An Unfinished Dream

Tunnel on an unfinished portion of the Atlanta Beltline. (crg)

The other morning I was awakened from a dream that I very much wanted to finish. I tried to go back to sleep just to see its outcome, but it was lost to me.

This is no artifice, as Coleridge claimed of his poem “Kubla Khan,” to fit the Romantic Age virtue of being unfinished, when, in truth, the poem about Xanadu’s “pleasure dome” in a “holy and enchanted place” and drinking “the milk of Paradise” is considered complete. It too came to him in a dream that was partly lost when he was interrupted capturing it in words.

In my dream, a young printer, with a magician’s dark moustache and goatee and flair, intended to introduce me to a new book. I explained I loved the excitement of beginning a book I really wanted to read: I told him I like the stiff, virgin feel of cracking a book open, covers resistant and pages clinging to one another. I mentioned that a writer friend would smell the binding of each of his new books, and that I now pay attention, not only to how a new book feels in my hands and looks to my eyes, but what aroma wafts my way from its binding glue.

Smiling in anticipation of his revelation, he showed me a tiny hardbound book, enclosed in plastic, as he delicately reached for the tab that would zip open its packaging, like those found on hard plastic grocery produce containers.

The title of the book was The Cracked Turban, and I understood it exposed the far-right’s mistaken notions about Islam. Obviously “cracked turban” was a metaphor, as a turban is made of cloth, but probably meant to reveal how very far from reality Islamophobia is.

The mysterious printer told me something equivalent to “This is going to knock your socks off!” I expected an extraordinary aroma when the airtight package was opened, not to mention my hope for an intriguing book that would be a pleasure to read and to have.

Then I woke up.

I so wanted to know what was going to happen next!

On my walk that morning and during my morning prayers, I struggled to understand its meaning. Now, I subscribe to the relatively recent theory of dream interpretation that parts of a dream are the result of randomly firing neurons, and its meaning lies less in its parts than in how your brain builds a narrative from them.

Wade and I have had death on our minds as his 83-year-old mother struggles with her health. On my walk I thought how life is an unfinished dream, and how death might be a much anticipated and intriguing book that each of us will open.

I am reading Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross in my morning prayers, and his emphasis on our soul’s need to be free of our senses to unite with God immensely bothers me. Obviously, my sense-ability about wanting to smell, see, and handle the mysterious book in the dream demonstrates I still embrace my Zorba-esque “pagan” desires as a necessary part of my spirituality. With many body theologians, I believe God and/or the sacred is to be found in our bodily experiences. Judaism and Christianity are both, in different senses and in my view, incarnational.

But I believe that incarnational theology might lend itself too readily toward materialism and even idolatry, both societal demons Muhammad wanted to drive out in establishing Islam.

Clearly the dream represents my political bias and political passion: to welcome the very people the alt-right wants to purge.

And also clearly, the magician-like appearance of the book’s printer and mysterious nature of the book’s packaging, size, and promise shows my reverence for books, no matter how “small.” Note it was a printer, not a publisher, who wanted to show me the book. Having once worked in a print shop, I respect the craft and toil of producing printed material.

Producing, handling, and honoring “hard copy” could be another example of incarnational theology. Islam respects Jews and Christians for being “people of The Book.”

An afterthought comes to me. Before I encountered the printer, eager to show me an exciting new book, a female archivist came to me in my dream and offered to help me organize my papers (and this has happened in real life—someone in our church). It’s telling that my narrative jumps eagerly onward to the introduction of a new book to enjoy.

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Potlatch

As a youth I was fascinated by a custom practiced among Pacific Northwest Native Americans called the Potlatch. I capitalize the Chinook term here, though my OED does not, because it seems every bit as sacred as Christmas and Easter.

Having accumulated much, a person (often a chief) would give away or burn all possessions and start afresh. Though my dictionary implies this was a show of wealth and prestige rather than generosity and humility, I’d say Christmas or any show of charity and humility is practiced with similar mixed motives, so why quibble?

Wade and I have been engaged in a similar practice as we downsize and move to a smaller, more affordable home, though one we hope to improve. I got practice for this in October by emptying my public storage unit in Los Angeles of my parents’ library and a few pieces of their furniture.

I was ruthless in finding new homes for their books, though I did glean three boxes of books and memorabilia to send home. About 35 boxes of books went to a used book store in the suburb where they lived. The furniture went mostly to family, thankfully, though a few pieces found their way to Mexico thanks to my brother’s enterprising neighbor.

My parents were not hoarders in the problematic sense, but they did hoard memories and books. Those “sacramentals” whose stories we knew we often kept, but the ones whose stories have been lost to us easily wound up in the yard sale after my mom’s death. Yet the books also contained “sacramentals”: postcards, photos, news articles, letters, poems, etc. that I needed to remove before giving up the books.

Maya Angelou shared her steely resolve with me through a book of hers I was reading in my morning prayers during that process, one I had found in one of those little lending libraries in a neighbor’s front yard. She could be sentimental and nostalgic, but also realistic and pragmatic, and she helped me recognize the grief and nostalgia of my enterprise as well as its practicality and necessity.

This October pilgrimage prepared me for our December/January Potlatch. Wade, the true materialist of the household, nonetheless loves giving up things just as much as acquiring them, and has made multiple trips to our neighborhood Habitat for Humanity ReStore, delighting its volunteers with every batch of items we will no longer have room for or have fallen into disuse.

As it was my job with my original family to empty my parents’ bookshelves, so too I needed to prune my own overflowing library, an exercise that reveals my present priorities.  My books about theology, church organization, and interim ministry were the easiest to surrender, but the books about spirituality will stay with me for now, including my Henri Nouwen collection.

My collections of books by Gore Vidal and Paulo Coelho, LGBT authors and other contemporary writers I deeply appreciated reading, but can release to keep books that changed my life and make room for those I hope to read. And of course, my volumes of poetry and art will stay. A local seminary library has benefited from my literary Potlatch.

My many boxes of personal and professional files I am still sorting for my archive at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion at the Pacific School of Religion. Many boxes were sent years ago, many are still to be reviewed. I have given up my desire for putting together a scrapbook, wanting rather to “move on” rather than be kept in the past.

These archives serve as the “final resting place” of the papers of such folk and ministries as John McNeill, Janie Spahr, and the Lazarus Project (to name a few) and I would urge you to make a donation to preserve them, and include them in your will. Write to CLGS, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94709, call toll-free 800-999-0528, email clgs@clgs.org, or visit http://www.clgs.org.

The first sermon I gave to an LGBT congregation, MCC Hartford in 1974, was entitled “Letting Go.” Coming Out is ultimately about letting go, whether coming out sexually or coming out spiritually. In a post entitled “Spiritual Picassos,” I described spirituality as a process like Picasso’s life’s work, letting go of unnecessary lines in his paintings and drawings to suggest the essence of his subject.

In October I found a big box of my childhood writings: stories and poetry. When I mentioned I was surprised that there were so many, my brother reminded me, “You were always writing stories.” Somewhat arbitrarily, I selected a few for my archive and tossed the rest, so impatient was I to let go of the dross of my life!

However, one story I rescued long ago was my first childhood attempt to write a story from the Bible, the story of Joseph and his brothers. His having to let go of his family, country, safety and security, believing in his dreams, spoke to my spiritual imagination.

“You intended this for evil,” Joseph later told his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “but God intended it for good.” As I think back on my life, disappointed and disregarded by the church alongside my LGBT sisters and brothers, there is no doubt our exclusion was evil, but God has used the injustice for good to those who follow.

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

Sacred, Saving Texts

(To listen to a podcast of my sermon this past Sunday at Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, click here.)

In a recent interview, Garry Wills said, “Nabokov was right: there is no real reading but rereading. I rummage in old favorites all the time.”

Having typed this, I look across the top of my laptop and see what remains of my copy of Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek on the bookshelves in my home office. The binding is completely gone. What I see are the pages pressed together by James Baldwin’s Giovanni's Room and Dostoevsky’s The Idiot on either side. If I were to remove it, I would have to hold it as carefully as an ancient manuscript lest the pages spill all over the floor.

The professor who introduced me to this sacred text was convinced that Kazantzakis would have won the Nobel Prize for literature if he had not written in Greek. What a gifted storyteller! And thank God he met Zorba, who, in the book and possibly in real life, challenged him not just to write about religion, but to embrace a lusty, embodied spirituality.

In similar shape, on the bottom shelf, is my childhood copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, whose Boo Radley and Tom Robinson and Atticus Finch all spoke to different parts of me as a young boy who knew what it meant to be queer, to be unjustly judged, to want to work for justice. And Scout—dear Scout—I wanted to be a story teller like her. If one only reads or writes one book, this is the one!

Three books down the shelf is The (well-worn) Portable Mark Twain, whose keen wit and humor cut through my youthful piety, both religious and patriotic. Huck Finn, included in this volume, I consider the long lost friend I never met. And between Lee and Twain is James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, whose Shangri-La and valley of the Blue Moon cultivated my hunger for the contemplative life.

Worn Volumes 1 and 2 of my Norton Anthology of English Literature remind me of the road not taken as an English major (either as professor, novelist, or poet) yet revisited again and again as a reminder of the ecstatic possibilities of language. And in the center on top of my bookshelves is Shakespeare, a nine volume set published in 1863, less read than revered, symbolic of his many plays and sonnets I read and reread in less fragile editions, also on my shelves.

Less worn but more read than other books on my shelf is Henri Nouwen’s The Inner Voice of Love, whose anguish I better understood grieving his death and later, grieving the death of what I thought would be a lifelong relationship, and whose more positive entries I reread whenever I need to remind myself that I too am a beloved child of God.

Suffering severe book spine problems are books by Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, Mahatma Gandhi, J. Barrie Shepherd, Anne Lamott, Maya Angelou, and John Boswell. The most fragile of these is Mohan-Mala, A Gandhian Rosary, 366 “pearls of thought” from Gandhi, which I’ve read through daily for as many as a half-dozen years strewn throughout the decades since I acquired it at the Lake Shrine bookstore of the Self Realization Fellowship in California when I was in college. And on the same shelf is Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings and Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life, both frequently consulted.

And I’ve already written of The Temple of God’s Wounds, which I have reread almost every Holy Week since a fraternal worker in India, Rev. John Cole, gave it to me during Eastertide, 1988.

Finally, the Bibles—the most used and worn of all. My clothbound Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version is going the way of Zorba, its binding barely hanging on, curled outward, and its back cover completely detached. Inside, the pages bear underlinings and markings of agreement and disagreement, exclamation points and question marks, a few coffee or wine stains, as well as occasional welts on the thin paper caused when we were caught in an unexpected rain doing our prayers.

I can’t find the exact quote on the internet, so I paraphrase Gertrude Stein: readers have no need of heaven, for they have had books!

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes. Past posts are available in the archive in the right rail on the blogsite. Tax-deductible donations welcome! Please click here. Thank you!

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