Wonder

Yesterday’s New York Times editorial about human endeavors reminded me of my post of July 12, 2017 about “Wonder.” As I work this week preparing a schedule for a virtual spiritual formation at-home retreat I thought it would give me a respite timewise and offer you a respite from our challenging political and pandemical times. Enjoy!

Others have come to the same conclusion, but in the sixty-six years that I have been given, I believe the essential ingredient of a spiritual life is wonder.

It can be found and expressed in many ways: worship, contemplation, compassion, activism, lovemaking, the beloved community, science, art, nature, and the recognition of the commonwealth of God, to name a few.

But the farther away any of these get from wonder, they can become tablets of stone, stumbling blocks, millstones round our necks, a dutiful obligation rather than a pleasurable joy.

As I write this, Luna, our neighbor’s cat, is chasing something in our back yard. I have spent happy moments watching Luna from my home office windows as she approaches our yard with wonder, leaping up the tall, central Bradford pear tree, slinking beneath our hedge of privet shrubs, luxuriating in rubbing her back on our weedy grass.

From our front porch, I’ve enjoyed watching her go on morning walks with her family (yes, really!): a dog named Lexi, children with a literary and a biblical name, Darcy and Micah, their father Chris, a New Testament professor at Mercer University, and mother Jenelle, who is the organizing pastor of the newly-forming Ormewood Church.

Luna runs ahead and lingers behind, depending on what catches her attention in the moment. She exemplifies wonder. And I realize that we human beings know only a little more than she does about the nature of things.

The morning I write this, I greeted them again from our front porch during my prayers, after reading a couple of psalms and Matthew 18, which includes Jesus’ counsel to enter the kingdom as a child, remove their stumbling blocks, find the lost sheep, confront wrongdoing in yourself and in the community, and finally, forgive from the heart, even as we have been forgiven.

In silence I contemplated the very tall and old leafy trees before me, the tiny bird chirping on the railing, the runner going by, the found stones that line our gardens, only a little distracted by the passing cars, some of which take the stop sign at the intersection as a mere “suggestion.”

The week I write this, I awoke each morning to NPR reporting on various catastrophes, a high rise fire, several bombings and mass shootings, the investigation of the administration.

Despite all that, I found myself marveling (yes, I realize how antiquated the gerund) that all I saw before me, including me, has evolved.  What impetus organizes seemingly inert matter into living things, thinking beings, and seems to call for beauty and compassion and wonder?

A couple of days ago, I read how the liver regenerates itself daily as it carries out so many mysteries that ancients thought it was the seat of the soul.  And not long ago I read how disparate parts of the brain organize the various signals from our eyes into what we “see.”

No wonder the psalmist sang this morning, “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of God’s mouth” (33:5b-6).

“Breathe on me, breath of God,” sings the old hymn.  What a sensual yet spiritual request!

“The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”  This popular quote from Irenaeus of Lyons hangs in our hallway, written by the hand of the calligrapher who once graced Mt. Calvary Retreat House in the hills above Santa Barbara before its destruction in the 2008 Montecito fire.

From dust to dust, ashes to ashes, our brief flicker in between is a cause for wonder.

For several photos of Luna, see the original post.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

What the World Needs Now Is Grace (Sweet Grace)

Wildflowers in the Swiss Alps, 1973.

Oh, isn’t that sweet? Chris is getting sentimental in his latter years, you might be thinking, out of touch with reality, pining nostalgically for an ideal world of lovingkindness. Next he’ll be composing rhymes for Hallmark cards.

But grace is countercultural, haven’t you noticed? Watch, read, listen, or click the news and you will find much that is ungracious. As a cure and balance, I’ve been paying attention to stories that don’t make it above the fold of the newspaper (for those who remember such a reference), are not “trending” or on the bestseller list:

+A doctor walking twenty blocks through rain to see her 91-year-old Filipina-American patient hours before she died, and the daughters who cared for her.

+A book about Darwin’s understanding that beauty and artful behavior, not just natural selection, influenced the shaping of species. And females had much to say in the process!

+How three friends worked together to prove that upside-down jellyfish sleep, indicating a brain is not required for slumber. (I think not having a brain would help!)

+A columnist’s pilgrimage to the Vatican and a pope who cares about refugees, immigrants, climate change, war and peace.

+Admiration for an unsung Civil Rights activist from the 50s, Rev. Joseph De Laine, involved in Brown v Board of Education.

+Understanding how feminism has positively affected the future direction of philosophy.

+Artists who make a statement with their artwork shortly before they die.

I wanted to title my first book about seeking ordination in the church as an openly gay man, A Profile in Grace. I was tentative about it, though, because it could imply that grace was something I had achieved or was gifted on my own, when my intent was that I, like everyone else, live and love and work by God’s grace. Harper & Row, its first publisher, preferred a title that suggested the story line, and my friend Scott Rogo suggested Uncommon Calling.

But God’s grace is what called me out of the closet and into that uncommon calling, a lifelong ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community, and more broadly, between sexuality and spirituality.

Grace is tough and truthful and transformative and liberating. It requires strength and honesty and change and freedom. When I have encountered or beheld or experienced or witnessed God’s grace, I have become better, happier, more helpful, and more gracious. Grace begets grace.

We may all be profiles in grace. It is in the glory of God’s grace that each of us discovers who we are created and called to be.

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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!

Photo and words Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Art Mystic

A couple of weeks ago I read about an artist whose work, in my view, parallels the mystical experience. Wil S. Hylton writes of one of James Turrell’s creations at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 

The room was devoid of boundaries, just an eternity of inky blackness, with the outline of a huge lavender rectangle floating in the distance, and beyond it, the tall plane of green light stretching toward an invisible horizon, where it dissolved into a crimson stripe. … The shapes and contours I saw were made entirely of light. 

It reminded me of the first laser light program I saw in the days before laser light shows became commercial and often tacky. It was truly a work of art on the interior “canvas” of the Los Angeles Planetarium dome, accompanied by music, ranging from classical to jazz. The colors were so intense, I cried.

The only other time I remember crying at the intensity of colors was on a visit to Petra, an ancient and abandoned city in Jordan carved in stone whose mineral composition reveals intense striations of colors. (You will remember its stone temple from the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.) I felt so sorry for one of my trip mates who was too sick to leave the bus, unable to join us being led on donkeys through a very long and winding few-feet-wide passageway between sheer stone cliffs to Petra.

Having that experience, I could understand why Zorba would wire the narrator of Zorba the Greek to come see a beautiful green stone he had discovered. Zorba, based on an actual acquaintance of the author, Nikos Kazantzakis, angers the narrator by his seeming obliviousness to the great famine he and his world are enduring on the eve of even greater disasters to come.

“To hell with beauty!” he writes, “She has no heart and does not care a jot for human suffering.” But then his anger dissipated, and he felt drawn to Zorba’s request: “Some wild bird in me was beating its wings and asking me to go. Yet I did not go. … I listened to the moderating, cold, human voice of logic.” In response, Zorba wrote, “You too could have seen a beautiful green stone at least once in your life, you poor soul, and you didn’t see it,” and the bad choice convinces Zorba there is a hell.

Hylton writes: 

The joke among Turrell’s friends is that, to see his work, you must first become hopelessly lost. … Not everyone enjoys the Turrell experience. It requires a degree of surrender. There is a certain comfort in knowing what is real and where things are; to have that comfort stripped away can be rapturous, or distressing. It can even be dangerous. 

Notably, his work is yet wheelchair accessible.

This could describe a mystical experience—becoming hopelessly lost, surrendering, having comfort and certainty stripped away, rapturous, distressing, dangerous. And yet “wheelchair accessible,” which I suggest as a metaphor for available to all.

As with the mystical experience, “a dense and impenetrable vocabulary to describe his work” is needed, like “thingness of light” and “alpha state of mind.” “Without these terms it would be nearly impossible to discuss his work,” Hylton observes.  So too with mystical experiences, for example: “thin places,” “dark night of the soul,” “interior castle,” “showings,” “mindfulness,” “oneness,” “nirvana,” “kingdom of God,”  “in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all.”

Related posts:

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

In the Company of Birds

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 blog. Consider using a post or quotes for your congregation's or group's newsletter, including the blog's address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.    

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