Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: Black

Showing posts with label Black. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Nightmare of the Presidency

Regular readers of this blog know I often have revealing dreams, but I have never had the audacity to dream of myself in the Oval Office. Yet last night, in one of those waking moments that come around three in the morning for us older members of “the tribe” who were to rise, tend to the campfire, and keep watch for lions and tigers and bears in olden times, I began to consider what a nightmare it would be to find myself elected president.

The occasion was my careful announcement to my Facebook friends of the candidate I support for the presidency. Given Georgia’s and other primaries this week, the timing seemed relevant. I say “careful,” because I chose a few words to support my candidate without overtly disparaging another’s choice. I was a little apprehensive about doing so, as we all know that the internet and Facebook can be a minefield, especially when sharing political views.

I received over 200 likes and over 50 comments, mostly supportive. A few expressed surprise, offering an alternative candidate. But the harshest comment came not from another political party, but from my own political framework. Someone asked how I could be a Christian and support this candidate, and said I must have been duped by the candidate’s “propaganda.”

Recent studies have suggested that political polarization is caused less by disagreement than by our failure to believe our opponents’ intentions are good, or at least justified or reasonable. This is the beam in my own eye that I stumble over when faced with my differences with the opposing political party. Now, I may be right in doubting their motivations. But it would seem that someone from my own party and bias might give me credit for making a reasoned choice that might not be theirs.

It makes me think of my biological family that never shied away from political arguments. Often political anger arose out of thinking that a family member I love would not be making such a stupid or heartless choice! In a perverse way, our political ire showed our deep respect for the person’s intelligence and moral compass.

Maybe the same thing is happening within the various “tribes” we belong to, whether a church, political party, circle of friends, or a nation as a whole. Maybe we think our better natures should make us all come out on the same page.

All of this is to say that at 3 a.m. I realized that to become president of the United States would be, for me, a nightmare. My tiny Facebook skirmish made me realize how vulnerable, how thin-skinned I can be. This may come as a surprise to those who know my lifetime of struggle for LGBT acceptance in the church, as well as other unpopular justice issues. But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the struggle of a U.S. President.

If elected, whom could I trust? Could I even trust myself to make the right choices? I can’t imagine being adequately informed about any issue. If blocked, could I confront my challengers? Would I be willing to compromise, and would I compromise too much?

Having never served in the military, what would I do with the imposing and intimidating Joint Chiefs of Staff? And, being a member of a centuries-old marginalized tribe, the LGBT community, how would I or my opponents discern between disagreement and disrespect?

And how would I cope with the outrageous “slings and arrows” that come a president’s way—slights, hurts, attacks, as well as the omnipresent danger of a lunatic wanting to make a life while taking yours.

My inaction as well as my actions could spell catastrophe for huge segments of the world population, let alone the earth’s environment. In some ways, being president is kind of like being God—you can’t really have a day off. And if you’re having a bad day, multitudes may suffer.

Some of you might say, well, this is surprising coming from a minister who speaks for God. That is the more audacious task, representing God. But I have never viewed myself “speaking for God.” In my nocturnal reverie, a play I had seen at the tender age of 18 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum came to mind: the Christopher Isherwood adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw story, “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search of God.” I have always felt like my writings detail “the adventures of a gay red-headed boy in his search of God.” More on this next week.

It is an awesome task to be “the leader of the free world” or the leader of any nation. That’s why your vote and my vote count so much. We don’t want the presidency to be scarier than it already is.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”

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!

Donations of $100 or more either at once or over 2016 will receive a signed gift copy of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

The Racial-Ethnic Oscar

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, last week and the Wednesdays of February I’m providing a link to the most visited post of each year. For 2012, that would be: The Magic Kingdom (also the most visited post of all five years), with A Pragmatic Guide to Prayer coming in second.

In the controversy over the lack of black nominees for Oscars, one Academy member facetiously asked if we were now to have an ethnic category “for your consideration.” I doubt very much that the man who asked the question is racist; after all, he has a black adopted daughter and black grandchildren.

But what he missed entirely is that there is already a racial-ethnic category at play in the making of films, let alone the Academy Awards: Caucasians are favored in every category, from audiences to those who get to do the films, which to me is the crux of the problem, not just that other racial-ethnic groups are thereby excluded from consideration for awards.

Affirmative action has often been misunderstood to mean that unqualified people should get a job over qualified people. Affirmative action, rather, is better understood as providing opportunities for equally qualified applicants who are underrepresented in the industry they wish to enter.

Equal rights have also been twisted by dominant cultures to mean “special rights.” How many times have I had to argue with even the most open churchgoers that LGBT people, in seeking equal rights, were not requesting “special rights,” but the rights afforded every other citizen of our country, including the right to marry. That so many legislators and judges are now trying to curtail that right under the guise of defending religious freedom is reminiscent of the many ways the dominant white culture has tried to undermine civil rights and voting rights of African Americans.

I’m also surprised that many people have difficulty with stronger sentences for hate crimes. A crime is a crime is a crime, they think, when refusing to consider how a hate crime is a crime intended to harm and intimidate a whole segment of our citizenry, not to mention that hate crimes are characteristically far more brutal and wounding.

LGBT people have made tremendous strides in a historically relative short period because we had the advantage of being part of every family, neighborhood, congregation, congressional district, and political party. While African-Americans are yet to be fully integrated (i.e., welcomed), LGBT people began “integrated” even when not always welcomed. Knowing LGBT people personally as well as seeing us in film and on television helped our culture understand who we are.

When my mother visited me in Philadelphia in 1976, I took her to several plays, including one at the historic Academy of Music that featured Billy Dee Williams as a fiery Martin Luther King Jr. I was stunned to discover we were among a handful of white people in the packed theater. Why weren’t more white people interested?

Better was seeing The Color Purple at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood years later. For the first time, I saw a theater filled with black people and mostly white gay people, given the black and lesbian themes of the film.

Not just in the South where I live now, but in every city I’ve lived or travelled, it’s still true that 11 a.m. Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week, so Christians can’t really get on our high horse—even progressive Christians—and preach what we don’t practice.

And Washington and Wall Street and corporate offices, whose whitewashed tombs house overwhelmingly white and male power structures, cannot effectively legislate, invest in, or inspire a diversity they do not represent.

So I welcome Hollywood’s agonizing over what it can do to remind us “black lives matter.” This is a step toward recognizing the diversity that makes a country great.

Blog readings for Black History month in the U.S. (February):

“Colored on TV”

Keep the Dream Alive!

Bayard Rustin Speaks

Knowing Your Place

Where Have All the Black Men Gone?

Black Lives Matter

Other relevant posts:

Redeemed from the Pit

Love Force

The Scariest Book I’ve Read

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

When Pastors Have Bad Dreams

Okay, so you may suggest I see a therapist rather than share this with you, but there’s something universal in the bad dream I had last night.

Pastors have all kinds of bad dreams: expected to preach when not prepared, missing your sermon as you walk to the pulpit, finding yourself naked in the pulpit, looking out at the congregation at 11 a.m. Sunday morning and seeing no one there, etc.

One of my preaching professors, Bill Muehl, once realized as he was about to preach in chapel at a girls’ school that the sermon he brought was the one he gave the same group the year before. Only it wasn’t a dream, it actually happened to him, and he had to use another sermon from memory, which he used as a “teaching moment” to advise his students to always have a back-up in memory. (I don’t re-use a sermon myself—I get bored with it!)

My most terrifying and recurring dream came to me when I served as an interim pastor: driving a dangerously slick winding road downhill in a thunderstorm at night with no headlights, no brakes, and/or no steering wheel!

Pastors also have good dreams: having just the right insights to offer in a sermon or talk, enjoying a committee’s embrace of your wisdom, seeing the sanctuary filled for Sunday morning service.

My dream last night was more of a nightmare.

I dreamed that there were a mere dozen in worship that morning, and one regular had brought someone new whom others did not like. There was fussing, even as I privately fussed with getting things ready for service.

It ended in a big squabble and as everyone was exiting before worship began, unhappy and disgusted with one another and with me, I suggested that the new person should be made to feel welcome. A friend in the congregation retaliated, saying that I myself had once said something derogatory about a visitor, which I denied, even if it may have been possible.

I awoke from the dream in the middle of the night feeling like a failure as a pastor. I became depressed, and had difficulties returning to sleep. Maybe I’d been a failure my whole life!

Pastors do make mistakes and pastors do fail. Sometimes it’s just not a good match. Sometimes either the parishioners or the pastor or church staff think they know better how to run the church.

Pastor or not, any of us can either unintentionally internalize a congregation’s dysfunction and/or become part of its dysfunctional family system. A congregation I know broke from another because of a dispute, but, when considering reunification decades later, the resentments of the congregation that had split had been passed on to new members not part of the original disagreement.

I witnessed that on a denominational scale when the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (the “northern stream”) and the Presbyterian Church, U.S. (the “southern stream”) considered reunion a century after Presbyterians had been divided by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

My dream did have a sort of happy ending, however, even though the first part kept me awake wondering about past failures.

After everyone left, as I was putting everything back in place in the sanctuary, an old, grey-haired, heavy-set black man came in with his young son or grandson, hoping I would talk with him. He was thankfully oblivious to what had just happened with the congregation, but I was haunted by my old fear, “what-would-he-think-if-he-knew-I’m-gay?” Nonetheless, I was ready to help, and they were ready to talk.

This ending came to reassure me, and I hope I’m not just rationalizing. For everyone I may have failed, there were always more opportunities for ministry.

I daresay many a minister—ordained or lay—may take comfort in that realization.

A reading for Advent: Put Yourself in the Nativity Story

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.