of God, but was a manifestation of spiritual abuse at the hands of a homophobic church.

Postscript: As a result of an exchange of letters with Schultze, Calvin went on to write his own philosophical “take” on things in a 1998 book, Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog (excerpts here and more photos here). In 1999 he adopted his own dog, Hobbes, abandoned in a local park. For more on Calvin, read The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life. He went to dog heaven in 2007.

I am mentioned in a blog I highly recommend: http://www.jmarshalljenkins.com/2014/11/13/van-goghs-sermons/

Calvin grown up, always happy!

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here. Or please 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!

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Our New Cathedral

I’ll be creating the liturgy and preaching for Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church in Atlanta Sunday Nov. 16 and 23, 11 a.m.

Sign up now for my free Advent retreat on-line beginning Nov. 22, “Nativity Stories.”

No, I’m not thinking of the new One World Trade Center, or a skyscraper in Dubai, and certainly not a megachurch or other megastore. I’m thinking of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, seeking understanding of the origins of the universe. Its outsize dimensions and outsize hope remind me of the great world cathedrals.

A similar collider in the U.S. was attacked by American politicians who thought they already knew the origins of the universe (Creation) and the site lies incomplete and abandoned in Texas, a testament to the puny mindedness that pervades Congress.

Particle Fever is an inspiring documentary available free on Netflix right now that tells the story of the 10,000 scientists from more than 100 countries trying to recreate what happened minutes after the Big Bang and discover the Higgs Boson that could lead to an explanation of how matter came to be.

In the film, during a briefing on the collider, an economist bluntly asks, “What is its economic value?” A scientist responds, “There is no known economic value—we will just understand everything.”

What is the economic value, say, of Wells Cathedral? Or Notre Dame Cathedral? Or National Cathedral? They not only help us understand our humble place in the cosmos, but the grandness and abundance of that universe.

In an essay entitled “The Truth of Abundance: Relearning Dayenu,” biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann argues for recapturing the concept of “dayenu,” Hebrew for “there is enough.” He writes,

In the Bible, ‘creation’ is primarily an exuberant, lyrical, doxological expression of gratitude and amazement for the goodness and generosity of God. The theme that recurs is generosity and abundance. There is enough! There is more than enough! There is as much as the limitless, self-giving God can imagine!

He writes that over against this experience of abundance is cast “the myth of scarcity,” the fear that there is not enough to go around, encouraging hoarding by a range of characters in our world, from the Pharaoh of the Exodus story to today’s “‘money economy’ driven by corporate power that recruits even the government as a company security force.”

A fraction of one percent hoards the majority of the world’s wealth, or capital, or mammon. They remind the rest of us, not of our humble place in the economic universe, but of our economic humiliation.

Wells Cathedral and the Large Hadron Collider could remind the very rich that “there is enough” for us all, not only to survive, but for all to live well, to live abundantly. “For what does it profit one to gain the whole world, but lose one’s soul?” Jesus asked, rhetorically.

Brueggemann rightly asserts, “The alternative to oppression is sharing, not sharing as isolated acts of charity, but as public policy.”

Related posts:

Bad Theology

One Nation Under God

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

"For Thine Is the Kingdom (burp!)"

Just a couple of weeks ago I mentioned I say the Lord’s Prayer every day. This morning I burped after praying “for thine is the kingdom.” I immediately apologized (to God) and went on, “and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

But then I thought better of the apology. This is the way God made us, to burp and to fart and to do all those things we’d rather not do or say in God’s presence, let alone talk and write about them!

Yet, choosing an alternative to the scary book I wrote about last week, I had just been reading a collection of Flannery O’Connor’s spiritual writings, bristling a little at her insistence on traditional Christianity, while intrigued by her notion of the importance of belief in writing fiction, in an excerpt from “Novelist and Believer” (1963). So I reviewed what I had underlined, “this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source.”

Could this Southern Roman Catholic lady living in rural Georgia have felt the same way about my burp during prayer, especially our Lord’s prayer? I daresay she’d join Gone With The Wind’s mammy, saying of Scarlett’s unladylike behavior, “Tain’t fittin’. Just tain’t fittin’.”

Then I re-read the paragraph in which I had only underlined the above phrase. She starts with St. Augustine’s notion that God is poured out in the world in two ways: intellectually and physically:

To the person who believes this—as the western world did up until a few centuries ago—this physical, sensible world is good because it proceeds from a divine source. The artist usually knows this by instinct; his senses, which are used to penetrating the concrete, tell him so. When [Joseph] Conrad said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe, he was speaking with the novelist’s surest instinct. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality. This in no way hinders his perception of evil but rather sharpens it, for only when the natural world is seen as good does evil become intelligible as a destructive force and a necessary result of our freedom.

O’Connor fears “that religion will suffer the ultimate degradation and become, for a little time, fashionable,” reminding me of the first monastics escaping into the deserts to pray, wary of the popularization of Christianity in the Roman Empire of Constantine.

She then affirms, “Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.” Despite this serious assertion, she adds, “it is well to realize that the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy.”

Perhaps this allows my burp after praying “for thine is the kingdom”—a little comic relief to my earnestness.

This past Sunday, asked to speak about generosity to a congregation, I began by asking them which person they felt most relaxed around, inviting them to name the characteristic of the person that made that possible. For me, I feel most comfortable with someone who has a generosity of spirit, a graciousness that sees my “divine source,” my “soul,” even as I burp and fart.

In memory of Pam Byers, one of those easy-to-be-with friends and colleagues.

Today is the 75^th anniversary of my late parents’ wedding.

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

The Scariest Book I've Read

I will be speaking on “Generosity in Three Movements” during the 11 a.m. worship of Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church this Sunday, Nov. 2, and leading a free workshop on The Cloud of Unknowing immediately following the service. (Pizza will be served, and remember that Daylight Savings Time ends at 2 a.m. that morning, so we “fall back” an hour.)

As All Hallows’ Eve approaches, I recommend a book that makes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol feel likes romps through a garden.

I am presently reading, or trying to read, or avoiding reading Laurel Dykstra’s book, Set Them Free: The Other Side of Exodus. It is the scariest book I’ve ever read.

“Rather than claiming that Christians are subject to a higher authority than others, I suggest that we in the radical discipleship movement admit that we are subject to lower authorities, the dubious and multiple authorities of the most oppressed speaking on their own behalf,” this member of Tacoma’s Catholic Worker Community and Episcopal Divinity School graduate writes in her introduction. In the margin beside this quote, I wrote, “Off to a good start!”

But halfway through the book, I feel like I’m reading The Grinch Who Stole Exodus.

I have always taken heart in the Exodus story, that of Israelites escaping the bondage and oppression of Egypt, as a model for the Civil Rights Movement, Liberation Theology, and for others seeking freedom, including my own LGBTQ community, in which both Dykstra and I identify. Rather than negate this, she suggests yet another way of reading the story.

More than once I heard biblical scholar Jim Sanders say, “When reading a biblical story, if you’ve identified with the good guys, you’re probably not ‘getting’ it. Read it again and identify with the bad guys,” he would say.

After all, we think WE would never crucify Jesus, but today it would be the U.S.A. and the privileged First World, the Presbyterians and Methodists and Baptists, for example, who might find his so-called “gospel” intolerable.

In other readings I have had inklings that WE are Egypt: that we live well at the cost of others’ deprivation and suffering and exclusion. But in no book I have read has the message been so unrelenting and clear that developed nations and multinational corporations are the new Pharaohs with hardened heart.

I cringe when even liberal U.S. presidents declare our foreign policy should be based on OUR national interests, rather than the interests of the whole world. As this book implies, our neocolonialism smacks of the same paternalism as its predecessor.

This is not just about the very rich, the fraction of the one per cent who benefit the most from the way things are. Those of us in the middle class and those of us in the church are also complicit with this power structure that continues a new “middle passage” and “trail of tears” of the downwardly mobile because we too benefit from their impoverishment and enslavement and do little to prevent it. “For most of us trying to get along, finding a bargain does not seem like an act of violence,” Dykstra observes.

I’ve been reading Set Them Free in my morning prayers and have wondered if I should rather read it later in the day. This morning I felt so debilitated by what I read that I didn’t feel worthy of being in God’s presence. I felt downright shame. I tried to pray, but all I could do was ask forgiveness. My concerns that I might have otherwise eagerly lifted felt parochial and self-absorbed.

Blessedly for writing this reflection, Dykstra quotes Phyllis Trible saying “reflections themselves neither mandate nor manufacture change; yet by enabling insight, they may inspire repentance.”

And Dykstra quotes and paraphrases the Pan African Healing Foundation:

They raise the question, “Are people of privilege capable of change?” There is an old African American proverb that says “it is easier to get the people out of Egypt than to get Egypt out of the people.” It refers to the responsibilities of freedom. But for people of privilege, for whom Egypt and empire have offered not only security and comfort but everything we have known, leaving Egypt and ridding ourselves of egyptian (sic) ways and habits will be slow and hard. Acknowledging our role in empire is a first step in the long, slow journey out of it.

Related Posts:

One Nation Under God

Fear, Flight, Fight, and Fancy—A Revelation

Kidnapping Jesus

Does a Corporation Have a Soul?

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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Forgiveness and Neighborliness

I will be leading a FREE virtual Advent retreat online beginning Nov. 22 entitled, “Nativity Stories.” All are welcome!

I recite the Lord’s Prayer daily, and often the most challenging phrase for me is the second part of “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Though I’ve received everything I have from a generous and gracious God, it’s hard to let go of grudges and wrongs and the feeling that others owe me something or that somehow I have unfairly missed out.

Or if I pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I think about how often I impinge on God’s territory by profaning the sacred, by judging or pre-judging others, by invading the space of one of God’s creatures, by polluting God’s property: earth, water, and air; or by playing God—a role which, in all modesty, I play rather well.

To the poor who followed Jesus, “forgive us our debts,” must’ve sounded pretty good. It sounds pretty good to us today, weighed down as we are with loans, credit cards, church pledges, expectations from elderly parents or children of any age or our beloved pets, not to mention Comcast bills.

To the sinners who followed Jesus, “forgive us our trespasses” or “sins” must’ve sounded pretty good. It also sounds pretty good to us today, burdened by moral failings, hurt we’ve inflicted on those we love most, toes we’ve stepped on or boundaries we’ve crossed, injustice we’ve ignored.

Thank God, there’s a lot of forgiveness in the Bible, and, according to Old Testament professor Walter Brueggemann, longtime oracle of Columbia Theological Seminary, forgiveness may involve money, land, power, politics, morality, and religious pretensions.

Religious scruples are what the late-converted apostle Paul often addressed. Paul when he was Saul was a Torah fundamentalist who followed every jot and tittle of the Law of Moses, not simply the Ten Commandments on which it’s based, but all the interpretations, applications, court rulings, and explications of Mosaic Law.

As we know from our own Christian tradition, no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous legalist, traditionalist, or fundamentalist. As an aside, Brueggemann also points out that no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous liberal, progressive, non-literalist such as myself. All of us tend to equate God’s views with our own, what Brueggemann calls “the cunning little secret of certitude.”

And that’s the tension in the early church—legalists wanting other Christians to follow the Laws of Moses, including dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, and others who experience freedom in Christ as to such spiritual beliefs and practices. Paul comes down on the side of freedom in Christ, but urges all Christians to respect and regard one another’s positions. Paul is truly a recovered fundamentalist, but doesn’t twist others’ arms to come to 12-step meetings of Legalists Anonymous.

“Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” Paul rhetorically questions the Romans, and then observes, “It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

Christians have entered into a covenant with Jesus and with one another that requires the interweaving of our lives, beliefs, and practices. Every strand is needed to create the fabric of our spiritual community, one that hopefully reflects Jesus’ meaning for our neighborhood and for the world.

Discussing the Ten Commandments in his book of essays, The Covenanted Self, Brueggemann affirms that the first three commandments about Yahweh give rise to the other seven, which all have to do with living in community, being good neighbors, and loving the neighbor as oneself.

In awe of God, we are called to, in a sense, privilege the neighbor to be truly neighborly and faithful to God. We are to consider their needs, their beliefs, their practices above our own needs, beliefs, and practices. It’s like what is said about marriage, each partner must give 150%. 50% doesn’t cut it, not even 100%. But if we strive to give 150% we are more likely to make a marriage or a spiritual community work.

That requires forgiveness—forgiving that the other is not all we expected, forgiving mistakes and ignorance and insensitivity, forgiving wrongs and inabilities and limitations. And forgiving ourselves these things as well. We are not perfect people. We are forgiven people.

Our model is Jesus, of whom our Christian tradition says that he emptied himself to be a servant. Jesus emptied himself into the neighbor, Brueggemann asserts, and urges us to “imagine that neighborliness is more important than good economics or good politics or good morality or good orthodoxy.” While accepting that challenge, I would add that truly good economics, politics, morality, or orthodoxy must be based in neighborliness.

In Living Buddha, Living Christ, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a woman who invoked the name of the Buddha hundreds of times a day for ten years, but “was still filled with anger and irritation.” Noticing this over the years, a neighbor knocked on her door and called to her. Annoyed, she struck her meditation bell hard to make it clear she was chanting. The neighbor called again and again, and finally the woman shouted, “Can’t you see I’m invoking the name of the Buddha? Why are you bothering me now?”

The neighbor responded, “I only called your name twelve times, and look at how angry you have become. Imagine how angry the Buddha must be after you have been calling his name for ten years!”

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