Wounding God

The Asian-Americans who have endured hate crimes during our current pandemic brought me back to this post from the week following Holy Week of 2016, March 30, 2016. This year, 2021, I read The Temple of God’s Wounds earlier in Lent, so in need was I of its spiritual insights and spiritual sanctuary. The friend in recovery mentioned in this post still struggles, and we alongside him, after multiple programs before and after a year incarcerated. 

Something burning in my heart is demanding the oxygen of expression. 

Regular readers of this blog know I am not persuaded by one line of thinking about the crucifixion: I don’t believe God demanded the death of Jesus to forgive our sins. Of the Passion narrative, I’ve written that the crucifixion was our idea, while the resurrection was God’s idea, however we understand resurrection. 

Yet I do believe the story of the crucifixion reminds us that we wound God. 

I know that’s not an original thought—many theologians, contemplatives, writers, and preachers have written about this. But it’s being brought home to me in several ways that culminated this past Holy Week as I read again The Temple of God’s Wounds. 

Monday night of that week I attended the fourth and final class on the themes of the Confession of Belhar, which the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. is in the process of welcoming into its Book of Confessions. It was adopted during the days of apartheid in South Africa by the Dutch Reformed Mission Church resisting the government’s separation of the races. 

Johnson C. Smith Theological Seminary offered it online, but I attended its meetings in person at the Martin Luther King Center near our home in Atlanta because I wanted to engage in the conversation directly. I thought this would be a way to hear concerns that current movements such as Black Lives Matter raise, but in a context of shared faith. As an aside, I felt very welcomed as a gay man. 

The class was small, about 70% African American and 30% Anglo-European, though the final Monday I was the only white person attending. 

Long before the course I had concluded that there is no way white people will ever understand the experience of black people in American society. The brutalization of slavery and the degradation of racism and segregation that followed (and still follows) cannot be erased, no matter how forgiving African Americans may be and no matter how transformed Anglo-European Americans may become. 

During one class session, we listened to the tape of the families of those murdered in the Charleston church offering forgiveness to their vicious and racist assailant, and I noticed that alongside “I forgive you” were cries of pain and anguish and grief at their loss, calls for repentance of the perpetrator and an expectation of justice for the victims so that “hate doesn’t win,” something the media largely left out in its eagerness to report their forgiveness. 

Their mercy was transforming for South Carolina, bringing down the confederate flag, while affecting broader American sensibilities as well. 

But, as one woman pointed out to me after class, “There was a lot of anger in black communities for how easily they forgave” that young man. Yet hearing their forgiveness while holding him accountable suggested they were not offering cheap grace. 

In class I told the story of participating in a “dog and pony” show at four venues around the state of Iowa for UCC pastors as their denomination was changing its positions on LGBT issues some years ago. One pastor had asked, “Where’s the repentance?” At first we thought he was expecting repentance from LGBT folk, but what he meant was, where was the church’s repentance for its mistreatment of LGBT people? 

I suggested to the class that maybe the church needed something like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission where wrongs could be named—the wounding of all kinds of folk because of race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. Ultimately this is how we wound God. 

By the next session of the course I had learned that several presbyteries have passed “A Healing Overture for the Admission of, and Apology for Harms Done to the LGBTQ/Q Members of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Family and Friends.” Hallelujah! 

When I’ve written on this blog about the need of being forgiving in the spiritual life, I’ve sometimes received friendly pushback from those who have been abused or work with the abused. It’s been pointed out to me that forgiveness in certain circumstances may not always be possible, even may not be a healthy choice.  

In “Forgiveness: The Last Step,” Marie Fortune writes in the context of family violence, “Once justice has been accomplished, even in a limited way, forgiveness becomes a viable opportunity. Prior to justice, forgiveness is an empty exercise.” She points out that Jesus said, “If another sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive.” [See Luke 17:3-4 NRSV.] 

That suggests at least four steps toward reconciliation: confrontation, confession, repentance (as in metanoia, an “about face”), followed by forgiveness. Only when justice is served, she writes, is “a victim of violence and abuse…freed to forgive.” 

On Maundy Thursday last week, Wade and I were part of a support community for a friend in a recovery program. After an afternoon meeting with our friend, a counselor, and a dinner out, that evening we attended what was essentially an Al-Anon meeting for support communities of others in recovery. Emotions ran high, as they must have when Jesus shared his last meal with his disciples: communion and hope, but also shared grief and feelings of betrayal, denial, abandonment. 

Some could tell stories in which the recoveries of their loved one held; others told stories of multiple heartbreaking attempts; many acknowledged that they too were powerless over what addictions were doing to their loved ones. I was deeply moved by the love and commitment in that room. I awoke Good Friday morning with involuntary tears streaming from my eyes thinking of them. 

The Twelve Steps are all about truth-telling, another requirement of justice. And the eighth and ninth steps are about making “a list of all persons we had harmed” and making “amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.” 

I had thought that I should find some service to attend the evening of Good Friday, when a close friend told us that the day was the 20^th anniversary of the death of his beloved partner to AIDS. So he came over and we ordered Chinese take-out. I couldn’t think of a better way to spend Good Friday. And I better understood his flash of anger about the Reagans when Hillary Clinton misstated after Nancy’s funeral that they had been instrumental in the “national conversation” about AIDS. 

A blog reader once pointed out to me that Jesus did not forgive those who betrayed, denied, abandoned, tortured, and crucified him, but rather, asked God to forgive them. That makes sense, for only God could administer the justice required for mercy. Could that be how Jesus’ sacrifice came to be understood as expiation for our sins? 

It is a sacred challenge to administer justice without vengeance. Jesus calls us to go the extra mile beyond retribution (“an eye for an eye”) and love our enemies. But real love holds the beloved accountable. 

The biblical witness is of a God of justice and mercy. Both are required for transformation. But scapegoating is never just, even if it is Jesus as the sacrificial lamb. Justice requires truth-telling, changing our ways, and making amends (penance).  Only then, to paraphrase Psalm 23, can “mercy and justice follow us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” 

 

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

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Compassion and Community

I took this photo of an 80-year-old Nicaraguan who had just voted in her first free and fair election. She is holding up her thumb that had been dipped in red ink to prevent voting more than once.

On our morning walks in the neighborhood before COVID-19, Wade and I would greet and be greeted by neighbors along our various routes (different for each day). But now that more people are out and about, walking, the new walkers seem less likely to look up from their cellphones or hear our greetings under their earbuds, though the runners still do, I guess because they have seen me run in the neighborhood and we have that connection.

I have supposed we have not yet formed with the new walkers the community needed to be acknowledged.

Last week’s post, “Recovering Compassion,” grew out of my current reading of a 1982 book by Henri Nouwen, Douglas Morrison, and Donald McNeill entitled Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life. What I have read since is that these three Catholic Christian authors believe compassion requires community: sensed, actual, and/or geographical.

What I first intended for this post was to suggest my difficulty feeling compassion for those with whom I politically disagree because they are not a part of “my” community. But instead let me describe this phenomenon positively. I feel compassion for Black Lives Matter protestors because the Civil Rights Movement “woke” me about equal justice and opportunity for all and inspired my own pursuit of that for LGBTQ people. And I admire the movement, We Are the 99 Percent, because my dad was a blue-collar Teamster truck driver and we lived on working class wages, despite my mom teaching at a Christian school for sacrificially low wages. And I better understand migrants escaping harsh conditions in Latin America because I have visited a post-Somoza Nicaragua and a post-Pinochet Chile.

And, in fact, I have tried to understand friends and family and fellow churchgoers with whom I share love and memories and values whose political bias opposes or diverges from mine. So true community does allow for diversity as well as compassion.

But I need—we need—to enlarge our sense of community.

The authors of Compassion write:

When we are no longer able to recognize suffering persons as fellow human beings, their pain evokes more disgust and anger than compassion.

Responding compassionately to what the media present to us is made even more difficult by its “neutrality.” … Whatever the news announces—war, murder, floods, the weather, and the football scores—is reported with the same ritualized tone of voice and facial expression.  … All of this is regularly interrupted by smiling people urging us to buy products of dubious necessity. The whole “service” is so distant and aloof that the most obvious response is to invest no more energy in it than in brushing your teeth before going to bed.

They contrast this with Jesus and God being moved by compassion, biblically described (multiple times) as feeling it in their guts (Jesus) and in their womb (Yahweh).

They offer as a role model the Trappist monk and social critic Thomas Merton whose “knowledge of the suffering of the world came not from the media but from letters written by friends for whom particular events had personal significance. To these friends a response was possible. When information about human suffering comes to us through a person who can be embraced, it is humanized.”

On occasion, Merton invited many of them to gather at Gethsemani Abbey to share and pray together and community was formed.

I have travelled widely and that has piqued my interest in developments in many states, countries, and locales. I am more attentive to their stories on the news or in the newspaper as a result. When a recent U.S. president was elected who had never traveled abroad, I wondered how he could possibly “get” or care about other regions or cultures.

Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community” is larger than we can fathom. The commonwealth of God that Jesus proclaimed is more extensive than our fellow believers. Instead of the Prosperity Gospel prayer to “enlarge my territory” for personal success and wealth, we need the Progressive Gospel prayer to “enlarge my community” and thus our compassion.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Rest in Peace, Rise in Glory

If anyone deserves to rest in peace and rise in glory, it is our Congressman, Representative John Robert Lewis.

He fought the good fight, he kept the faith, he got into “good trouble,” he served his Lord and his country well.

A few days before he died last week, I wrote on Facebook that in every encounter Wade and I had with him, he made us feel as if he were there to see us! And he really saw us, engaged with us, wanted to know “how are you doin’?” He didn’t look around to see if there was someone else to greet. He was solidly there, pleased to listen.

I put this on Facebook because we had just been moved watching the documentary, John Lewis: Good Trouble.

Wade was so charmed by him that he on two occasions invited him to our home for dinner. And Congressman Lewis said yes, he’d love to come. I felt like the centurion who said to Jesus, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you.” Lewis was a Civil Rights Movement icon and I did not feel worthy. Our place is small and modest. What would we serve? Whom invite? Should it be a campaign fundraiser? We did not pursue it because of my reservations.

I am grateful Rep. Lewis lived to see the latest incarnation and proliferation of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Lives Matter. He seemed to share my view that all movements are led by subsequent generations. Younger people see things and know things and feel things that us older folk may miss.

Please permit an aside. I don’t like the facile categories and generalizations applied to different generations. I think they are a weak media invention and new occasions for prejudice. This week a columnist described being called to task as a “Baby Boomer” who had dreamed of a new and better world in the 60’s, “Okay, Boomer, why didn’t you finish the job?”

The truth of the matter is that all the activists I knew and worked with in the 60’s and 70’s and beyond have never stopped working for a better world. Many problems cannot be “fixed” in a single generation.

Ironically, the LGBTQIA Movement of which I have been part nearly DID “finish our job,” accomplishing more goals than I ever thought possible in my lifetime. That’s why we now have the luxury, opportunity, and responsibility of “intersectionality,” better understanding and expressing and addressing the relationship of all peace and justice and equality issues.

I was deeply touched by an outstanding LGBTQIA activist writing that my first book helped him realize that “I was possible.”  That is why I am so beholden to the Civil Rights Movement: it helped me realize that “I was possible.”

I doubt I have ever had the courage of John Lewis, willing to non-violently endure a fractured skull on the Edmund Pettus bridge. But I am glad I got to touch, as it were, “the hem of his garment.”

Representative Lewis loved this early mug shot,

displayed at a restaurant in our neighborhood.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

The Crisis of Racism

Part of a nearby Baptist church memorial to multiple African Americans 

whose lives have been taken in recent years.

In preparation for leading an online course on respected spiritual author Henri Nouwen, I am reading my own 2002 book of 100 meditations on his life and writings to remind myself of things I might say and stories I might tell. I found “Day Seventy-Two: The Crisis of Racism” particularly pertinent to today’s happenings and offer it in support of Black Lives Matter.

Henri wrote in a posthumously published book of his participation in a well-known Alabama protest march:

It seemed as if nobody could party better than these oppressed people. The flush of victory seemed to have them in its grasp, combined with the certainty that they would lose. … [Alabama Governor] George Wallace cannot be converted.

-Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Road to Peace, p 82.

Why does racism have such a grip on us? Why do its relentless talons press into our culture’s mind and heart so deep that we hardly recognize its power even now, almost forty years* after Henri wrote these words about the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965? Forty years—we should be at the Promised Land by now. Did our grumbling en route bring us yet another forty years as punishment?

What strikes me as I finally read Henri’s previously unavailable essays about the Selma march and King’s death in 1968 in The Road to Peace is the unambivalent clarity with which he describes good and evil, what is just and what is unjust. It’s like the realism of his writings about Central and South America: there’s a hardness and a leanness to his writing that is less enchanting than gripping.

If he had “swung” that way, he would have made a strong politically prophetic figure. This book’s editor John Dear points out that Henri did not want to be arrested in U.S. protests because, in doing so, he risked being deported as an “alien.” But I think it was something deeper in his nature that shunned political drama for spiritual drama, the larger playing field in his mind.

“Fixing” something politically was important; but addressing it spiritually was even more so. And he realized that “being right” politically did not mean “being right” spiritually; that, as we try to take the beam out of the world’s eye we must be watchful of a myriad of splinters in our own, to reverse Jesus’ metaphor.

Which brings us back to the talons of racism that grip our culture. At heart it is a spiritual crisis underlying the political crisis. That’s why the Reverend King could draw Henri from his studies at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas into a march by calling the religious community for support after marchers earlier suffered violence on the Edmund Pettus bridge just outside Selma.

Henri wrestled long and hard about whether or not to go. That, to me, suggests Henri was not meeting the demands of ego or self-righteousness but meeting the demands of humility and justice. When you’d rather not, but you’re there anyway, you know it’s not about you.

His recognition that “nobody could party better than these oppressed people” foreshadowed similar experiences with the poor in Latin America and the severely disabled of L’Arche. Feeling momentarily powerful and victorious while facing certain defeat is a dynamic understood by any who have advocated “lost” causes.

And yet, ironically, the “defeat” that “George Wallace cannot be converted,” is controverted as early as five years later in an essay Henri wrote about Dr. King’s assassination, quoting the Alabama governor declaring it “a senseless and useless act.” Since then, of course, Wallace asked forgiveness for his support of segregation, probably not unrelated to his own crippling wound in an attempt on his life.

Though [truth’s] portion be the scaffold

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future…

From the hymn, “Once to Every One and Nation” by James Russell Lowell.

* Remember, my book was published in 2002.

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Copyright © 2002 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, blogsite and book title, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy. 

Pride and Shame

We obtained this rainbow flag in Italy when our LGBT symbol became a rallying flag to oppose whatever war the U.S. was waging in the Middle East at the time. 

"Pace" means "peace" in Italian.

How can I write about pride when there is so much shame about racism, reactionary politics and policing, confederate symbols and namesakes, as well as our failure to contain a deadly pandemic that disproportionately punishes people of color and/or poverty?

That thought crossed my mind as I hung our rainbow Pride flag on our front porch in honor of LGBTQIA Pride month and anticipated writing this post. And, after writing this, the U.S. Supreme Court recognition of LGBT employment rights makes this post all the more relevant.

Pride was what I needed when I began to affirm myself in my 20’s a half-century ago, pride of who God created me to be as a gay man. And a healthy dose of pride is what we all need to confirm who God has created and called us to be and confront the truly shameful parts of ourselves and our nation’s history that led to slavery, Jim Crow, and brutal murders of black men, women, and children.

Some refer to slavery as our original sin, but I think our displacement and murder of Native/Indigenous peoples preceded and anticipated the enslavement of Africans, borne also of our racism and cultural superiority complex.

I once wondered how descendants of slaves could ever overcome the generational PTSD inflicted by our nation. Now I wonder if and when white Americans will ever get over our sense of privilege and entitlement at the expense of people of color and of other nationalities.

Jesus would not be happy.

Jesus told the parable of the Good mixed-race Samaritan as an example of loving one’s neighbor and revealed his Messianic identity to the mixed-race Samaritan woman at the well who became his first evangelist. Jesus was moved by the wisdom of a Syrophoenician woman, healing her daughter after initially resisting her request. Jesus healed ten lepers, but only the mixed-race Samaritan returned to give him thanks. And Jesus remarked in wonder at the faith of a centurion, part of the occupying force of the Roman empire, healing his país, a word which could mean slave or lover.

Jesus is the original disruptor-in-chief by demonstrating values that lift us all.

Atlanta is majority African American. And our Pride, now celebrated in October around International Coming Out Day, does not focus on LGBT people alone but encourages all to take pride in who God created them to be. Atlanta also hosts the annual Black Pride festival for LGBT people, the largest gathering of its kind. Atlanta, said to be “the city too busy to hate” is becoming “the city too busy to shame.”

“Pride is faith in the idea that God had when God made you,” Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixen) wrote in Out of Africa. She added, “Love the pride of God above all else and the pride of your neighbor as your own.”  (I’ve quoted this many times!)

When we celebrate our neighbor’s worth, we offer gratitude, praise, and honor to the God who created all the peoples of the earth, even as “the arc of the moral universe… bends toward justice,”* as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. anticipated the “Beloved Community,” the Commonwealth of God.

*This is King’s briefer and more memorable allusion to a longer quote of abolitionist Theodore Parker, a Unitarian pastor of the 1800s.

A different post also entitled: “Pride and Shame”

With his wit, wisdom and word-play, poet, pastor, and friend J. Barrie Shepherd has been a good companion in this epidemic through a new chapbook entitled A Pandemic Portfolio: From BC – (Before Corona) to AD – (After Distancing) – Poems Composed in a Season of Pestilence. Proceeds go to Barrie’s local charities that include two food banks and may be obtained by a donation of $5+$2 postage to J. Barrie Shepherd, 56 East Shore Drive, Chebeague Island, ME 04017 or email barrieshep@aol.com.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

Jesus Did Not Come to Save You

Our pastor and neighbor and her daughter doing chalk artwork

on Saturday in support of the protests. (Our house is in upper left corner.)

Jesus did not come to save you, nor to make you prosper. Jesus came to save the world and help it prosper. Of course that includes you, but not exclusively.

The morning I write this, these thoughts came to mind after hearing a discussion on NPR of an evangelical pastor about personal salvation and individual prosperity followed by reading a New York Times column by David Brooks about reparations best going to communities rather than individuals. All of this in the context of the pandemic and the racial divide.

I grew up as the kind of Baptist that emphasized personal salvation. I had no idea that there were other kinds of Baptist and other kinds of Christian that emphasized the salvation of our world, our environment and our communities. To my knowledge, at the time there was no “prosperity gospel,” though The Power of Positive Thinking of Norman Vincent Peale came close, influencing President Trump’s father and apparently himself.

In high school, I remember being moved by John Hersey’s novel A Single Pebble that offered a different perspective, that of Asian religions and cultures, featuring the greater importance of the collective, of the community, over individual concerns.

And then I became a Presbyterian my first year of college and learned for the first time that salvation was not my personal escape clause from hell but sought the redemption of a fallen world. “God's got the whole world in God’s hands,” we had sung as evangelical fundamentalist children, though with male pronouns. “Jesus is coming” was not seen as a joyous occasion of transformation but as a threat to nonbelievers and Christian “backsliders.” The cosmic Christ would end the world.

Only through a Spiritual Formation course at Columbia Seminary a few years ago did I fully “get” that the whole Bible is about God coming to be with us, first “tabernacling” with the Hebrews, becoming Emmanuel (“God-with-us”) for Christians, and, in Revelation, not destroying the world but making his/her/their home with us, renewing and refreshing heaven and earth.

And the story of the Incarnation is that Jesus did not “come” from anywhere else, but was, in the psalmist’s words, “knit together in a mother’s womb, fearfully and wonderfully made” as we all are. The gospel he proclaimed was of a commonwealth already in our midst, even within us, if we only shared a divine vision, empathy, and desire for us to heal one another and our world.

The story of the Bible is that God has been with us all along. And in all of us. “Red and yellow, black and white—all are precious in his sight,” we sang in Sunday school. And, I have come to believe, in all of us regardless of religious perspective.

Mere personal survival was Jesus’ first temptation (“turn these stones into bread”) and is ours as well. Through his ministry and his teachings Jesus transforms personal survival to personal sacrifice, encouraging all to offer our lives to others for the sake of and in the realization of the commonwealth of God. That’s how the bread and wine of mere survival become the body and blood of full communion with the world. We are called to be, in the apostle Paul’s words, “living sacrifices.”

That’s how God loves us, how God saves us, how God lives in us—unless we mess it up.

Recent posts that offer hope during our pandemic:

We Are All First Responders

Being a Good Host to Children

Two of many posts that address our racial divisions:

Black Lives Matter

“I Can’t Breathe!” (last week’s post)

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

"I Can't Breathe!"

George Floyd portrait in a front yard on our street.

In thanksgiving for the life, artistry, and audacious activism of Larry Kramer, who saved countless lives, possibly my own.

An unrecorded Eighth Last Word of Jesus on the cross as his body sagged, cutting off his airflow, was “I can’t breathe!”

Doesn’t matter if this is true, because his spirit is surely in the last breath of any who suffer at the hands (or knee) of the powers that be. “I can’t breathe” has become the protest not only of individuals but of a movement intent on justice for all.

And now it also encompasses the respiratory suffering of millions at the hands of a virus and care-less leaders, even as caregivers give everything they have to relieve suffering and save lives.

Only in one difficult period of my life did I suffer a series of panic attacks in which I thought, “I can’t breathe.” But it gave me an inkling of what desperation that feeling entails. I can understand the resulting urges to violence and the sentiment expressed in the words of the 1975 Hollywood film prophet, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Or in the Holocaust rejoinder, “Never again!” And in the AIDS pandemic, “Silence=Death.”

In relation to the novel coronavirus pandemic, I’ve followed the science of the virus and the treatment of COVID-19 as well as the sometimes-harrowing personal experiences of those infected. When I pray about this, I can’t bring myself to pray for special protections for me and Wade and our families and friends. I pray for the whole human family: for deliverance, for a treatment, a cure, a vaccine.

On a recent routine visit, my Physician Assistant asked me where I was getting my information about it all and he was relieved to hear me say, “NPR, PBS and The New York Times.” Whether facing a pandemic or a presidential election, where we get our news matters.

Intriguing to me is how central breath is to managing and hopefully overcoming the havoc the virus wreaks in our bodies. Breath is central biblically and spiritually as well. Breath and Spirit represent life and soulfulness. God breathed life into the first human creature. Jesus breathed on his disciples Holy Spirit. The Spirit breathed resurrection into the early Christian movement, and then its subsequent reformations, including that of progressive Christianity.

And breath is helping me get through this period. Using the words Jesus used on a storm at sea, I breathe in thinking “Peace” and breathe out thinking “Be still,” inhaling the peace of God and exhaling the “demons” that wrack my well-being.

Last week I read a moving message from one of my Facebook friends, a black mother who was glad she had given her teenage son “the Talk” that so many of our black friends and colleagues have had to give their children about appearing non-threatening. He was pulled over for what turned out to be a minor infraction, so he had taken everything out of his pockets, put his driver’s license in one hand and his car registration in the other, and placed both hands on the steering wheel where the approaching officer could see them. The officer turned out to be friendly, but her son had been shaken by the encounter. I’m sure he had to catch his breath when it was all over, as did his mother upon hearing of the experience.

I wept to read this. With many others, I responded with a brief word of support and gratitude.

I believe Jesus wept too.

Also in our Georgia neighborhood. 

Recent posts that offer hope during our pandemic:

Where Is Everybody?

Creating Space

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

Woke and Awakening

My well-worn copy.

I love that “woke” is related to “awakening.” “Woke” as an adjective is from African American vernacular, and, as employed by Black Lives Matter, entails social awareness, especially of racism and social injustice. It is now used ubiquitously to suggest someone who is politically aware.

In spirituality, “awakening” suggests spiritual awareness. An early twentieth century authority on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, describes “awakening” as the first stage of a mystic’s lifelong process. She described five stages of a mystic: awakening, purgation, illumination, dark night, and union.

What brings this to mind for me are two recent articles evaluating Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird. One article reviews a book that offers a disconcerting analysis of Lee’s novel as a defense of upper class educated Southern whites distancing themselves from racist “white trash,” as if the latter were entirely responsible for racial barriers, while excusing themselves with the actual economic, political and social power to end segregation.

Jarring as this is for me as a fan of the novel, this appears to be true, and, I hate to admit, could also be said of those who insist President Trump was elected by that infamous “basket of deplorables” rather than by educated, middle and upper class white voters.

The other article, reviewing another related book, explains the writer’s disdain of the novel as insufficiently aware of the African American experience. Only Scout’s character is fully developed, she writes, not that of Tom Robinson or even of Atticus Finch.

I wanted to counter that this is because the book is not about Tom Robinson or Atticus Finch: the book is about Scout and her transformation in the light of her personal experience of events and characters in the narrative. The most authentic representation of African American experience would most likely be found in the writings of African American authors themselves.

The novel’s film was released a month after Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Segregation Forever” inaugural speech. Though the sterling character of a small-town Alabama lawyer like Atticus Finch might have been a stretch, given the times, as one writer suggests, he serves as a counter to the prevailing ethos of racial prejudice. He gives white readers someone to emulate, something lacking in Lee’s original version, Go Set a Watchman. Thanks be to God for a good editor who advised her to revisit and reshape the story!

All this is to say, as I’ve written in my books and on this blog, To Kill a Mockingbird

served as a “woke” experience for this 12-year-old boy from California who had never even visited the South. That, coupled with the Civil Rights Movement and good teachers and preachers, began for me a lifelong journey toward a better understanding of racism and social injustice.

The books of African American authors furthered my growth: Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Stephen Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, James Cone, Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Walker, and Cornel West. Articles, reporting, firsthand encounters and presentations by numerous others also contributed to my “woke” process.

Just as “awakening” is only the beginning of a mystic’s lifelong path, maybe we might consider “wokeness” as only the start of political awareness. Maybe we could speak of a “woke-consciousness” that allows further development as well as application to other social issues of our times.

I was struck by the spiritual parallels as I completed reading this past Sunday Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality. He quotes Flora Slosson Wuellner’s description of spiritual growth in her book, On the Road to Spiritual Wholeness:

As we are healed and pulled together into wholeness, we are shown many things that we had not seen before. We are shown feelings we have had, but which have been repressed. We are shown things we have done, judgments we have made during our days of blindness and insensitivity. We are shown relationships in a new light, and facts to which we had not awakened. And as we wake and see, decisions about what we see begin to rise in freshness and power.

I posted this on July 11, 2018, and post it today in observance of Black History Month in the U.S.

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

Black Lives Matter

This week marks the ninth anniversary of the beginning of this blog!

“Black lives matter” is not just wisdom for protesting “issues” of law enforcement. It should be a mantra for all of life.

Black lives matter when there is equal access to prenatal and postnatal care, preschool, decent housing and nutrition, education, healthcare, employment, promotions, advancement, economic opportunities, voting rights, justice in the courts, representation on school boards, law enforcement agencies, city councils, state legislatures, congress, corporate boards, and executive positions in business and government—to name some of the things routinely denied.

Black lives matter when the disproportionate detention and incarceration rate of African-Americans on mere suspicion, manufactured evidence, mandatory minimum sentencing, or low-level drug offenses is reduced dramatically or eliminated altogether.

A pet peeve of mine has been to see black people cast in incidental roles in movies and TV programs (how many black judges can there be?) rather than seeing their characters integrally woven into an ensemble cast, though this has been changing in recent years.

I once worked with a progressive but all-white group who would have agreed that all of the above are examples of institutional racism, and whose members said they wanted to do something about it. But a colleague who had worked with the group far longer than I told me privately, “They all want to address the issue of racism politically, but few, if any, actually have black friends.”

The person observed that institutional racism will only be dismantled as we take racism personally, when black lives matter in our own friendships, families, congregations, work places, working relationships, and social networks.

A white police officer testifying in the O.J. Simpson trial was asked if he was a racist, and he said “no.” I was astounded. I don’t know how any white person in the United States can say they have avoided being taught prejudice to some degree. And we all benefit from white privilege, just as our white ancestors (and not just slaveholders) benefited from black slavery.

I believe our society survives partly because it is graced with the fortitude and forgiveness and sometimes generational forgetfulness of the minorities it has wronged. And most amazing to me are the descendants of slaves who were “owned,” brutalized, raped, and lynched. How can they stand our uppity white domination? How can they stand the undue influence of angry and mean folk trying to undo what progress has been made in redressing past sins?

Those who forgave the deadly, racist shooter in the Charleston church were as Christ to me. Their grace exposed the racism of those who held onto the confederate flag as a way of life. Their grace transformed parts of the country that seemed irredeemable.

Black lives matter.

I posted this on August 19, 2015, and post it today in observance of Black History Month in the U.S.

Related posts:

Stand Your Ground: Ferguson, Washington, Jerusalem

Where Have All the Black Men Gone?

  

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

You may 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! 

Black Museums Matter

Reading of the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. reminded me of the most difficult thing I saw when visiting the Holocaust Museum last May.

There are so many heartbreaking things to witness in that archive of brutality and inhumanity, what I will describe may seem less consequential, but for me it summed up everything, from the piles of shoes of concentration camp martyrs, to the railroad car used for their transport, to the various devices used to end their lives, not to mention the multiple ways intended to dehumanize them before their incarceration.

These things brought tears to my eyes, but what made me want to cry uncontrollably  was seeing a youth—maybe 15—sitting quietly on a bench in a side pocket room intended for rest and reflection. He looked so disheartened, so disillusioned, so overwhelmed by what he saw, I felt for him.

This is what our various histories do to young people: histories of anti-Semitism, racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, classism, heterosexism, mistreatment of those with disabilities, religious intolerance, and so on and so on—this is what we do to the innocent, not only of times past but of the present day.

“Woe to anyone who causes one of these little ones to stumble…” Jesus admonished.

Yet frankly, my own disillusionment as a youth, learning of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, racial hatred, bigotry, and prejudice made me a better citizen. My own disillusionment in American foreign policy around Vietnam and Latin America made me a better patriot. My disappointment at the inequality and mistreatment of women made me a better person. (I say disappointment rather than disillusionment in this case because I never had the illusion that women were treated fairly.)

And the disillusionment that led to my involvement in the reformation of the church around LGBT inclusion made me a better Christian.

I’m glad to learn that there will be a room in the new museum in which to reflect and recover after visiting the exhibit devoted to Emmett Till, a black youth brutalized and lynched after being accused of whistling at a white woman.

Whenever I am able to visit that museum, I expect that I will see another youth sitting in that room with the same downcast and forlorn expression that I saw last May.

I posted this on October 5, 2016, and post it today in observance of Black History Month in the U.S.

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

Woke and Awakening

My well-worn copy

I love that “woke” is related to “awakening.” “Woke” as an adjective is from African American vernacular, and, as employed by Black Lives Matter, entails social awareness, especially of racism and social injustice. It is now used ubiquitously to suggest someone who is politically aware.

In spirituality, “awakening” suggests spiritual awareness. An early twentieth century authority on mysticism, Evelyn Underhill, describes “awakening” as the first stage of a mystic’s lifelong process. She described five stages of a mystic: awakening, purgation, illumination, dark night, and union.

What brings this to mind for me are two recent articles evaluating Harper Lee’s book, To Kill a Mockingbird. One article reviews a book that offers a disconcerting analysis of Lee’s novel as a defense of upper class educated Southern whites distancing themselves from racist “white trash,” as if the latter were entirely responsible for racial barriers, while excusing themselves with the actual economic, political and social power to end segregation.

Jarring as this is for me as a fan of the novel, this appears to be true, and, I hate to admit, could also be said of those who insist President Trump was elected by that infamous “basket of deplorables” rather than by educated, middle and upper class white voters.

The other article, reviewing another related book, explains the writer’s disdain of the novel as insufficiently aware of the African American experience. Only Scout’s character is fully developed, she writes, not that of Tom Robinson or even of Atticus Finch.

I wanted to counter that this is because the book is not about Tom Robinson or Atticus Finch: the book is about Scout and her transformation in the light of her personal experience of events and characters in the narrative. The most authentic representation of African American experience would most likely be found in the writings of African American authors themselves.

The novel's film was released a month after Alabama Governor George Wallace’s infamous “Segregation Forever” inaugural speech. Though the sterling character of a small-town Alabama lawyer like Atticus Finch might have been a stretch, given the times, as one writer suggests, he serves as a counter to the prevailing ethos of racial prejudice. He gives white readers someone to emulate, something lacking in Lee’s original version, Go Set a Watchman. Thanks be to God for a good editor who advised her to revisit and reshape the story!

All this is to say, as I’ve written in my books and on this blog, To Kill a Mockingbird served as a “woke” experience for this 12-year-old boy from California who had never even visited the South. That, coupled with the Civil Rights Movement and good teachers and preachers, began for me a lifelong journey toward a better understanding of racism and social injustice.

The books of African American authors furthered my growth: Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Stephen Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, James Cone, Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr., Alice Walker, and Cornell West. Articles, reporting, firsthand encounters and presentations by numerous others also contributed to my “woke” process.

Just as “awakening” is only the beginning of a mystic’s lifelong path, maybe we might consider “wokeness” as only the start of political awareness. Maybe we could speak of a “woke-consciousness” that allows further development as well as application to other social issues of our times.

I was struck by the spiritual parallels as I completed reading this past Sunday Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality. He quotes Flora Slosson Wuellner’s description of spiritual growth in her book, On the Road to Spiritual Wholeness:

As we are healed and pulled together into wholeness, we are shown many things that we had not seen before. We are shown feelings we have had, but which have been repressed. We are shown things we have done, judgments we have made during our days of blindness and insensitivity. We are shown relationships in a new light, and facts to which we had not awakened. And as we wake and see, decisions about what we see begin to rise in freshness and power.

Related Post: Black Lives Matter

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

Black Museums Matter

Reading of the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. reminded me of the most difficult thing I saw when visiting the Holocaust Museum last May.

There are so many heartbreaking things to witness in that archive of brutality and inhumanity, what I will describe may seem less consequential, but for me it summed up everything, from the piles of shoes of concentration camp martyrs, to the railroad car used for their transport, to the various devices used to end their lives, not to mention the multiple ways intended to dehumanize them before their incarceration.

These things brought tears to my eyes, but what made me want to cry uncontrollably was seeing a youth—maybe 15—sitting quietly on a bench in a side pocket room intended for rest and reflection. He looked so disheartened, so disillusioned, so overwhelmed by what he saw, I felt for him.

This is what our various histories do to young people: histories of anti-Semitism, racism, ethnic hatred, sexism, classism, heterosexism, mistreatment of those with disabilities, religious intolerance, and so on and so on—this is what we do to the innocent, not only of times past but of the present day.

“Woe to anyone who causes one of these little ones to stumble…” Jesus admonished.

Yet frankly, my own disillusionment as a youth, learning of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, lynching, racial hatred, bigotry, and prejudice made me a better citizen. My own disillusionment in American foreign policy around Vietnam and Latin America made me a better patriot. My disappointment at the inequality and mistreatment of women made me a better person. (I say disappointment rather than disillusionment in this case because I never had the illusion that women were treated fairly.)

And the disillusionment that led to my involvement in the reformation of the church around LGBT inclusion made me a better Christian.

I’m glad to learn that there will be a room in the new museum in which to reflect and recover after visiting the exhibit devoted to Emmett Till, a black youth brutalized and lynched after being accused of whistling at a white woman.

Whenever I am able to visit that museum, I expect that I will see another youth sitting in that room with the same downcast and forlorn expression that I saw last May.

Related Post:

Black Lives Matter

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