Let's Give Up Despair for Lent!

Cross at a construction site in our neighborhood today.

My imperative title is not intended to apply to those enduring clinical despair or depression that require professional help and/or medication. I’m thinking of those of us suffering “ordinary” despair from the political situations in which we find ourselves: demagoguery, racism, nativism, extreme partisanship, polarization, disinformation, manipulation, corruption, and so on.

Rarely do I write a post the day before I put it on my blog, but here I am, doing just that. If you only read the title you know what I’ve been thinking about for weeks as we begin this holy season of Lent today, Ash Wednesday. Lent reminds us of the interval of our lifetimes from cosmic dust to dust, our own “brief but spectacular” moments to shine in this universe. (Thanks to PBS for that phrase.)

Context is important. I’ve been watching a series on Netflix called The Universe that reminds me how fabulous and fantastic, fearful and far-flung the universe is as well as how opportune it is for these short-lived bits of human flesh (me and you) to wonder in amazement and awe and gratitude to even be a tiny part of it!

In preparation for a contemplative retreat I’ll be co-leading (to which you are welcome) I’ve been rereading Kathleen Norris’s book The Cloister Walk, looking forward to conversations about its many spiritual subjects. Synchronicity would have it that today she writes about despair, though in a different way than I expected.

Norris quotes early Christian spirituality historian Benedicta Ward, “For all sins, there is forgiveness. What really lies outside the ascetic life is despair, the proud attitude which denies the possibility of forgiveness.” Norris elucidates:

As for designating despair as an aspect of the sin or “bad thought” of pride, I find it enormously helpful. Among other things, it defeats my perfectionism, my tendency to give up when I can’t do things “just right.” But if I accept the burden of my despair, in the monastic sense, then I also receive the tools to defeat it. I have a hope that no modern therapeutic approach can give me (p 129).

Quoting another scholar, Douglas Burton-Christie, Norris explains that the first Christian monks believed scripture “possessed the power to deliver them from evil. They believed that the Word of God has the power to effect what it says.”

So, in our political morass, we are not defenseless. But we do need to consider and confront our all-or-nothing perfectionism which we apply not only to ourselves, but to our political candidates and parties. I was astounded to learn recently that in the last U.S. presidential election, tens of thousands of Bernie Sanders’ supporters voted for Donald Trump when the Democratic party chose another nominee. (See New York Times columnist David Brooks’ February 6, 2020 column, “How Trump Wins Again.”)

Whomever you support, don’t despair! Please volunteer and/or donate to campaigns you believe in, not forgetting that “down ballot” choices are also vital. Or, if politics is not your thing, please volunteer and/or donate to programs, centers, and causes near and dear to your heart.

Despair is a luxury we cannot afford in these troubled times!

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. 

I will again 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's the link: 

https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd

Ash Wednesday

“Rend your hearts and not your garments.” Joel 2:13

“We are so damn proud of our humility!” The mother of my childhood best friend said this, though not to me. She had muttered it under her breath at church one Sunday in my mother’s presence, and my mother mentioned it approvingly in a family conversation. I’ve forgotten the context, but there are so many churchly occasions for which it would be appropriate that it doesn’t really matter.

Today many of us will attend, even lead, Ash Wednesday services. Pious sentiment will be running high, a flash flood in the spiritual desert. It will make us feel good to feel so humble. Some of us will have the opportunity to proudly display ashes on our foreheads. People will speak in hushed, gloomy, somber tones as clear evidence of their reverence. Oh, how godly we will be!

I wonder if a more godly sign of penitence for Christians might be to rip up and burn our books of church polity. It could be a way of saying that, as useful an instrument as each may be, they are merely a human attempt to order God’s grace, which spills all over the place like rain and sunlight on the just and the unjust.

Some of us will respond that church rules and laws are good things, they just need reforming. I would think the prophet Joel considered the heart a good thing, too, but he heard God calling us to rend it, to tear it asunder, to demonstrate our repentance. Rending church polities might remind us that we need to repent of our order that has denied the supposed disorderly access to Jesus. Jesus didn’t get along too well with the religious lawyers of his day, who brokered the grace of God according to their own polity, the Law of Moses.

May your grace surprise us with its resistance to pride and prejudice.

I had planned to offer this today long before last week’s debacle of the United Methodist Church continuing its anti-gay policies in its own church polity. I have been grateful to work alongside so many United Methodists on progressive issues, from demonstrating at the Nevada nuclear test site and travelling to Central America in witness of justice and peace to editing Open Hands, a magazine for congregations welcoming of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, founded by the Methodist Reconciling Congregation program. I grieve with them today and all LGBT-positive people in every religious tradition and denomination whose polities attempt to refuse the grace of God to LGBT people.

This meditation is found on pages 222-223 of my 2001 book, Reformation of the Heart, daily meditations for Advent, Epiphany, Lent and Holy Week. Please use today’s post as you wish, as is advised of every post on this blog. Ash Wednesday begins the season of Lent, which remembers Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness after his baptism, undergoing temptations. For a creative variation of this biblical story, see last week’s post.

P.S. My friend Chris Iosso was inspired by this post to write one of his own that “connects the dots” of so many issues plaguing our world: http://justiceunbound.org/carousel/lent-and-unrelenting-brutality/

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2001 and 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Beside Still Waters

This week marks the seventh anniversary of beginning this weekly blog!

 “Be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred.”

Try this on for Lent, the forty day period leading to Holy Week, which begins today, Ash Wednesday:

“Be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred.”

How long has it been since you allowed your Good Shepherd to give you rest in green pastures beside still waters, restoring your soul? The “still waters” of the 23^rd Psalm are waters gentle enough to drink from to safely quench our thirst; the Hebrew means “waters of rest.”

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

O my God, in you I trust.

Nothing compares to a contemplative retreat in a monastic setting, surrounded by fellow pilgrims and an authentic monastic community. Trying to capture that ethos once more, I read again the reflections I wrote after a men’s contemplative retreat at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama, and a Hildegard of Bingen retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery, also in Cullman.

The respective experiences elevated not only my spirit but my prose, and I’m certain this post will pale in comparison—both to the experience and to the poetry required to capture the rhythms of words, songs, and silence of a monastic community.

O Lord, open thou my lips.

And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

Especially welcomed to join the sisters in the chancel area of the church at Sacred Heart, and given their gentle guidance in saying the offices that punctuate their day, helped us taste the pleasure and the power of reciting psalms and prayers together. We thus stepped carefully into a stream of a centuries-old tradition.

As I wrote in one of my papers, the contemplative retreat unveiled again for me how the multitude feeds the boy with the modest lunch, the reverse of the boy whose peasant’s lunch fed the multitude through the blessing of Jesus. I felt surrounded and nourished by “so great a cloud of witnesses.”

When we are listening, God speaks to us in a myriad of ways, and God was echoing all over the place at both monasteries and their grounds. Silence, scripture, songs, lectio divina, the Daily Office, readings, prayers, homilies, teachings, and conversations offered me voices from the past (memories, tradition, spiritual guides) as well as from the present (fellow pilgrims, colleagues, fellowship). Even the silence was deafening. And outside, the sounds, smells, sights, breezes, warmth of day, coolness of evening of the natural setting completed the feel of God’s embrace.

The afternoon that began our 24 hours of silence midway through the contemplative retreat, I spent much longer in the sanctuary of the church than I imagined I would. I pleasured in the profound silence. I started constructing my final paper in my mind, but then reminded myself that this was not what the silence was for.

The silence was simply to be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred. To be “useless.” To welcome the “schola” (“free time”) of “scholar.”

That silence unveiled a second kind of silence for me, the need for Sabbath, a time of no work, no activity, no planning, only recreating, allowing myself to be re-created and refreshed and renewed, hopefully in God’s presence. Since that experience, I’ve given myself some slack in my ever-present need for accomplishment, turning off my laptop to avoid work and the internet from time to time, relaxing my workouts and runs, reading more for fun than I’ve done in the past.

Peace! Be still!

Be still and know that I am God.

Come, join us beside the still waters of the Sacred Heart Monastery April 30-May 4, 2018. I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat with Debra Weir, Beside Still Waters, to which you are welcome. For more information, click on the title or copy and paste into your browser: 
https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x2611000212a

For previous posts to read for Lent, click on or copy into your browser:
https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com/search?q=lent  (Scroll down for multiple posts. At the end of the collection you will find a couple of posts included simply because they used the word "lent"!)

Thank you for your financial support of this blog ministry: 

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description.

Or mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

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

Spiritual Baggage

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, the last entry of January and every Wednesday of February I’m providing a link to the most visited post of each year. For 2013, that would be Jesus: Introvert or Extrovert? with a close second, What I Don’t Believe, What I Do Believe.

Please imagine you see before you my roller travel bag…

What you see is the baggage I usually carry with me on a speaking trip—at least, the visible baggage. As you can see, this is a piece of carry-on luggage, which is the sure sign of a frequent flier! I happen to agree that there are two kinds of luggage, carry-on luggage and lost luggage.

Now I didn’t pack this for a trip, but rather, to make some points about spiritual baggage. So let’s see what’s inside, quite literally unpacking our metaphor.

First we find another bag hidden inside. This represents hidden spiritual baggage we carry with us even when we claim to be traveling light as progressive Christians. We may discover hidden dogma: hidden expectations, latent prejudices, unintended biases, beliefs that don’t play well with others.

This may not be from any malevolent intent. The hidden baggage may just be part of our mystery as complex individuals. We stumble when we fail to acknowledge the mystery—that there are things about ourselves or our belief systems and our spiritual communities that are still being unveiled.

What have we here? My mother’s purse! We have unexpected spiritual baggage. How many of us have said we were not going to be like our mothers or our fathers only to recognize a bit of their behaviors or their attitudes in ours? This is true spiritually as well. Unconsciously we incorporate in our souls a bit of the souls of those who shaped us, our spiritual ancestry.

And if we have suffered spiritual abuse, we may spiritually abuse others—that is, force our spiritual views on others. This can be a problem whether we are spiritually traditional or progressive.

If we have been encouraged to think independently about our faith, we are more likely to encourage others in their declarations of spiritual independence. Providentially for me, my mother’s purse represents a woman who read widely, regardless of religious viewpoint, while affirming her own faith.

Look here! A pair of jeans, 31-inch waist. Now, how can I say this in a way that’s nice to myself. I am too full to fit into this pair of jeans! Sometimes in our spiritual baggage we find things that don’t fit us anymore: we’ve become too full, too open to fit into such narrow spiritual clothing. Perhaps we’ve simply outgrown it. Now that doesn’t mean we are superior to someone who would fit this pair of jeans. It just means we’re in a different place.

And what’s this? An extra-large t-shirt! Now this is just the opposite. I’d get lost in this. My spirituality may be a little more compact than it used to be. Maybe I’ve been losing some spiritual weight that held me down, or exercising my spiritual muscles so my soul is leaner and stronger. So I don’t need quite so much room or space or dogma anymore.

And here’s a makeup kit! Oh yes, what we might use to paint a smile on our faces even when we felt down, or put drops in our eyes to give us that misty-eyed expression when we wanted to look devotional or penitential or serious. As we learn more and more that the spiritual life is not about artificial highs or lows, we can leave this item behind.

Here’s something that’s harder to give up: a sorcerer’s hat! This is the hat Mickey Mouse wore in the animated film Fantasia as the sorcerer’s apprentice. It represents magical thinking.

  

Many of us have associated magic and superstition for so long with spirituality, that this is very difficult to let go of. Even today, if my car doesn’t start, I may offer a little incantation to God to make it go. But I no longer believe that’s how God works in the world. It’s up to me to have the car serviced, or fix the car myself (fat chance!), to take care of the car so that it will work when I need it.

So it is with the spiritual life. Though there are moments of grace that almost feel like magic, the spiritual life requires prayerful maintenance. We need spiritual mechanics (spiritual guides) and soul manuals (sacred texts and inspirational books). And we need spiritual communities to support us in our soul repair and development and customizing.

What you will not find in my bag is the “sword of truth” or the “armor of God.” I discovered long ago that God has no interest in bloody crusades, burning inquisitions, or violent jihads. To me, God is not manifest in violence but in vulnerability, not so much evident in victory as in compassion.

But look here! Now I have more room for clothes that fit, sacred texts and books that guide, and room for gifts for others. Because when we talk about spiritual baggage, what we really mean is excess baggage, baggage that doesn’t work for us any more, that burdens us, leaving little or no room for new spiritual habits or insights.

The less we carry, the farther we can go. In the spiritual life, there are two kinds of baggage: carry-on and lost. Less is often more in the spiritual life.

Jesus advised, “It is more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” To soften the meaning of his “hard saying” about the rich, it has been explained that the “eye of a needle” referred to a particular gate through the city walls of Jerusalem which was so low and narrow, camels had to be relieved of their baggage to enter. Though this interpretation is not considered valid by biblical scholars, the metaphor works for the purpose of this post.

We still need carry-on spiritual luggage: those insights that have helped us along the way, the vision that helps us put the puzzling jigsaw pieces of our lives together in a framework of meaning. Admittedly, some of the pieces don’t quite fit together. They overlap or fit awkwardly. But we’ve done our personal best. And we have a spiritual community to help.

Many readers of this blog observe Lent, a period of fasting, or letting go of something. This Christian season, which begins today, may be an opportunity to consider the spiritual baggage we need to lose as well as that which we need to “carry-on.”

Related posts:

Shoveling Manure

“Bad Theology”

Readings for Ash Wednesday (today):

The Soul Feels Its Worth

Cosmic Dust

A reading for this first week of Lent:

“Forgive Them for They Know Not What They Do”

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2005 and 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Cosmic Dust

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

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

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

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

What if we think of the ashes as cosmic dust?

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

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

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

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

For we, too, are cosmic dust.

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

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

Thursday:      The Right Word

Friday:            Acts of God and Acts of War

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

Sunday:          Shoveling Manure

Monday:         Spiritual Freedom

Tuesday:        Redeemed from the Pit

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

Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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

"A Trust beyond Betrayal"

Readers, happy second anniversary! This weekly blog began on February 16, 2011. Below today’s post I’ve listed the “top ten” posts, those most visited since “Progressive Christian Reflections” began. Contributions to this ministry are welcome. Thank you!

The presentation I refer to in this post is now available on YouTube (18 minutes).

A campus is often a fearful place to speak. I am more likely to be challenged for my religious views than for my sexual orientation. But early in the 20^th century, Martha Berry founded a Christian school for enterprising rural boys in northwest Georgia that has blossomed into a co-ed college that welcomes religious values. Invited to speak by Berry College as a gay Christian to (as it turned out) 160 students and members of the faculty and administration, I feared that conservative and fundamentalist students might play “gotcha” with scripture or outright condemn me.

Instead, I was asked questions by those truly seeking answers, those who actually listened and tried to understand my point of view, even when they disagreed. During the reception that followed, the conversation continued, and one young man asked me to elaborate on something I had said toward the end of my presentation: “As is often true in the spiritual life, along the way I have let go of things and beliefs and practices I no longer need to have faith in God, that can even get in the way of complete trust in God.” And I explained that’s why I embrace progressive Christianity, letting go of incomplete and confining images of God—why the second of the Ten Commandments forbids such images. I concluded, “I like to say that the less one believes, the more faith is required.”

This last sentence had puzzled the student, and I tried to explain this phenomenon further, but unsatisfactorily, in my own judgment.

In preparation for teaching a weekend Spiritual Formation course on the Christian writer Henri Nouwen at Columbia Theological Seminary, I am re-reading the three books I’ve assigned to the class. One is Can You Drink the Cup?, a distillation of the spiritual life written in Henri’s final year of life. Reflecting on the crucifixion, when Jesus felt most abandoned, Henri writes, “Jesus still had a spiritual bond with the one he called Abba. He possessed a trust beyond betrayal, a surrender beyond despair, a love beyond all fears.”

This would have been a fine example to illustrate my point “that the less one believes, the more faith is required.” Stripped of his believing disciples and adoring multitudes and even religious certainty, betrayed and denied and offered up to death by his own, tried and judged and tortured by the religious and political establishment, accused of blasphemy and treason and arrogance, and finally lifted up on a cross of shame, suffering, and death, Jesus “possessed a trust beyond betrayal” in his spiritual intimacy with God.

Progressive Christians have voluntarily followed Jesus’ sacrificial model, letting go of the trappings of religious certainty—the so-called “fundamentals,” including biblical inerrancy, as well as restrictive orthodoxy and religious exceptionalism—to nakedly trust in God as our spiritual hope and in Jesus as our spiritual guide as we quest for truth and justice, kindness and inclusiveness.

Lent, which begins today, Ash Wednesday, is a good time to let go of all hindrances to “a trust beyond betrayal,” whether doubts or sins or untenable beliefs.

May I suggest reading posts from this blog (using the archive in the right rail of the blog site) as a possible daily exercise for this season of preparation for Holy Week?

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.

Posts seen by between 600-700 visitors and subscribers (click on titles to read):

Faggot Jesus

The Body of Christ

Spiritual Care for the Liberated

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

“Bad Theology”

Is Marriage Sacred?

Blessed Are the Job Creators

Wise as Serpents

The God Who Removes Obstacles

Jesus as Sexual Actor