Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Rest in Peace, Rise in Glory


If anyone deserves to rest in peace and rise in glory, it is our Congressman, Representative John Robert Lewis.

He fought the good fight, he kept the faith, he got into “good trouble,” he served his Lord and his country well.

A few days before he died last week, I wrote on Facebook that in every encounter Wade and I had with him, he made us feel as if he were there to see us! And he really saw us, engaged with us, wanted to know “how are you doin’?” He didn’t look around to see if there was someone else to greet. He was solidly there, pleased to listen.

I put this on Facebook because we had just been moved watching the documentary, John Lewis: Good Trouble.

Wade was so charmed by him that he on two occasions invited him to our home for dinner. And Congressman Lewis said yes, he’d love to come. I felt like the centurion who said to Jesus, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.” Lewis was a Civil Rights Movement icon and I did not feel worthy. Our place is small and modest. What would we serve? Whom invite? Should it be a campaign fundraiser? We did not pursue it because of my reservations.

I am grateful Rep. Lewis lived to see the latest incarnation and proliferation of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Lives Matter. He seemed to share my view that all movements are led by subsequent generations. Younger people see things and know things and feel things that us older folk may miss.

Please permit an aside. I don’t like the facile categories and generalizations applied to different generations. I think they are a weak media invention and new occasions for prejudice. This week a columnist described being called to task as a “Baby Boomer” who had dreamed of a new and better world in the 60’s, “Okay, Boomer, why didn’t you finish the job?”

The truth of the matter is that all the activists I knew and worked with in the 60’s and 70’s and beyond have never stopped working for a better world. Many problems cannot be “fixed” in a single generation.

Ironically, the LGBTQIA Movement of which I have been part nearly DID “finish our job,” accomplishing more goals than I ever thought possible in my lifetime. That’s why we now have the luxury, opportunity, and responsibility of “intersectionality,” better understanding and expressing and addressing the relationship of all peace and justice and equality issues.

I was deeply touched by an outstanding LGBTQIA activist writing that my first book helped him realize that “I was possible.”  That is why I am so beholden to the Civil Rights Movement: it helped me realize that “I was possible.”

I doubt I have ever had the courage of John Lewis, willing to non-violently endure a fractured skull on the Edmund Pettus bridge. But I am glad I got to touch, as it were, “the hem of his garment.”

Representative Lewis loved this early mug shot,
displayed at a restaurant in our neighborhood.

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

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Mary Trump's "Frankenstein"


Watching Mary Trump’s interview by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last Thursday about her book on the shaping and misshaping of her uncle, the President (Too Much—Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man), I remembered a post I wrote on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein October 26, 2011. Our society has minted a number of “Frankensteins” who are underdeveloped in compassion, the trait that unites us with God. As I wrote then:

The Christian teacher Abelard of the twelfth century explained the atonement this way: witnessing Jesus suffering on the cross awakens in us that which makes us one with God: our compassion. Compassion is our link to divinity. To witness suffering—whether firsthand or through the media—may draw out our divine urge to hold and help the vulnerable.

My concern in re-presenting this reflection is not, per se, political, but rather, to remind us how “Frankensteins” are made, not born. I take the Celtic Christian view of original innocence—that yes, we may be marred by sin, but we are not sinful at birth, as the concept of Original Sin would have it.

From my 2011 post:

A few years ago I watched for the first time the Kenneth Branagh film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  It prompted me to read Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, discovering that the film reflects many of its insights. The creature who has been given his creator’s name in the public mind is not the monosyllabic grunter of gay director James Whale’s 1931 film classic (whose own story is the content of another worthy film, Gods and Monsters), but an eloquent philosopher on being a creature abandoned by his creator and rejected by fellow creatures.

Asking for a mate “as hideous as himself,” the creature explains to his creator, Victor Frankenstein, “If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundred fold; for that one creature’s sake, I would make peace with the whole kind!” His creator writes, “His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.”

Branagh’s movie version of the creature’s words captures the sinister consequence of being denied: “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” And only then concludes, “For the sympathy of one human being, I would make peace with all.”

I concluded my post with this pastoral illustration:

I attended an ordination in San Francisco which featured two pastors giving “the charge” to one who would be serving as a chaplain and director of a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at a local hospital. The Presbyterian pastor gave an eloquent but long commendation whose content I do not remember. The MCC pastor gave a memorable two-point counsel. “The people you’ll be serving,” she said simply, “Basically want to know ‘Am I alone?’ and ‘Am I loved?’”

“For the sympathy of one human being, I would make peace with all.”

We are all creatures. We each have love in us the likes of which can scarcely be imagined and rage the likes of which can hardly be believed. If we cannot satisfy the one, we might indulge the other.



I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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Copyright © 2011 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

A Flower's Tears

The flowers I was contemplating.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post last week that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Last Wednesday and today I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and this one from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s pastoral sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem:

A flower’s tears
are the dewdrops
that drip, orb by orb,
as sun rises.

A flower’s tears
are the raindrops
that stream, string by string,
as storms rage.

A flower’s tears
are the petals
that drop, one by one,
as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”



I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

"A Flower Does Not Talk"

One of our orchids.
I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Today and next Wednesday I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and the second from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.

It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality.

This seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21st century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko Kudo.

I took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this, a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good role model.

As I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend, Linda Culbertson, recent executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.

Suzuki evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words, I find this comforting.

He then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined “bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”

“Zen tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”

Yet the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after all the same.”

Hallelujah!

The book’s title is that of the author’s poem:

A Flower Does Not Talk

Silently a flower blooms,
In silence it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,
            the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.
This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;
The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

I think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.


I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Dancing Queen

Dancing Jesus icon.

Okay, I can’t get it out of my head. Dancing Queen. This past week, Wade and I watched some escapist fare to overcome the world’s angst over the pandemic, the murders of black people, and who is in the White House. We watched both versions of Mamma Mia! on two consecutive nights. And I listened to my CD of Abba as I did my blog business last Wednesday.

That day’s post quoted my spiritual mentor Henri Nouwen about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: “It seemed as if nobody could party better than these oppressed people.” That’s true of LGBTIQ people as well. Henri had a taste of that when I once took him to a popular West Hollywood disco, Studio One.

In the middle of marchers dancing during an apartheid protest in South Africa, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu was asked by a news reporter why dancing was so important. Tutu continued his dancing, gave the reporter a puzzled expression, pleading, “We’ve just got to dance.”

Wade and I watched the fa-bu-lous Global Pride 2020 24-hour marathon this past Saturday that often moved me to tears of joy and gratitude, as well as grief and pain for those who never lived to see it. (An aside I can’t resist: a gay friend of mine had to keep re-taping a McDonald’s commercial because he kept putting too much emphasis on the word “fa-bu-lous”!)

I still remember when I thought I was the only one.

And I remember an early Pride festival in my home city of Los Angeles. Friday night, at the entrance, fundamentalist Christians had positioned themselves with damning signs, including “TURN OR BURN!” which the band just inside the festival fence mocked by playing “Burn, Baby, Burn!” from Saturday Night Fever.

Another aside from “the old days”: MCC founder and Pride activist Rev. Troy Perry liked to explain that fundamentalism was an ideological “ism” that included nothing “mental” and nothing “fun.”

It was the Saturday of a subsequent Pride festival that a friend and church member brought his ten-year-old son along. When I arrived, I noticed the dance tent was crowded with a circle of attendees watching a couple dance in the middle of the tent, clapping their approval to the beat of the music. As I approached, I realized it was my friend’s very white little boy dancing extraordinarily well with a very tall black man. I kidded my friend, “Your son has fulfilled your fantasy of having the eyes of everyone on the dance floor riveted by your dancing skills!” When the father died of AIDS years later, I probably told that story in his eulogy.

I have often taken my emotions into my dancing, whether expressing joy or grief. That’s true of many of us in the Queer movement. My first long-term boyfriend and I used to dance till we were sweaty and shirtless.

A friend who died of AIDS a few years after graduation from Columbia Theological Seminary here in the Atlanta area had a rather traditional Presbyterian memorial service. But at the end, to our delight, he had requested the postlude, “Dancing Queen.” We left with a smile on our lips.

Thanks be to God for all the dancing queens of our lives!



I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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.