The World Is My Cloister

St. Bernard Abbey Church

Cullman, Alabama

The world is my cloister.

Yours too.

It’s a too obvious pun, but often the art of writing for the spirit is stating the obvious. “The world is my oyster” is an idiom or metaphor for personal success. “The world is my cloister” is an invitation to experience the world and success in a different way.

And, given that beings like ourselves are multiple light years away, if at all, earth is our own little cloister in the known universe.

That’s what came to me Monday morning, the day I write this. Before I continued my re-reading of The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (which clearly gave me the idea), I sat on our front porch for some time sipping my coffee, listening and observing.

The street is quieter now that we are sheltering in place because of COVID-19. Fewer of us going to work and no children being driven or biking or walking to school means diminished traffic. The only people I see are walking their dogs or walking and running themselves. Most of the sounds I hear are squirrels chasing one another in the trees and birds chirping or bickering.

An almost invisible flash of light overhead sends a slow and lengthy rumbling of thunder through the clouds above. A light, almost imperceptible rain begins to fall, and in places where the moisture silently gathers until released—leaves, roofs, gutters—I can better hear the periodic splatter of its deliverance to concrete, asphalt, or puddle.

These gentle sounds are occasionally and briefly overrun—nearby or from afar—by the roaring and screeching and banging of the city’s metal dragons devouring our rubbish and our recyclables—Monday is trash day in our neighborhood, after all.

I revisit a very pleasant dream I had Sunday morning as I awoke. I was home with my biological family in our tract house in the L.A. suburbs, enjoying a happy visit. We were all about to leave to go other places and were explaining to one another what we had planned. I felt a hand on the top of my head, gentle but firm, as if in blessing. I didn’t know if it was Mom’s or Dad’s or, wishful thinking—could it be God’s? I fully woke up, still feeling this hand pressed on my head and thought I’d find my hand there or Wade’s, but lo, there was no hand. I told Wade about it on our morning walk.

Now, on Monday, a familiar neighbor walks by with his big friendly dogs, and I pick up an umbrella to walk toward him while keeping our respectful six feet of social distance. We speak of our shared experience of Ormewood Church on Zoom yesterday, a digital app that allowed our spiritual community’s first meeting since the governor of Georgia banned gatherings to constrain spread of the virus.

I had been surprised that so many—35 family units—signed on for the service, with liturgists, singers, and pastor leading us remotely.  Wade and I had kept our setting on “gallery” so we could see the families attending in their varied home environments.

I confessed to the neighbor that, because we didn’t focus exclusively on our pastor during Jenelle’s sermon, I untypically did not follow the sermon so well—my fault, not hers—as I enjoyed the distractions of kids climbing on parents or fiddling with the devices or sticking faces or fingers in their camera's eye.

What our neighbor took away from the experience, he said, was that “this is community” –that so many went to the trouble to log in and participate, including our usual small group time in which we were asked, “What has been your ‘darkest valley’ this week and what has been your ‘grassy meadow’?” Our text for the service and the sermon was Psalm 23.

I was especially in awe that Zoom could scramble us into small groups after the sermon where we could see one another on our screens and offer our answers to one another by unmuting our speakers.

We are blessed by these new cathedrals. And we are blessed when we see and hear, taste and sense our neighbors and neighborhoods as cloisters of the Spirit, of the holy, of the whole people of God. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord our whole lives long.”

Related post: A Healing Touch

I was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted and encouraged for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

The Pandemic's "Monastic" Opportunity

I’ve postponed to next week a previous reflection about meditating on the psalms, a spiritual practice routinely followed in monasteries. But, given what I’m about to say, it may become all the more relevant.

Emails from blog readers and the cancellation or reconfiguration of local personal or religious gatherings has taught me how further isolating the coronavirus, or COVID-19, can be. To several readers, already isolated because of health or age or retirement, I’ve written this could be our “monastic” opportunity to experience the value of being “all-one” (where the word “alone” comes from) as well as resting in God, taking a break and a breath and a breather, especially important resisting a respiratory infection.

Those of you who have attended workshops or retreats or even committee meetings with me know my fondness for those present to take what I call “monastic moments” to consult their own hearts. I especially find this helpful when I pose a question or problem to a group and wish to avoid the person who speaks first distracting us from our own answers or solutions. A moment of silence allows each one of us to prepare our own thoughts and feelings for sharing with the group.

We need more moments of silence to consider who we are and whose we are—and here I don’t just mean God, but our spouses, our families, our communities of faith and otherwise, everything from our neighborhoods and cities to our countries and our environment.

The limitations prompted by our present pandemic offer each one of us a very personal “existential crisis”—a phrase much bandied about in our political debates these days. We are given an occasion to ponder vital questions: Why are we here? What do we value most? Who do we want to become? What do we believe in? Whom do we love? What do we live for?

Many of us need more than a monastic “moment” to consider if not answer these questions. We need a contemplative retreat, a temporary withdrawal from our busy world of interactions, entertainment, nonstop news, activities, and problem-solving. This may be our 40-day sojourn in a wilderness, our valley of the shadow of death to recognize that God is with us—even here.

And, I would say, we need a retreat “leader,” a guide, someone whose spiritual counsel we trust. Right now, mine is Kathleen Norris and her book The Cloister Walk. Over the years, my retreat leaders have included Henri Nouwen, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, The Dalai Lama, Richard Rohr, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther King, Barbara Brown Taylor, Mahatma Gandhi, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and especially Jesus—to name a handful of hundreds of guides who have taught me something about myself, about God, about you, about our world.

Who is your “go-to” spiritual guide whose writings you may once again dive into in your social distancing? You don’t have to find yourself alone.

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

In Praise of Praise

A neighbor's daffodils

A friendly email exchange with a regular reader of this blog about last week’s reference to “How Great Thou Art” prompts me to share again this post about praise music from 2012. 

Attending the Sunday evening praise service of MCC San Francisco, my partner turned to me and said, “For this service, you’re gonna need a lot more rhythm!” I had just moved there to serve as interim pastor, and the clapping and swaying and emotional singing had not been a regular feature of my worship experience.

A visit to the service a year earlier had alienated me. “What if I’m in pain when I come to the service?” I judgmentally thought, “I wouldn’t fit in with all these happy people.”

Sharing that thought with the former pastor, the Rev. Jim Mitulski (one of the world’s finest preachers), he corrected, “We started that service to give voice to all of our feelings facing the AIDS crisis in the Castro.” He explained it was the old gospel songs and Taize style chants that expressed the range of their emotions, from lament and longing to hope and faith. One might compare the similar range of the Psalms.

I’ve just finished reading a book by a progressive Christian who expresses many insights I cherish, but who suggests we praise to “flatter” God to get what we want. That may be true for some, but not for me, and not for most, I would say.

Rather, we praise to be uplifted into God’s realm, to feel and to be embraced by something larger than ourselves—spiritual community, planet earth, the cosmos and all that is within it. The expanding universe calls for our own expansion. Spiritual ecstasy, like sexual ecstasy, gets us out of our selves, literally “out of stasis,” out of the status quo.

Just like prayer, praise is the place, not of God’s transformation, but of our own! To paraphrase the spiritual, “It’s not you but me, O Lord, standing in the need of praise.” In her book, Suffering, the late German theologian Dorothee Sölle affirms that collective “lament, petition, expressions of hope” empower those who suffer to address wrongs, comparing workers’ protests to liturgies, particularly the Psalms.

I come from traditions—both Baptist and Presbyterian—suspicious of the charismatic expressions of worship. Even the simple act of lifting our hands and faces upward—ironically, the praying posture of the Jews and Christians of biblical times—seemed indecorous in our more somber and earnest worship.

There is “bad” praise music, of course—uninspired, unpoetic, musically dull, and theologically untenable for progressive Christians. But even the theologically questionable ones, if inspired and poetic and musically interesting, may be fun to sing. Just don’t take them literally (just like scripture!).

I introduced a new song with just the right theology at an annual Kirkridge men’s retreat I co-led, but when we faltered at its difficulty, someone started singing “Jesus Loves Me,” and it became the reprise of the weekend.

My preference is for Gregorian chants, and songs and chants from Taize and Iona, and John Michael Talbot songs, as well as spirituals, sambas, salsas, and freedom songs. But I also still hum and sing the old gospel songs and staid hymns as well. Just ask our dog, Hobbes.

I was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

Related post: The Sound of Eden

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

I will be co-leading “Beside Still Waters: A Contemplative Retreat” with Debra Weir April 27-May 1, 2020 at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. It is open to the public, and some limited scholarships are available. Three readable texts are recommended to prepare but are not required to have been read by opening day. Here is the link: https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. I welcome the use of Progressive Christian Reflections as contemporary readings in worship, discussion starters, or other non-profit purposes.  My hope is that you will also browse the archive (right column on the site) to use previous reflections in your daily or occasional meditation.

Our "Spiritual Universe"

As happened last week, I am writing this the day before posting it, a rarity. Usually I have several days or weeks to write and review (and review again) a post. Despite my occasional despair at the large empty spaces that I experience in retirement, I still find that life is often full, and this week served as an example.

This past Sunday, with others from what is now Ormewood Church, I attended a brief and informal graveside service commemorating the life of Rev. Peter Denlea, the one-time pastor of our predecessor Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church. It was organized by one of his sons, Colin, also a pastor, at Georgia National Cemetery to which Peter’s first vocation as a Navy bomber pilot gave him access. I wondered if the cemetery rules (above photo) really permitted a spirit as expansive as Peter’s, given its prohibition of “boisterous actions”! Later this month, his boisterous spirit will be celebrated at a wake in our neighborhood, where he once lived at the end of our block.

With a similar group from Ormewood Church the next day, I attended the celebration of the life and legacy of Judge Elaine L. Carlisle at Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, a member of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church who lived three houses uphill from us. The largely African American church was packed with fellow judges and lawyers, the City of Atlanta Police Honor Guard, and sister members of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms also attended.

Our pastor, Rev. Jenelle Holmes, offered moving and meaningful prayers at each service.

And synchronicity strikes again as, at both services, we sang “How Great Thou Art.”

I lost it each time we sang it. Remember, I mentioned last week that I had been viewing the mind-boggling 2007 series The Universe, now available on Netflix. I had just finished watching the final episode, so these words by Stuart K. Hine particularly moved me:

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder

Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee:

How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

I’m losing it again as I type these words. They take me back to my childhood faith, which included Billy Graham evangelical meetings featuring George Beverly Shea boisterously singing this hymn. As the song affirms, I want to believe that Peter, who lived longer than I have, and Elaine, whose life was cut shorter than mine by an as-yet-unexplained traffic accident, have been “taken home.”

Former Mayor and later Ambassador Andrew J. Young, who appointed Judge Carlisle to the bench, offered “Words of Comfort” to us. His storytelling gifts as an elder preacher and politician served us all well, bringing smiles and laughter, including one tender story about his affectionate but mistaken greeting of Elaine’s twin sister in the airport of Gary, Indiana, their hometown!

But then something he said comforted me very personally in the midst of my “lost in space” doubts. He said that now Elaine was part of our “spiritual universe,” the commonwealth of God. A spiritual universe is no more unimaginable to me than the physical universe.

I was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  “How Great Thou Art” copyright © 1953 by S. K. Hine, renewed 1981 by Manna Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

I will be co-leading “Beside Still Waters: A Contemplative Retreat” with Debra Weir April 27-May 1, 2020 at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. It is open to the public, and some limited scholarships are available. Three readable texts are recommended to prepare but are not required to have been read by opening day. Here is the link: https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd