Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: 2015

Wednesday, December 30, 2015

The Natural World Is Super Enough

Last week, subscribers received a link that failed to work! I substituted a better one for Teresa of Avila’s quote.

Pope Francis recognized a second miracle associated with Mother Teresa, meaning she will soon be canonized as a saint.

When I visited her home for the dying in Calcutta, a woman in front of me whined contemptuously to a companion, “Do you think Mother Teresa is a saint?” I held my peace, as this woman had been antagonistic during most of our Fordham University religious studies tour of India, severely testing my contemplative reading about non-violence during the trip, selected writings of Gandhi.

To me, Mother Teresa’s whole life was a miracle, far surpassing any unexplained healings from those who pray for her intercession.

Miracles do not convince me. What Mother Teresa did “naturally” is enough.

I’ve been reading through Matthew lately and I love Jesus’ teachings, but am put off by the many miracle stories recorded in the gospel. I believe Jesus was a healer in a larger sense, bringing spiritual healing to individuals, neighborhoods, even rivals. But I can’t fathom the “unnatural” and, in my mind, unlikely restorations of sight, hearing, and speech.

I eventually stopped reading Autobiography of a Yogi by one of my spiritual heroes, Paramahansa Yogananda, when I became overwhelmed by the increasingly magical elements of his self-reporting, though I learned in a recent documentary about his life that the book was the only one Steve Jobs had on his iPad.

I feel pretty much the same way about Jesus’ miracle stories. For a long time I’ve interpreted these metaphorically, or considered them a retrospective hagiographical portrait of Jesus painted by his early followers. “No signs shall be given this generation,” Jesus was believed to have said, but he ironically delivered many signs and wonders, according to the Gospels.

Personally I don’t feel a spiritual need for the supernatural; the natural world is super enough! That’s one of the things we learn from the great mystics, our spiritual poets, as well as scientists.

The natural world seems so miraculous, from infinitesimal neutrinos and organisms to galaxies far, far away (homage to the Star Wars’ fresh release, wink-wink) in space and time, one shouldn’t need an interruption or intervention of the natural order to believe in a Higher Power—why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face and the brain in your head and the heart of your compassion.

Even if there are dimensions of reality as yet unrecognized by our limited perceptions, that doesn’t make them magical or supernatural, just unperceived. I for one am hoping against hope that death is but an entrance into another dimension of existence. If not, the life I’ve been given is miracle enough.

Over the Christmas holidays, watching again several versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I realized that Scrooge’s resurrection is the most accessible and believable miracle that the birth of Jesus invites. Scrooge becomes downright giddy and playful, gracious and generous, embracing life and others and causes with gusto.

“God brought you to life with Christ,” Saint Paul wrote the church at Ephesus. Contemplating this long ago, I realized how true this was for me. And it’s taken a lifetime to get used to it.

Jesus has given me a life. You too.

A reading for Christmastide: The Soul Feels Its Worth

My personal pick for “the” Moment of the Year 2015.

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

Wednesday, December 23, 2015

The Child Who Calls Us to Evolve

Why do we care so deeply for the child born to Mary and Joseph in a Bethlehem cave and not the millions of other children born into a poverty of one kind or another? Is it because of who he became, or simply because we can only care for one person at a time?

According to “The Arithmetic of Compassion” by professors and researchers Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic, our capacity for compassion diminishes when there is more than one to care for: “psychic numbing” takes hold. Their studies reveal a “compassion fade” when one person in need is joined by another, and we are less motivated to help either.

“Pseudoinefficacy” disables donors when it is felt their contributions would be “a drop in the bucket” facing a disaster or pandemic, a study I’ve cited before on this blog. And the “prominence effect” prevents interventions to halt such things as genocides and climate change when competing with our “near-term comforts and conveniences.”

Citing the insights of psychologist Robert Ornstein and biologist Paul Ehrlich from their decades-old book New World New Mind, we still have cavemen and cavewomen mentalities, ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and breadth of the world. Ehrlich and Ornstein prophesied we need a “conscious evolution” of our minds to care not only for those nearby but to embrace the world.

Enter spirituality. This is not what any of the experts above suggest, but this is what comes to my mind when they speak of our own evolution toward altruism. Spirituality recognizes our connectedness to all creatures and all creation.

Jesus understood our limitations and taught an ethic of the nearest neighbor, to quote musician Billy Preston, later set to music by Stephen Stills, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

Love your neighbors as yourself, love your enemies, greet and welcome strangers, visit the sick and imprisoned, proclaim release to the captives, give vision to those who don’t get it, comfort those in mourning, feed those in need, announce God’s common wealth to the poor.

G. K. Chesterton summed up this attitude in Francis of Assisi:

To Francis a human being stays always a person and does not disappear in a dense crowd any more than in a desert. He honored all; that is, he not only loved but respected them all. What gave him extraordinary personal power was this: that from the Pope to the beggar, from the sultan of Syria in his pavilion to the ragged robbers crawling out of the wood, there was never one who looked into those brown burning eyes without being certain that Francis Bernadone was really interested in him or her, in his or her own inner individual life from the cradle to the grave; that each was being valued and taken seriously and not merely added to the spoil of some social policy or the names of some clerical document. … He treated the whole mob of people as a mob of kings.

I particularly like the ending emphasis on social policy and clerical documents. Whether our goal is social justice or church membership, unless we regard each one uniquely and highly, we will fail.

Henri Nouwen quotes this in his Genesee Diary, writing, “I cannot embrace the world, but God can.”

But it’s not enough to hold the world in our prayers. “GOD CAN’T FIX THIS,” New York’s Daily News reminded us in its headline after the recent mass shooting in California.

Our words, thoughts, and prayers are not enough.

Tradition has it that Francis said, “Preach the Gospel at all times, and if necessary, use words.”

“On earth Christ has no body but [our] own,” Teresa of Avila reminded us.

The holiest purpose of prayer, of meditation, of spirituality is that it fixes US.

It helps us evolve to embrace the world. Now our nearest neighbor is also in the news and on the internet. Our spirituality must keep up with our technology.

The Christmas story is that God wants to save the world, not just you and me and our neighbors. And we are to be, to paraphrase Francis, instruments of God’s peace on earth and goodwill to all. That should be the measure of our every act.

A reading for Christmas: Mohammad’s Child

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Wednesday, December 16, 2015

Youthful Exceptionalism

When working with young tigers...

We speak of American exceptionalism, a belief that we are special, uniquely able to bring peace and progress to the world. In this view, we are smarter than, better than, more prosperous than, more blessed than all the peoples of the world. These are sometimes experienced as gifts, but often, as entitlements.

Maybe we got this from our spiritual forebears, primarily from Christians who believed themselves especially called by God to inhabit this Promised Land, this new Eden of America, echoing the Jewish concept of being the chosen people to witness the one true God as well as inherit their Promised Land.

Maybe we got this from our struggle for independence and our form of government, shaped by enlightened Enlightenment values, a shining “city on a hill.” We were not going to make the same mistakes our Anglo-European ancestors did.

In last week’s post, I used the phrase “youthful exceptionalism.” From my youth to old age, I have recognized youthful exceptionalism in myself and in others.

In my first book, Uncommon Calling, I wrote that my opposition to the Vietnam War may have been fueled in part by youthful arrogance, but I couldn’t let that keep me quiet. No doubt that also played a role in my early efforts to see the church reformed when it came to race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity.

At the same time I tried to discover, as the saying goes, “the shoulders on which I stood,” those who had gone before me in the church and in each justice movement. The scene that troubles me most in a favorite film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, is when the son, played by Sidney Poitier, berates his mail carrier father’s generation. In contrast, my 80+ year old mother was delighted when Tom Brokaw heralded The Greatest Generation. “I’m glad our generation is finally getting the recognition it deserves,” she said.

A longtime political activist told me that he works alongside young people who are experiencing “white male fatigue,” entertaining little interest in those who have gone before. I myself have been accused of quoting too many dead white men on this blog. I kidded the critic by saying “some of my best friends” are dead white men, and I will soon be one myself!

Many of us in the early LGBT movement used our white male privilege, risking our lives and our livelihoods, to speak out for many who could not speak for themselves, those who were similarly privileged but afraid and closeted, and those who were already severely marginalized because of race, gender, or disability. We did not speak for them, but we spoke out for all of us.

I think I offended a young LGBT activist unintentionally by commending him for following in the footsteps of (and here I named earlier prominent activists in his religious tradition). I meant it as a compliment, but I haven’t heard from him since. Did he think his efforts were original?

Youthful exceptionalism can be as spiritually dangerous as American exceptionalism. To believe your generation has the answers or will solve our problems may be as narrow as believing that of your country.

At the same time, spiritual peril may also be a spiritual opportunity. I have often said approvingly that movements are led by their youngest members. Not having the baggage of us old-timers in the movement, all that held us back or prompted us to compromise too much, all our blind spots and missteps and mistakes—all provide an opportunity for a fresh start.

After all, we didn’t have all the answers either.

“Only with the calmness of Buddhist monks is breakfast with young tigers possible.” What sounds like a Zen saying about generational differences is actually a line intended literally from The Tiger & the Monk, a documentary I recently watched free on Netflix about a Buddhist monastery west of Bangkok that serves as a refuge for tigers.

But it may serve as spiritual guidance for the longer lived within any movement.

A reading for Advent: The Right Word

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

What I Love About the U.S.A.

As I look upon the faces and read the names of the 14 people murdered during a holiday party of colleagues serving the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health, I am reminded of why I love the United States of America.

I see men and women of diverse national and racial and ethnic ancestries: African, Hispanic, Vietnamese, Iranian, German, English, Greek, Italian, Jewish, and more. I see Protestants and Catholics and Jews and possibly those with no religious affiliation.

They were charged with our public welfare as health officials, and some worked with the most vulnerable Americans, those with disabilities, including the partnered gay man who managed the coffee shop in the building and trained people with developmental disabilities.

I love that the United States is home to such diversity. Other nations are increasingly diverse and some are more welcoming than we, but I believe that our nation’s pride and strength comes from our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-faith citizenry.

I hate that some would try to make us feel ashamed of our diversity, that some would try to make us fearful of the integrity that is the fruit of our unity, that some would try to prompt us to a “this is mine, not yours” mentality, that some would be divisive in pursuit of their political careers, that some would remove the welcome mat at the base of the Statue of Liberty. This is un-American.

The spiritually-impaired, the mentally-impaired, and the emotionally-impaired are not the only ones who need background checks; we must examine our own spiritual, mental, and emotional impairments. Almost any one of us can have a crazy moment when an easily accessible weapon may tempt us to destruction, whether a gun or the internet or a simple word of hate.

But there are those who more grievously enable mass killings: those who profit from the weapon-congressional-political complex*: the gun lobby and gun manufacturers, and the elected officials and presidential candidates funded by them. They all profit from those who resist our diversity with guns.

When I lived in West Hollywood, California, I participated in a conference sponsored in our community by the then-named National Conference of Christians & Jews. Soviet Jews were pouring into our community, and some of the elderly residents, often Jews themselves, felt threatened by their Russian “lifestyle” of congregating late at night on street corners to socialize, often talking loudly.

As I heard them express their fears—with some legitimacy, given the vulnerability felt by seniors—I couldn’t help but think they must have felt the same way about gay people flocking into their neighborhood years before.

As for me, I loved the fact that I could walk by a crowd of chatting people or go to a neighborhood deli and not understand a word that was spoken.

Of course some of this fearlessness was afforded me by both youthful exceptionalism* and white male privilege. But look today at those expressing the most anti-immigrant and racist sentiments, and they are predominantly white or male or both.

In his wryly-named book, Dirt, Greed, and Sex, Episcopal priest and professor William Countryman wrote that those of biblical times believed that they lived in a world of limited goods. Thus greed was possibly the most grievous sin. To want or to have more than one’s share was to take it away from somebody else, in effect, to steal.

The Ten Commandments could largely be described as opposing forms of stealing: you shall not take God’s image or name, you shall not take from the Sabbath’s holiness or from your parents’ honor, you shall not take another’s life, you shall not take another’s spouse, you shall not take another’s possession, you shall not take another’s reputation by bearing false witness, you shall not even yearn to have a neighbor’s house or anything belonging to the neighbor.

We too sometimes think we live in a world of limited goods, and environmentally and globally, there is some evidence of that.

But there should be no shortage of things that make a people truly great: diversity, equality, justice, mercy, compassion, and hospitality.

*These are phrases I’ve coined for this post. Next week’s post will explain “youthful exceptionalism.”

A reading for Advent: Why Must Politics Intrude on Our Faith?

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

When Pastors Have Bad Dreams

Okay, so you may suggest I see a therapist rather than share this with you, but there’s something universal in the bad dream I had last night.

Pastors have all kinds of bad dreams: expected to preach when not prepared, missing your sermon as you walk to the pulpit, finding yourself naked in the pulpit, looking out at the congregation at 11 a.m. Sunday morning and seeing no one there, etc.

One of my preaching professors, Bill Muehl, once realized as he was about to preach in chapel at a girls’ school that the sermon he brought was the one he gave the same group the year before. Only it wasn’t a dream, it actually happened to him, and he had to use another sermon from memory, which he used as a “teaching moment” to advise his students to always have a back-up in memory. (I don’t re-use a sermon myself—I get bored with it!)

My most terrifying and recurring dream came to me when I served as an interim pastor: driving a dangerously slick winding road downhill in a thunderstorm at night with no headlights, no brakes, and/or no steering wheel!

Pastors also have good dreams: having just the right insights to offer in a sermon or talk, enjoying a committee’s embrace of your wisdom, seeing the sanctuary filled for Sunday morning service.

My dream last night was more of a nightmare.

I dreamed that there were a mere dozen in worship that morning, and one regular had brought someone new whom others did not like. There was fussing, even as I privately fussed with getting things ready for service.

It ended in a big squabble and as everyone was exiting before worship began, unhappy and disgusted with one another and with me, I suggested that the new person should be made to feel welcome. A friend in the congregation retaliated, saying that I myself had once said something derogatory about a visitor, which I denied, even if it may have been possible.

I awoke from the dream in the middle of the night feeling like a failure as a pastor. I became depressed, and had difficulties returning to sleep. Maybe I’d been a failure my whole life!

Pastors do make mistakes and pastors do fail. Sometimes it’s just not a good match. Sometimes either the parishioners or the pastor or church staff think they know better how to run the church.

Pastor or not, any of us can either unintentionally internalize a congregation’s dysfunction and/or become part of its dysfunctional family system. A congregation I know broke from another because of a dispute, but, when considering reunification decades later, the resentments of the congregation that had split had been passed on to new members not part of the original disagreement.

I witnessed that on a denominational scale when the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (the “northern stream”) and the Presbyterian Church, U.S. (the “southern stream”) considered reunion a century after Presbyterians had been divided by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

My dream did have a sort of happy ending, however, even though the first part kept me awake wondering about past failures.

After everyone left, as I was putting everything back in place in the sanctuary, an old, grey-haired, heavy-set black man came in with his young son or grandson, hoping I would talk with him. He was thankfully oblivious to what had just happened with the congregation, but I was haunted by my old fear, “what-would-he-think-if-he-knew-I’m-gay?” Nonetheless, I was ready to help, and they were ready to talk.

This ending came to reassure me, and I hope I’m not just rationalizing. For everyone I may have failed, there were always more opportunities for ministry.

I daresay many a minister—ordained or lay—may take comfort in that realization.

A reading for Advent: Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Squandering Eternity

If you are looking for devotional material for Advent, may I recommend my own Reformation of the Heart, which leads the reader through each day of Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, and Holy Week. It includes a handy scripture index.

A thought crossed my mind today that I can’t let go of.

It took a virtual eternity to get to me, to you, to our present lives.

We think of eternity as a thing of the future. “Where will you spend eternity?” billboards and bellicose Bible-thumpers ask. Much religion is based on this premise. “Squandering eternity” has come to mean giving up heaven, an everlasting future with God.

But the only eternity we “know” is in the past, the billions of years it took to form the universe, solar systems, planets, inhabitable planets, life, and the forms of life those planets host today.

Eternity has brought us to this moment, the breath I take as I write this, the breath you take as you read this. Squandering eternity is not living up to this moment, not being fully mindful of it, not reverencing all that has come into balance, into play, to make this moment “work,” to create this eco-sphere in which we live and move and have our being, to evolve my/your consciousness to reflect its magnificence.

Much of our lives is denial and distraction. We fill our moments rather than letting them fill us. We’re occupied with our pasts and preoccupied with our futures.

The founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius, believed that, in the Final Judgment, God will not ask what we didn’t do, but rather, “How much of my creation did you not enjoy?”

Given our current displays of xenophobia and environmental arrogance, we could ask ourselves, how many of God’s creatures do we not enjoy? And, given various inequalities, how much enjoyment is being denied others?

Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And it was the Jesuit-educated priest and physicist George Lemaître who gave us the wondrous concept behind the Big Bang. Talk about a singular moment!

I lost my muse in July, our beloved dog Hobbes. Though now she joins me only in spirit for my morning prayers on the deck, I am not bereft of “wildlife,” so to speak. Identical twin cats sometimes watch me from a neighbor’s window. A hummingbird occasionally flies inquisitively before my face. Almost every morning, a bee gathers nectar from the flowers in our hanging baskets.

I once said the Lord’s Prayer as my eyes followed the bee move from tiny blossom to blossom, as if the bee were praying it. How differently God’s kingdom and power and glory seemed then!

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough,” Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote.

Ignatius defined sin as anything that blocks the love that God is trying to share with you, or blocks your love for God. And for Ignatian spirituality, God is part of everything.

To Ignatius, what bothers God is not our being fully human, but our trying to be God.

Let God be eternal.

Take this moment to wonder that you have come to be after all this time.

Cultural anthropologist Rene Girard died earlier this month. As many of you know, I used his understandings of mimesis, mimetic rivalry, violence, and the scapegoat mechanism in my book, Coming Out as Sacrament. For an excellent analysis of his life’s work, please click here.

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

We'll Always Have Paris

Friday I finished helping with a week-long spiritual formation course and found myself reflecting on the instructor’s explanation of Ignatian spirituality’s concept of “holding things loosely.” He learned this professionally as a church pastor and personally weathering a divorce and as the father of a daughter with a drug addiction.

After a Costco run, I retrieved Wade from the Atlanta airport, returning from a week out of town for work. Then we sat down for our usual evening PBS newscast and learned of the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris. A Facebook friend posted that he and his wife had just visited the city two days earlier and found it gay and vibrant.

I wept, as I often do watching the news. I wept for those who lost their lives and the wounded and their loved ones, I wept for Paris and for France and for our world. Like most Westerners, I was oblivious to a pair of terrorist bombings that killed more than 40 innocent children, women and men in Beirut the day before.

On the subsequent newscasts and Saturday’s Democratic presidential candidates debate, no one was “holding things loosely”—everyone had either questions or plans on “what we should do” to prevent such violence.

As usually happens, one idea again emerged in the nonstop commentary, that Islamic moderates had to speak out forcefully to rein in Muslim extremists.

Easy to say, hard to do. I remember oh-too-well how little mainstream denominations in this country said or did to rein in religiously-motivated gay-bashing before LGBT people became respectable, or at least acceptable, in their eyes.

No matter your religion, if your god tells you to kill yourself or others, literally or figuratively, that god is what needs to be eliminated from your mind and your heart.

I once wrote on this blog that the young men being attracted to ISIS were as illiterate about the Qur’an as gay-bashers who quoted the Bible when brutalizing transgender people, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals.

But last March’s cover story in The Atlantic begs to differ. “What ISIS Really Wants and How to Stop It” by Graeme Wood asserts that the ISIS movement is very well-versed in the Qur’an. Its intent is to bring in an apocalypse, provoking the rest of the world to a violent confrontation and destroying the freedoms that make cities like Paris so gay and vibrant.

German liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle once struck my survivor’s mentality to the core when she spoke on nuclear proliferation during an interfaith luncheon I attended when I lived in Los Angeles. She said that, in a nuclear war, she would rather be among the killed than among the killers. Why should she be provoked to change her non-violent nature?

I have the same beef with capital punishment. I oppose executions partly because they make us all killers. But I am not a pacifist. ISIS and terrorism of any kind must be confronted, if only because it’s usually the most vulnerable who suffer from their actions. Confrontation may have non-violent forms, which would be preferred, but it will require more, I believe—though we should never equate the “more” with the will of God.

In the Ignatian course we viewed the French film Of Gods and Men, the story of a household of Trappist monks ministering to the needs of Muslims in their Algerian village, ultimately slaughtered by fundamentalist revolutionaries that even their Muslim neighbors feared. Warned to leave, they followed a discernment process that led them to the “aha” that this was their home, that this was their calling, to serve this neighborhood materially and medically—and so they stayed, despite their peril. They held their own lives “loosely.”

Jesus too knew the risk of “moving into our neighborhood” to proclaim a spiritual commonwealth, not a caliphate, which welcomes us all equally and voluntarily, a commonwealth of “liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

At the end of the film Casablanca, Rick urges Ilsa to go with her husband to aid him in his vital work of resisting Nazis, despite the great love they had found earlier in Paris. “Ilsa,” he explains, “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

“We’ll always have Paris,” he reminds her.

We’ll always have Paris. It will always be gay and vibrant. And it will always risk the crazies who want to diminish its shine and glow, because liberty to be liberty must hold everything loosely.

Relevant columns:

“Ted Cruz and the Anti-Gay Pastor” by Katherine Stewart

“Finding Peace within the Holy Texts” by David Brooks

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

What Is Truth?

“What is truth?” Pilate famously asked Jesus in Gospel writer John’s version of Jesus’ trial. Jesus had just informed the Roman governor of Judea, “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

This exchange came to mind as three recent New York Times articles began percolating in my head.

“Believing What You Don’t Believe” by professors of behavioral science Jane L. Risen and A. David Nussbaum reports on an experiment in which participants were instructed to label one bowl of sugar “sucrose” and an identical bowl as “sodium cyanide (poison).” Despite the fact that the persons themselves chose which to label, they nonetheless resisted using sugar from the bowl labelled poisonous.

The authors then apply the contrast between fast and slow thinking. The volunteers’ instinct (fast thinking) was not to touch the bowl labelled as poison, and though their reason (slow thinking) might be used as a corrective to realize the labels were by their own arbitrary designation, “People can simultaneously recognize that, rationally, their superstitious belief is impossible, but persist in their belief and their behavior.” They may even try to rationalize their irrational, intuitive decisions.

The article concludes with an illustration of how setting in place a policy in advance can avoid the pitfall of following “a powerful but misguided intuition in a specific situation.”*

“How to Live a Lie” by philosophy professor William Irwin questions the “objective reality” of God, free will, and morality. He posits that many live by moral or religious or ethical “fictionalism,” voluntarily or involuntarily, and some may understand such fictionalism as “mythologically true,” while at the same time knowing that these constructs are “not literally true.”

All this touches my experience as I have grappled with the reality of God. I don’t want to make the mistake of allowing superstition to determine my beliefs or behavior while, at the same time, I believe myth speaks to the unknowable (or not yet known) in human experience.

The articles converge for me as I consider that setting in place “policies” (as in the first article) about God, morality, and free will can help civilization and us personally.

The Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, “God is love,” equal rights, the separation of church and state, and belief in personal and corporate responsibility have contributed to our culture in positive ways, for example.

But is embracing such policies finding the truth, or rationalization, a kind of mind-game?

“The Light Beam Rider” by biographer Walter Isaacson celebrates the 100^th anniversary of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Einstein, he observes, was able to advance science by beginning with what he called “Gedankenexperimente,” “thought experiments,” or what we might colloquially call daydreaming or mind-games.

The author gives pertinent examples, and then concludes, “That ability to visualize the unseen has always been the key to creative genius. As Einstein later put it, ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’”

This week, helping with a spiritual formation course on Ignatian spirituality, I am learning that imagination plays a key role in its understanding of prayer.

Could all this mean that the imagination and thought experiments of mystics, theologians, and ethicists are “key to creative genius” and of more value than “certain” knowledge about God?

Could that be why the teachings of spiritual founders like Jesus have captured our own spiritual imaginations?

*I just learned last week on the fascinating PBS series, The Brain with (neuroscientist) David Eagleman, that this is known as a “Ulysses’ contract.” Ulysses had himself tied to the mast so he couldn’t sail his ship onto the rocks when he heard the seductive sirens’ song.

Find out how you can support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

Fleshing Out the Soul: James B. Nelson

I will be using some of Nelson’s insights this Sunday, Nov. 8, in a talk on “Grounded Spirituality” for the 11 a.m. service of the Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church in Dahlonega, GA, followed by a free workshop entitled, “Spiritual Self-Exam.”

The proudest moments of my life have sometimes come serendipitously. Conducting a workshop on LGBT pastoral issues during a conference for Christian ethicists, someone asked me what book I would recommend to help congregations dealing with such issues.

I didn’t even have to think about it. I answered, “James B. Nelson’s book, The Intimate Connection: Male Sexuality, Masculine Spirituality. Or is it, Masculine Sexuality and Male Spirituality? I can never remember.”

Laughter erupted in the classroom. “Why don’t you ask the guy with the question?” someone said, “That’s Jim Nelson.” I laughed too, but I was proud that I had unintentionally paid him a great compliment.

We had never met, but I once subbed for him when his mother’s death prevented his speaking to our annual Presbyterians for Lesbian & Gay Concerns luncheon at General Assembly. I had been doing a lot of presentations about the relationship of spirituality and sexuality, and the group’s board prevailed on me that day to take his place, though I had brought none of my speaking notes.

I spent that morning reassembling from memory what I had recently been talking and writing about, and I gave one of my rare extemporary speeches. The response was positive, and I was feeling good about myself until someone on the board felt the need to put me in my place by saying, “You know that’s all from James Nelson.”

I didn’t know, and I was too embarrassed to say that I had not yet read any of his books! When I subsequently did, I was further embarrassed to realize that a quote of mine I thought to be original, and had actually published, was really Nelson’s: “We know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all.”

What that says to me is that Nelson’s ideas had somehow permeated my universe, seeping its way into my thinking through conversations I was having in the church and with colleagues. That to me is the greatest compliment to his life and work, that his ideas would become part of the very fabric of contemporary theological discussion.

Of course there are dozens if not hundreds of body theologians today, but he was among the first along with Carter Heyward and others to help many of us claim an embodied spirituality, and we grieve his recent death at the age of 85.

In college I had thought I needed to go outside my own Christian tradition to claim my body, my sensuality and sexuality, and the beauty of creation. That’s why, as I wrote in my first book, Uncommon Calling, Kazantzakis’ novel, Zorba the Greek, became my “second Bible.” The nominal “pagan” Zorba’s sensual zest for the world awakened in me a spirituality far from how I had been reared, spirituality as “pie in the sky when you die by and by.”

I knew little of earth-oriented Native American spirituality, and nothing of Celtic Christianity, which, with Body and Process and Liberation and Feminist theologies have served as correctives to my thinking of spirituality as an out-of-body experience.

I have used so many of Nelson’s insights and analyses—properly credited of course!—in my books and my talks and on this blog that I can’t imagine doing what I do without him. I refrained from reviewing all my underlining in his books for this post, however, lest I be tempted to offer more than my favorite Nelson quote:

“Pleasure is the strongest argument for the existence of God.”

Last week’s post prompted a reader to ask a question about this blog’s statistics: Since January, donations have totaled $1,470, free subscriptions are nearly 600 weekly, and visitors from all over the world number between 3000 and 4000 per month.

Find out how you can support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Asking for Money

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I urge you to take these requests to heart.

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

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

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

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

Gratefully,

Chris

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

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

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

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Salvation from Fundamentalism to Universalism

In thanksgiving for the life, ministry, and writings of body theologian James B. Nelson. For posts on this blog that reference his insights, click here and scroll down.

The following is excerpted and adapted from a talk previously given to the Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church in Dahlonega, Georgia, where I will be speaking at 11 a.m. Nov. 8 on “Grounded Spirituality” and offering a free workshop after the service on “Spiritual Self-Exam.”

Salvation has come to mean something very different for me over my lifetime than it did when the word slipped so easily from the mouths of the fundamentalists around me in the Baptist church and Christian school in which I grew up.

“Salvation” or “being saved” implies that we are in danger, a danger we cannot escape without help. We need a rescuer, a defender, a knight in shining armor, a hero or heroine, a messiah, a god or goddess—or, as in ancient Greek theater, a “deus ex machina,” a god who magically comes on stage via a machine-like apparatus.

We don’t like to admit our vulnerability in sometimes needing a rescuer!

But salvation in both Jewish and Christian meaning also means deliverance, implying a release from oppression, from bondage, from captivity, from injustice, from unrighteousness, from meaninglessness—and here you can add anything we might need deliverance from, such as addiction, greed, poverty, ignorance, prejudice—even wealth and privilege.

Thus the children of Israel were delivered from the hand of Pharaoh in Egypt through the Exodus, the formative story of Judaism. And early Christians were delivered from purity codes and ritual requirements, and more importantly, delivered from sin and death in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the formative story of Christianity.

Regarding either of these stories as myths does not diminish their roles as foundational stories; in fact, it may enhance their use in speaking to the unfathomable mystery of human experience.

But the words translated both “salvation” and “deliverance” have another meaning still, and that is “liberation.” Liberation means we are set free from all that holds us back, keeps us down, interferes with a life filled with meaning, love, and hope, freeing us from oppressive institutions, beliefs, and systems, whether economic, political, or religious.

Thus liberation theology has spoken to so many around the world, from the barrios of Latin America to the pockets of self-determination in totalitarian states across the globe.

As a progressive Christian, as a believer in interfaith and multicultural spiritual wisdom, I can identify with all three of these terms: salvation, deliverance, and liberation.

But what I’ve needed to be saved from, delivered by, and liberated for has changed over the years.

Today I need to be rescued from parochialism, my narrow and often privileged view of the way things are.

I need to be delivered by insights of a wider range of thinkers—those of other faiths, races, conditions, and cultures, as well as scientists, artists, and atheists.

I need to be liberated for new ways of experiencing and understanding the world and our lives and God.

My salvation from fundamentalism (of all kinds, political and religious, conservative and liberal) has led me more and more to a kind of universalism, an ever-expanding realization that we’re all in this together, need one another, and share a collective stake in the salvation of the world.

For those interested in knowing what progressive Muslims think, please visit:

http://www.mecca-institute.org/ or http://www.mpvusa.org/

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium.

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Monastic Vows

Thank you for the record number of visits and responses to last week’s post, “Married at Last!” and the “likes” and comments on Facebook about my birthday and our wedding!

I am passionate in my admiration for the contemplative life. I could not have done what I have done as a gay activist both in the church and the culture were it not for my morning prayers and personal retreats, times to bask in God’s unconditional, overwhelming, and transformational love.

And I have always had a rather romanticized desire to be a part of a monastic community. I believe I could handle most of the vows required of monastics.

I’ve got poverty down, having been self-employed doing free-lance church work, including writing and speaking and editing, for most of my career, and now writing a free weekly blog with a large readership whose donations so far this year total just $850.

And the vow of stability required by some monastic communities would also be within my reach, being an introvert and a creature of habit as well as being loyal and steadfast.

Those who know me or have read my books may find this difficult to believe, but I could even handle celibacy or chastity.

But to take a vow of obedience would be for me most challenging of all.

In birth order theory, being the youngest of my family, I would be the revolutionary, the rebel, even the prodigal. While I’m not quite all that—after all, I’m the only child of my parents whose vocation has been upholding their Christian faith—yet I am a progressive Christian, which means I resist being told what I have to believe and how to behave!

What helps me is understanding that the word “obedience” itself comes from a root word meaning “to listen,” and I’m pretty competent at that, not only as a pastor and friend, but also as one whose prayers are more about listening than speaking.

One could say that the Christian vow of “obedience” is much like the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” Jesus commanded us to “watch,” or “watch and pray,” as he asked of his disciples in Gethsemane, seeking always God’s will and God’s way and God’s commonwealth.

Years ago, I found myself praying to God, “Bring me closer to you,” but then I quickly added, “But not through anything bad.” Much of spiritual intimacy is predicated on suffering, when spiritual intimacy is provided to alleviate suffering. Jesus healed the masses with his hands and his words, words that reminded them of God’s benevolence, giving us life and love, mercy and grace.

My mother was the first to encourage my reading of monastics, just as she did much of her life. But it was not until the 84^th and final year of her life that she told me, “You know, I’ve always believed God loves us all, but I only recently have come to believe that God loves me personally.”

Surprised, I said, “Mom, haven’t you been reading all my books?!”

For her, this was a kind of a spiritual “arrival.”

It may just take me 84 years of life to fully believe it myself.