Bill Maher's Fundamentalism

This post appeared in last week’s Huffington Post, receiving over 200 “likes” and over 200 comments.

I am a Bill Maher fan. My partner and I regularly watch the political comedian’s show on HBO, and we share his political leanings. Though he doesn’t quite “get” the need for or role of myth, he fulfills the traditional and mythological role of “fool to the king,” using barbed wit to speak truth to power. And he expresses the anger and frustration many of us progressives feel toward “the powers that be.”

Saturday night before last we attended his live performance here in Atlanta. The friends I accompanied wondered how his religious barbs might affect me. All I could say was that I agreed with most of them, mainly because he was not directing them at the religion I practice.

For example, I agree that religion and science are mutually exclusive categories, but it’s not an either/or choice, for each serve different purposes. Some of the most respected theologians and contemplatives have been scientists, doctors, and mathematicians themselves. Personally, my faith would not be as vital and progressive were it not for scientific discoveries and revelations.

Though Bill Maher thinks he is dissing all religion and spirituality, he actually attacks what I would call grade school religion. He even hinted at some respect for the new pope, whom I would describe as representing graduate school religion and above.

His reference to “the Jewish fairy tales” of Hebrew scriptures sounded unintentionally ironic to me, given that the Jewish prophets played the same role of playing “fool to the king,” speaking truth to power, and could be said to be the moral and spiritual basis for Maher’s own criticism, both of political leaders who fail the poor and marginalized, and religious leaders who place priority on worship and purity over justice and mercy, as well as his desire to set a fire under the electorate to do something about it. Another Jewish prophet, Jesus, did much the same.

Rather than give credit to Mother Teresa’s ability to doubt her faith, referencing her posthumously published letters, Maher used it as “proof” that religion is a crock of ----.

Psychiatrist and spiritual explorer M. Scott Peck once defined evil as “the unquestioned self,” the inability of an individual or institution to even imagine being wrong. Thus I believe that in faith, doubt is a virtue. Just as in science.

Maher’s certainties about religion mirror the certainties of fundamentalists, rather than the whole of faith. I believe he would appreciate Bishop Jack Spong’s quip, perhaps quoting someone, “Religion is like a public pool. Most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”

Each Wednesday of Lent, I am providing links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:     The Benefit of Doubt

Friday:           A New Underground Railroad

Saturday:      "One Nation Under God"

Sunday:         The Making of You

Monday:        Dust and Glory

Tuesday:       Piety on Parade  

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using 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.

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

My Loneliness Led Me to God

Simply writing the title makes me feel over-exposed.

Just now walking our dog, Hobbes, I found myself contemplating my lifetime need for God.

I felt extremely lonely as a child. Hard to believe in a loving household of a family of five with pets living in a small tract house with a single bathroom, sharing a bedroom with my brother. And we were part of a loving church and Christian school which shared our beliefs, values, and hopes. And I had so many friends in those places and later, high school and college.

But I had a secret about who I was so terrible I might as well have been abandoned alone on a lifeless asteroid, with little hope for rescue.

I was homosexual.

No “gay” then, no “same-gender loving people.” “Queer” and “faggot” and “dyke” and “fairy” were not words used with pride as they are by some today reclaiming them from those who use them pejoratively. “Homophile” was in use in the 1950s, but not in the circles I travelled.

At first, I thought I was the only one—at the time, a common experience among “my kind.”

Then, my “role models” were societal stereotypes and caricatures, sick and unhealthy, condemned and excommunicated.

On this morning’s walk, I found myself reviewing all the clues in my writings to my extreme loneliness. My understanding of my childhood baptism as a way of belonging to God and Jesus and my family forever. The occasional days when I was too lonely and depressed to go to school. My compassion for others who felt alone. The passion with which, as part of my high school choir, I sung our beloved principal’s favorite song, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”  My clinging to a college “best friend” and later, my first boyfriend. In a brief round of therapy in seminary, the identification of my “separation anxiety.” My most common “sexual” fantasy: waking up with a lifelong partner.  My appreciation of Alfred North Whitehead’s quote, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.” My gratitude for Henri Nouwen’s teaching how the spiritual life transforms loneliness into creative solitude. My receptiveness to process theologian Daniel Day William’s insight that we are less afraid of not being than we are of not belonging.

Sitting in a car with a close lifelong friend from childhood whose former partner was clearly dying of AIDS in the hospital before us, I asked why he hadn’t come out to me—a gay activist by then—earlier. “What difference would it have made?” he responded. “I would have felt less alone,” I answered. “You would have felt less alone,” I added.

I explained in my first book, Uncommon Calling, that as a youth, afraid of being condemned by either a minister or a therapist, God became my minister and therapist, with whom I had hours-long conversations. That marked the beginning of my interest in the contemplative life. Today I might describe the relationship as anamchara, “soul friend.”

My fear writing about this now is that some might write off God, or at least my own experience of God, as some sort of “imaginary friend” I’ve created to get me through rough times.

But aren’t those times that we exclaim “Please be with me, God!” the most authentic and least pretentious prayers? Reaching out to that which is greater, higher, deeper, and more complete makes sense as we realize our humble circumstances in this vast universe.

And it isn’t as if I did this alone. Thanks be to God for those in the Bible and in the church who discerned and learned, taught and practiced their faith, often in dire circumstances, and passed it along to all of us.

Now I know I’ve never walked alone.

Today’s post also appears on Believe Out Loud.

This Sunday, March 23, I will be speaking during the 11 a.m. worship of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church here in Atlanta, imagining what a “lost gospel” from the Samaritan woman at the well might be like. I will also speak there on Easter Sunday, April 20, and Sunday, May 18.

Each Wednesday of Lent, I am providing links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:      Interrupted Lives   

Friday:            Wear Flowers in Your Hair

Saturday:       Spiritual Picassos

Sunday:          On the Threshold of the Church

Monday:         Thanking God Anyway

Tuesday:        Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using 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.

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

Spiritual Stretching

Put your hands over your head and stretch. Take a deep breath.

Doesn’t that feel good?

And don’t you vicariously feel good when you see your dog or cat or another person stretch and perhaps yawn?

Many years ago I learned that, to prevent my back from seizing up on me, I needed to do a simple stretching exercise before getting out of bed in the morning.  I also do a coordination exercise a holistic chiropractor once taught me that’s supposed to help me think more clearly. And then I’m ready to, as the camp song goes, “Rise and shine and give God my glory…”

A few summers ago, Wade and I attended a yoga class that was all about stretching and breathing, led by our friend and neighbor José Blanco. It was surprising how challenging and tiring stretching and breathing can be, as well as how wonderful it can feel. Yoga, of course, is a spiritual discipline developed in Hinduism to focus body, mind, and spirit.

A lot of Christians don’t like to stretch. Orthodox literally means “straight thinking,” and many Christians like to keep to the straight and narrow, within the confines of what they consider proper belief and behavior.

Progressive Christians like to stretch our minds. That means we can stay in our heads way too much. That’s preferable to not going there at all. As they say, many people are lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.

Thankfully, stretching our minds may stretch our hearts as well, especially if we can catch our breaths.

Stretching is an antidote to confinement, an answer to tension, a solution for paralysis that is not permanent. It helps tissue lubricants flow, as well as the life-giving, oxygenating, vitality-inducing blood that we need to be nurtured and grow. 

Our spirits and our spirituality need stretching too.

Jesus did not teach yoga positions, but he was still a kind of yoga instructor, because he taught spiritual stretching. His spirituality stretched the religion of those around him to move out of ossification—which means to make rigid, callous, or unprogressive—to move beyond laws written in stone and temples made of stone.

Anyone who has endured an obnoxious neighbor will know that “loving your neighbor” is a stretch. Anyone who has struggled with an image of an angry or distant God knows that “loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind” is a stretch. Those raised on negative self-images know that “loving your self” is a stretch. Those taught to fear or hate a stranger realize that Jesus’ urging to greet even those we don’t know is a stretch.  And “loving your enemies” is obviously a stretch!

By stretching, a spiritual community becomes expansive and inclusive and nimble. A breath is a stretch, and Jesus was said to have breathed on his disciples his Spirit. That Spirit stretched their ability to share his story in the languages of strangers. That same Spirit has, throughout history, stretched at least parts of the church to welcome those it formerly resisted, excluded, marginalized, or persecuted.

And God’s mystery stretches our spiritual imaginations. In the apostle Paul’s words to the Athenians, God “does not live in shrines made by human hands” but causes us “to search for God and perhaps grope for God.”

Breathe. Stretch.

Doesn’t that feel good?

Each Wednesday of Lent, I am providing links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:     How Well Do Progressive Christians Fish?

Friday:           I Love to Tell the Story

Saturday:      Keep East Atlanta Weird

Sunday:         9/11: When We Were One

Monday:        Praying for “Enemies” (St. Patrick’s Day: though this post is not about St. Patrick, his answered prayer to be sent on a mission to those who enslaved him as a youth, the Irish, makes this post a bit relevant to the day.)

Tuesday:        Exorcising Demons

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Click here for more information on Chris and his speaking engagements.

Consider using 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.

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

Cosmic Dust

Please join me for “The Passion: In Arts, Texts, and Music: A Contemplative Retreat for Lent” 9 a.m. – 12 p.m., this Saturday, March 8, 2014 at Columbia Theological Seminary.

“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”

Being Ash Wednesday, today many of us will hear these words while receiving ashes on our foreheads in the sign of the cross. It reminds us of our mortality, our finite lives, and thus calls us to appropriate humility in the face of the infinite.

But I wonder if there’s another way to observe this day and the season of Lent which it inaugurates by considering where those ashes come from. I don’t mean their traditional origin in last year’s Palm Sunday palm fronds that are burned to ashes and mixed with oil to create an adhesive mix, but a deeper origin.

What if we think of the ashes as cosmic dust?

We are made of the stuff of stars generated billions of years ago that evolved into living things that eventually produced our species, providing a lineage that goes all the way back to the origins of the universe. And our human lineage goes back to the first beings that looked and thought and felt like us as well as future beings we will never know and who will learn and do and think greater things than we can imagine.

And within this lineage is our own personal lineage whose flesh we more directly share, parents and grandparents and ancestors, children and grandchildren and descendants.

Today’s ashes, today’s cosmic dust, may remind us not only of being finite creatures, but of our seemingly infinite relations with the cosmos, with this planet and our sun and moon, with all of earth’s creatures, with humankind past and present and future. And so it may remind us of the importance of our lives: to live them well, to love abundantly, to give extravagantly.

For those of us who try to follow Jesus, Lent and Holy Week is especially a time to honor his life well lived, his sacrificial and atoning love, his gracious generosity.  It’s a hard act to follow, but we are called to do no less.

For we, too, are cosmic dust.

This Sunday, catch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

Each Wednesday of Lent, I will provide links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:      The Right Word

Friday:            Acts of God and Acts of War

Saturday:       We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands

Sunday:          Shoveling Manure

Monday:         Spiritual Freedom

Tuesday:        Redeemed from the Pit

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using 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.

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