Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Hobbes, Calvin and Chris join the

Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church nativity scene, early 2000's.

Photo by Wade Jones.

In his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, novelist and sociologist Andrew Greeley writes that most Roman Catholics in the U.S. are not “propositional” Catholics who assent to a number of “propositions” or doctrines. For example, a majority of American Catholics do not agree with the Vatican’s teaching on sexual ethics, dismissing its teaching on contraception altogether and questioning its positions on other reproductive choices, premarital sex, and homosexuality.

Greeley concludes from his research that they are not drawn to their church by dogma, but by the story—the biblical narrative, particularly the narrative about Jesus. I think that’s true of Protestants as well. We wonder why many Christians only come to church around this time of Advent and Christmas, but I believe it’s because we love the story of the baby Jesus born to Mary and Joseph, cradled in a manger, endangered by Herod, visited by shepherds and kings.

In the words of Kathleen Norris, “Human beings, it seems to me, require myth as one of the basic necessities of life. Once we have our air and water and a bit of food, we turn to metaphor and myth-making.” To me, myth is not a story that is untrue, but a story that carries a deeper truth that draws us in. As a 5-year-old once said, a myth is a story that is true on the inside. (Gertrud Mueller Nelson tells this in Here All Dwell Free.) Within the words is a Word.

In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore suggests that imagination is one of the most underutilized and undervalued spiritual gifts. So I invite you to put yourself in the story of Jesus’ nativity. Jesus is not simply born to Mary. He is born to us, if only we use our imagination!

Are you King Herod, fearful of losing power or privilege as God is doing a “new thing”? Or an Eastern sage enduring academic malaise, seeking a star of inspiration? A shepherd routinely going about your business when the skies seem to open up? A prophet crying in the wilderness?

Are you a religious leader holding on to tradition at all costs? An empire’s bureaucrat missing the unfolding human drama? Or one whose life is too full to welcome a homeless, unwed mother-to-be? Joseph, serving quietly on the periphery of sacred drama? Mary, with an unsought calling to do the dirty and painful and lonely work of birthing a new movement? Or a vulnerable child born into a vicious and violent world?

Truth is, over a lifetime, we may play all of these roles in this story. Good to remember, at this time of year, that we hinder or help, blink or behold this nativity of God’s Word to us.

I posted this on December 11, 2011, and thought new blog followers might like to read it. Have a meaningful Advent and Christmas!

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

A Priest for the 21st Century

Though priest, sociologist, and novelist Andrew M. Greeley lived most of his life in the 20th century, he was ahead of his time in his vision of what the Roman Catholic Church is and what it could be, especially in the United States.

As a “renegade” Protestant, I valued his protests against hierarchy, elitism, corruption, and cover-ups, such as the one surrounding pedophile priests. I’m not aware of an equally prominent Protestant figure who parallels his brutal directness and public airing of dirty clerical laundry.

I did not always agree with him (who did?), but I often agreed with him, and I greatly appreciated the audacity with which he brought scientific study to religion as well as matters of faith to both academia and popular literature.

Peter Steinfels’ obituary in The New York Times and its subsequent editorial does him justice, but only Greeley’s own writings can offer a full explanation of his life and times. Steinfels correctly summarizes his work: 

If there was anything tying Father Greeley’s torrent of printed words together, it was a respect for what he considered the practical wisdom and religious experience of ordinary believers and an exasperation with elites, whether popes, bishops, church reformers, political radicals, secular academics or literary critics.

 AMEN!

And then: 

Before religion became creed or catechism, he said, it was poetry: images and stories that defy death with glimpses of hope, and with moments of life-renewing experience that were shared and enacted in community rituals.

 For me, too, it all begins with poetry, images, and stories… 

“The theological voice wants doctrines, creeds and moral obligations,” Father Greeley wrote. “I reject none of these, I merely insist that experiences which renew hope are prior to and richer than propositional and ethical religion and provide the raw power for them.”

Preach it, brother! This is not far from my Baptist upbringing that taught me that personal experience is crucial to one’s faith. In my own struggle with the Presbyterian (and broader) church, it was such experience that prompted many Christians to question the church’s attitudes toward LGBT people, while opponents decried and denied personal experience as having moral or spiritual authority. And experience collected, organized, and evaluated, as a sociologist like Greeley did, is science.

Given our own “renegade” status as progressive Christians, our spiritual grounding is strengthened by poetry, images, stories, and experience—the stuff of reflection and contemplation.

Rev. Greeley was careful not to say or do anything that might prompt his silencing by authorities. If he were really free to speak, I wonder what else he might have said.

Posts from this blog that reference Father Greeley:

I Wanted to Be Famous

Paradise Lost and Paradise Found

Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Et II, Benedict?

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. 

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Et II, Benedict?

The 50^th anniversary of the promise of Vatican II prompts me to remember Pope John  XXIII with fondness, nostalgia, and reverence. His life experience, according to John W. O’Malley’s recent New York Times op-ed piece, helped him know “diversity, turmoil, sin and evil firsthand, but he also knew goodness as he found it in people of other faiths and no faith.” That’s among the reasons he initiated Vatican II, though he did not live to see it through to its conclusion, let alone its implementation.

I grew up with anti-Catholic sentiment preached from our Baptist pulpit, but a saving grace was my mother’s reading of Catholic alongside Protestant writers. As a young woman, she had enjoyed a positive relationship with nuns who cared for her frequently hospitalized mother in their small town Catholic hospital.

I was home sick from school when a news bulletin flashed the news of Pope John’s death on our Packard Bell television set in 1963. Though only 12 years of age, I immediately felt sad, knowing a unique light had left our world. In 1973 I visited his tomb in the crypt underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, noting fresh flowers. It moved me in a way no other gravesite on my first trip to Europe did; his was the only grave at which I cried. On my most recent visit to Rome, I was glad to see he had been promoted upstairs to the main floor, now in a glass coffin. At first I wasn’t sure it was him, so I asked a guard, “Is that Pope John XXIII?” “Most of him,” the guard replied with a wink. That same visit we also saw a living pope, Pope John Paul II, old and frail.

There was resistance to the changing nature of the church signaled by Vatican II, with its intended consultative collegiality among bishops, priests and laity, ecumenical emphasis, interfaith dialogue, vernacular liturgy, and other attempts at modernization that made it less of a dinosaur still breathing fire at the Enlightenment.

My friend, David Mellott, Dean of Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, suggests to me that Pope John could not have initiated reforms on his own had there not been a “sensus fidelium” in the Roman Catholic Church, “the sense of the faithful” that wanted change. It could be said that, had Pope John lived, that same “sensus fidelium” might have prompted even him to be more cautious in Vatican II’s application.  (Anyone who has served in ministry knows almost every congregation says it wants change until changes are actually implemented!)

In Vatican II, “The church validated for the first time the principle of religious freedom and rejected all forms of civil discrimination based on religious grounds. Thus ended an era of cozy church-state relations that began in the fourth century with Emperor Constantine,” the Georgetown professor, Jesuit priest, and author O’Malley observes. This is a very good time to be reminded of this in the United States.

In his 1986 autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, diocesan priest and novelist Andrew Greeley tells of sneaking into the conclave of Vatican II with a faked pass and witnessing a battle between the conservative, turf-defending Roman Curia and the bishops who served the broader church, aided by more progressive theologians like Hans Kung and Karl Rahner. His analysis was that Vatican II irrevocably asserted that the church can change.

Greeley also mentions the present pope’s involvement in Vatican II, listing alongside Kung and Rahner “a much younger Ratzinger (who now conveniently forgets his contribution to the Council)…”—and Greeley wrote this before Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, when he was the Vatican watchdog for orthodoxy as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In a 1977 book that I used years ago for my morning reflections, Zen and the Bible,  Japanese Jesuit priest J. K. Kadowaki, lauding Vatican II, also refers to that much younger Ratzinger whom he met when doing research in West Germany:

While there I was invited by the Catholic theologian, Professor J. Ratzinger (now a cardinal), to lecture on “Zen and Christianity” to a group of his doctoral students.  … Toward the end of the seminar, Professor Ratzinger said, “How interesting it would be if we could compare the ideas of Zen with those of the Bible. If that could be done, it would be a great event, not only for the dialogue between Zen and Christianity, but also in respect to the ideological exchange between East and West.”

That’s in the spirit of Pope John XXIII and of Vatican II, though Pope Benedict might prefer to forget this too.  Now that Pope John has been beatified on his way to sainthood, progressive Christians might hope that he may intercede for the whole church—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal devotions, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  Please click here to learn more about this ministry and/or make a donation!

Many thanks to Dr. David Mellott for reviewing a draft of this post and contributing his wisdom from his Roman Catholic training.

Check out Glaser’s latest article on The Huffington Post: “Flag Pins & Crosses: ‘Mine Is Bigger than Yours!’”

Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

Hobbes, Calvin, & Chris in the Nativity Scene
of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church, Atlanta.
Photo by Wade Jones.

In his autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, novelist and sociologist Andrew Greeley writes that most Roman Catholics in the U.S. are not “propositional” Catholics who assent to a number of “propositions” or doctrines. For example, a majority of American Catholics do not agree with the Vatican’s teaching on sexual ethics, dismissing its teaching on contraception altogether and questioning its positions on other reproductive choices, premarital sex, and homosexuality.

Greeley concludes from his research that they are not drawn to their church by dogma, but by the story—the biblical narrative, particularly the narrative about Jesus. I think that’s true of Protestants as well. We wonder why many Christians only come to church around this time of Advent and Christmas, but I believe it’s because we love the story of the baby Jesus born to Mary and Joseph, cradled in a manger, endangered by Herod, visited by shepherds and kings.

In the words of Kathleen Norris, “Human beings, it seems to me, require myth as one of the basic necessities of life. Once we have our air and water and a bit of food, we turn to metaphor and myth-making.” To me, myth is not a story that is untrue, but a story that carries a deeper truth that draws us in. As a 5-year-old once said, a myth is a story that is true on the inside. (Gertrud Mueller Nelson tells this in Here All Dwell Free.) Within the words is a Word.

In Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore suggests that imagination is one of the most underutilized and undervalued spiritual gifts. So I invite you to put yourself in the story of Jesus’ nativity. Jesus is not simply born to Mary. He is born to us, if only we use our imagination!

Are you King Herod, fearful of losing power or privilege as God is doing a “new thing”? Or an Eastern sage enduring academic malaise, seeking a star of inspiration? A shepherd routinely going about your business when the skies seem to open up? A prophet crying in the wilderness?

Are you a religious leader holding on to tradition at all costs? An empire’s bureaucrat missing the unfolding human drama? Or one whose life is too full to welcome a homeless, unwed mother-to-be? Joseph, serving quietly on the periphery of sacred drama? Mary, with an unsought calling to do the dirty and painful and lonely work of birthing a new movement? Or a vulnerable child born into a vicious and violent world?

Truth is, over a lifetime, we may play all of these roles in this story. Good to remember, at this time of year, that we hinder or help, blink or behold this nativity of God’s Word to us.

 



Paradise Lost and Paradise Found

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

I’ve been reading Andrew Greeley’s autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, during my morning prayers. Yesterday I read of his seminary experience at Quigley Preparatory Seminary in Chicago: “I came to Quigley with a religious faith as unexamined as it was intense. I learned during those years to examine it candidly and objectively without losing either the faith or its intensity.” He describes this as a movement between Paradise Lost and Paradise Found, referencing Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of this journey as a movement from the First Naïveté to the Second Naïveté, “from the uncritical acceptance of a religious symbol through a time of analysis and ‘unpacking’ the symbols to a critical acceptance of and commitment to the symbols.” Greeley uses the example of his own movement from the devotion to Mary as the Mother of God to understanding Mary as signifying God’s Motherhood.

When I was in college and seminary, we talked a lot about “demythologizing” scriptures and tradition, and I must confess my love of story caused me to argue for “re-mythologizing.” Today much is made of “deconstruction” of practically everything. While I believe these practices may be necessary and helpful, they remind me of the time, as a child, when I took apart all my mechanical toys to see how they worked. I couldn’t exactly put them back together again, and they never worked the same afterward.

Greeley is critical of religious leaders who remain in what I would call “deconstruction purgatory,” resisting movement to the Second Naïveté, as well as church members who resentfully reject the symbols and stories altogether, instead of engaging them further. My best friend in high school and college could represent the latter, disgusted that he was taught the biblical stories as if they were true by nuns in elementary school, only to have the priests contradict that in junior high. There are parallels among Protestants, obviously—in fact within all religions that have progressive and fundamentalist/literalist divisions.

I believe one of the reasons that the scholar Joseph Campbell was so beloved was his ability to take a myth apart for his students and listeners and put it back together again, having even greater meaning than before. Thank God for clergy and educators who can do that! The progressive Christian movement needs more Joseph Campbells in our pulpits, classrooms, and lecture halls to move us from Paradise Lost to Paradise Found, but it is incumbent on us all to find such teachers.

Chris will be speaking on “Spiritual Abuse” this Sunday, July 31, during the 11 a.m. worship of the Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church in Dahlonega, Georgia.

I Wanted to Be Famous

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

I am 60 years old, and sometimes I fear I have done my last great thing. And Oprah never called.

I confess I wanted to be famous. Household-name famous. Not for something inconsequential, but famous for writing the great American novel, an award-winning play or screenplay, or a “must-read” spiritual treatise.

Apologies for contradicting my website’s promise that my posts would not be self-centered; but perhaps it’s inevitable that genuinely spiritual writing—perhaps all writing—comes always from the perspective of one’s self. Thus academic papers that began, “I write as a white, older, American male, etc.” became fashionable.

Yet I make my confession about wanting to be famous because I believe that many share this experience of having been infected to varying degrees with a hunger for celebrity. Many of us want to stand out from the crowd, or at least, in our field.

Reading a recent article about Lady Gaga, however, I felt exhausted just learning about her busy, frenetic schedule. I act the part of the extrovert well, but afterward I am exhausted, and need some down time away from the crowd.

And I would not like to be under the scrutiny of the media, which often plays the harsh, judgmental, unforgiving, and omnipresent “god” of our time. I don’t even like to be the subject of local gossip.

In my morning prayer yesterday, I reflected on all the other things I wanted from life. I wanted to love and be loved, and that’s happened. I wanted to write, and I have. I wanted respect, and often I have had that, though sometimes I let out a Rodney Dangerfield grumble. I wanted to do ministry, and even my non-ordination made that possible. I didn’t want to struggle financially—well, that’s another post for another time!

Last week, my neighbor Jose gave me Andrew Greeley’s autobiography. Greeley has achieved fame as an author and is also a Roman Catholic priest. A New York Times writer is quoted, saying of him, “His parish is in his mailbox.” These days it’s probably in his e-mail box as well. As a writer, that’s where my parish has been, for the most part, and on the phone and Facebook.

I don’t really think a “contemplative” blog like mine can make me famous, though I’d love to be proven wrong! The reason I write this is to cheer on a “congregation” again, one that is wholly voluntary and so far, conflict-free.

Chris Glaser’s next workshop will be held at First MCC Atlanta, Saturday, June 11, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., free of charge with lunch included: “Sex Talk: The Interface of Sexuality and Spirituality.” His books will be available for purchase.