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! 

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

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The Body of Christ

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

One of my favorite images in the Bible is that of our spiritual community, the church, as the Body of Christ. And this past weekend the Metropolitan Community Church of the Blue Ridge in Roanoke, Virginia, gave me an opportunity to reflect on this image with its members and friends.

Generally I do not move in academic circles, so I’m not sure if it’s still the fashion to identify one’s “social location” at the beginning of a presentation or paper as it was a few years ago. It humbles anyone who might claim to write or speak for one and all, because everyone’s perspective may be limited by their social location. (I must admit to faith in the discernment powers of readers and listeners to decide what speaks to them and what doesn’t without such disclaimers!)

I mention this because I believe one of the consequences of the metaphor of the church as the Body of Christ is that it has helped Jesus transcend his particularity, his social location as a first century Palestinian Jewish male living under Roman occupation. In the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians, the Body of Christ is Jew and Greek, slave and free. In our own words we could say that the Body of Christ is now of every race and place, of every age and culture, of every condition and class, gender and sexuality, of every vocation, education, experience, and skill set.

Jesus transcended his particularity, his social location, by leading and loving us into this community. And we transcend our particularity, our social location, by living and loving in this community. The Body of Christ stretches around the globe and reaches backward and forward in time. Now I think that’s cool!

The problem is, others don’t. They want to silence or censure or shutout those with different perspectives. The classic definition of “liberal” suggests a willingness to consider all views. Church historian Martin Marty has pointed out the liability of being liberal: when liberals rise to places of influence in denominations, they leave conservatives in place. But when conservatives do the same, they ax the liberals! Thus, over time, mainline denominations are being skewed to the right.

One of the points I made in my presentation on progressive Christianity this weekend is that Christian fundamentalists and biblical literalists claim they are the “traditional” Christians, when in truth, they are relative newcomers to the tradition. I believe that much of what today is called “progressive” Christianity is really good old mainstream liberal Christianity.

I have been re-reading Kenneth Leech’s Soul Friend, and in his chapter, “Prayer and the Christian Spiritual Tradition,” he writes:

Frequently…expressions such as “traditional theology” and “traditional spirituality” are used in ways which indicate ignorance of the tradition in its diversity. We are in a situation of breakdown so that what often passes for orthodoxy is simply a current convention, and the most deeply rooted orthodox teachings are seen as some novel theory.

So, while listening to the conservative members of the Body of Christ, progressive Christians must never believe that our positions don’t have multiple roots in Christian tradition!

And when conservative members of the Body of Christ question whether we are members of that body and resist listening to us, we must remind them of Paul’s words to the Corinthians about failing to recognize the Body of Christ:

Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will be answerable… For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.

In context, Paul is talking about discerning the Body of Christ in each other, not in the bread and the cup. When we fail to see the Body of Christ in one another—and I would add, in the stranger as well—we are held accountable.

I delight in the concept of our spiritual community as the Body of Christ because it celebrates diversity while resisting divisiveness.

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