Why Progressive Christians Need Contemplation

Wade took this photo of me resting

on one of our bike rides.

Jesus told his disciples “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart,” and, in his earliest known correspondence, the apostle Paul advised the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing.”

The first Christian contemplatives took the notion of “praying always” to heart, and went out into the desert to pray, to preserve the “edge” of Christian faith even as church and state colluded in the fourth century. As Thomas Merton explained in The Wisdom of the Desert, 

The Coptic hermits who left the world as though escaping from a [ship]wreck did not merely intend to save themselves. They knew that they were helpless to do any good for others as long as they floundered about in the wreckage. But once they got a foothold on solid ground, things were different. Then they had not only the power but even the obligation to pull the whole world to safety after them.

The Desert Fathers and Mothers believed prayer was not about changing God’s mind or heart, but about their own transformation. God brings justice and mercy into the world one person at a time. Thus prayer and contemplation serve as grounding for those of us who seek the transformation of the world. This passion for transformation is one dimension of progressive Christianity. 

A second dimension is that we use our minds, our critical faculties, to approach our faith—texts, tradition, history, present, and future. But in the use of our minds we must not lose heart. We are not spiteful children who run around proclaiming “There is no Santa Claus!” to innocents. We are faithful people who affirm spiritual truths without literalist trappings. It is true that much progressive Christianity is about demythologizing and deconstruction. But in so doing, our hope is to recover the ancient meanings of the stories of our faith tradition, as well as their meaning for today. 

One way of recovering the ancient meanings of our faith tradition is through prayer and reflection. To participate in the biblical dialogue about God, meaning, virtue, and so on with our hearts as well as our minds is to be an authentic and integral part of an ancient tradition that was diverse in its viewpoints, heterodox in its theologies, and multiple in its expressions. 

A third dimension of progressive Christianity is that we plumb the depths of our faith even as we value other faiths, including agnosticism and atheism. Our multicultural world—not as different from the ancient world in its diversity as is often thought—offers opportunities for dialogue, not only across religious and cultural boundaries, but across disciplinary boundaries as well, as I recently wrote on this blog. Science, for example, is not an adversary, but an aid in understanding the world, religion, and spirituality itself.  The way of art and literature is another.           

Just as some Christians seem to have lost their minds, progressive Christians cannot lose our hearts. As Jesus said, “What benefit is there if, in gaining the whole world, we lose our soul?” We are not modern-day Gnostics who believe our “secret wisdom” will save us. Rather, we believe that knowledge frees us from superstition, sentimentality, and the “elemental spirits” that the apostle Paul confronted in Galatians. Our faith is not stupid, nor is it heartless. Prayer and meditation afford us the opportunity, as the Desert Mothers and Fathers taught, for words to descend from our minds to our hearts. Thus prayer and contemplation must become a fourth dimension of progressive Christianity. 

We may feel overwhelmed by the diversity of texts and traditions about Jesus, about God. Biblical scholars discuss the authenticity and accuracy of these accounts. Theologians debate their authority and application. Contemplatives reflect on their inspiration for the present. 

These thoughts have been further clarified from my post on the blog of Episcopal Divinity School around the time I began my own. 

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

This post appeared August 17, 2011. I considered retiring from my blog on its tenth anniversary in February of this year but didn’t want to “abandon” readers during the pandemic! My brother suggested I run “the best of” my posts. This will give me the opportunity to write a new post occasionally. Thanks for your continued interest! 

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Banning Goldfish Bowls

Not long ago the city of Monza, Italy, banned the use of traditional goldfish bowls because their curved sides obscured a fish’s take on reality.

Makes me wonder, what next? Churches, with their stained glass windows? Theaters, with their only “window” being a stage? Possibly observatories and laboratories, with their high-powered lenses? All of these could be said to offer a distorted view of reality!

In their recent book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow use this curious anecdote as a beginning point to contemplate whether any of us have an accurate view of reality. We all may be looking through a curved lens, so to speak.

But, they add, a goldfish could still accurately predict movements outside their sphere, and that’s part of the scientific quest. They later explain that our brains are continually modeling the outside world, despite a hole (and therefore blind spot) where the optic nerve is attached in the middle of each retina, which emit pixelated messages that our brain constructs into a three-dimensional whole.

The field of vision is one place where the academic quest of deconstruction would not be helpful to understand the whole! Notice the breadth of possibility in this metaphor.

Last night I watched again The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand’s novel. My interest in its philosophical take on the world has been piqued by American legislators and business leaders who share Ayn Rand’s views on the individual, the absurdity of self-sacrifice, the absoluteness of the self.

I “get” the need to do one’s work, no matter the consequences. I’ve tried to do that my whole life. That’s what keeps me focused on my writing. But I extend that first sentence by adding, “no matter the consequences to me.” I am constantly aware of the consequences for others, because a writer usually has readers in mind.  I care about readers, what words may inspire, challenge, and provoke. And, as a minister, I am keen on helping rather than hindering others on their spiritual paths, trying to discern what’s true, good, and beautiful. I’ve been blessed by readers, editors, copyeditors, and publishers who help me in that process.

The Fountainhead depicts an architect who does not want his work compromised. Admirable, in a way. But then, who is he building for? Will his structure take into account the humans who will inhabit it? And how does he know that without consultation, both with them and with other architects? Collaboration is key.

But then, that’s the “collectivism” the character deplores.

Last night I also watched the final episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s accomplished depiction of cable news. In this last season, the news network has been acquired by a young high tech mogul intent on increasing its revenue, viewership, and appeal to younger viewers. He does so by making every viewer a contributing “journalist” regardless of qualifications and without checks and balances for truth, privacy, and sensationalism, wreaking havoc.

This is the kind of collectivism I deplore.

During a “Big Chill” kind of weekend with former classmates, I learned that several were surprised I didn’t go into filmmaking. We had grown up together in L.A.; they knew I liked to take photos, make movies, and write. One told me he even watched movie credits looking for my name. I explained that, had my calling not been elsewhere, I would not have liked writing for Hollywood because everyone “in the industry” thinks they’re writers, and what’s on screen often bears little resemblance to the original.

As I reflect on my education, I wish I had been given more experience working in teams. What has helped make up that deficit is my vocation in the church and more broadly, the spiritual community. Spirituality is inherently collective, even for spiritual hermits, for all of us pray and write and care as one.  And we have the spiritual resources over the ages of the many who have gone before us.  That’s a core truth of spirituality: we are not alone, we are bound to one another. The apostle Paul thus depicted the Christian spiritual community as the Body of Christ.

That’s why I’m puzzled that some current aficionados of Ayn Rand claim a Christian identity. Rand was consistent in her individualism: being an atheist, she was not bound to a concept of spiritual relationship or community.

The more I read and the more I watch documentaries on the scientific quest, it’s clear we’ve gotten where we are because of collectivism in science as well. The recent PBS/BBC series, How We Got to Now, demonstrates this well.

To paraphrase Saint Paul, “For now we see through a goldfish bowl dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now we know only in part; then we will know fully, even as we have been fully known.”

Related Post:

Ayn Rand Was Consistent

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

God Is Bigger than Yours (and Mine)

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

Reading “The Archaeology of the Stars” about Population I, II, and III stars in the Science Times of the February 11, 2014 edition of The New York Times, I realized again how tiny are our imaginations when it comes to God.

The tribal*, nationalist, and creationist gods are the tiniest of all. To think of God favoring a tribe or a nation, or to insist that earth is a mere 6000 years old, is a sign of hubris and ignorance that actually “disses” God—in Anglo terms, disrespects and dismisses God.

The movement gods are closer to recognizing the reality, I believe, whether that of the Jesus movement, for instance, or the gods of the ecumenical, interfaith, progressive, New Thought or New Age movements, to name a few examples. But these gods too can be trapped when enshrined in inflexible doctrines and institutions, domesticated like a pet to respond to our expectations.

The god of nature, of the environment, of the cosmos at least de-centers our anthropomorphic way of limiting God. The agnostic god recognizes our inability to imagine God adequately, while the god of atheism too often is a mirror reflection of a god rightly resisted. These three options, despite their alleged disbelief, seem preferable to a god that is nothing more than a tribal, national, fundamentalist, or movement pet.

As a participant in the Jesus movement, as much as I love Jesus—what he taught and how he lived and the life he still gives me—I have needed to move beyond the claim that he is the only child of God.

Rather, I have come to believe that he and many who followed him remind us that ALL are children of God, including the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and that we are each to have, in author Karen Blixen’s words, “faith in the idea that God had when God made us.” To paraphrase the sage Rabbi Zusya** in my own faith context: in the life to come, they will not ask me why I was not Christ, but, “Why was I not Chris?”

And further, why didn’t I recognize that my god is not God? 

*I intend that “tribal” includes any group that thinks only their group knows God.

**Rabbi Zusya famously said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ but ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

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Related post:

Knowing Your Place

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