Vacation & Vocation

A neighbor's peaceful pathway.

Very early one morning I saw a woman doing a walking meditation, such as Buddhists do, pausing after each step taken, perhaps pondering a koan. As I drew closer, I realized the “koan” she concentrated on so intently was, in truth, an iPad. 

Running through the park, I approached a young man sitting in the lotus position, his face downturned in meditation. As I passed by, however, I saw his thumbs busily texting.

On each occasion, the only hope of my original fantasy was that they were tweeting or texting their spiritual directors or gurus!

We all know of such impulses to check tweets, messages, e-mails, and news media! C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters comes to mind, in which Screwtape advises Wormwood, his tempter in training, to put into his ward’s head the impulse to take a break just as he’s about to discover something important to his spiritual progress, thus distracting him.

One dictionary defines vocation as “an impulse to perform a certain function.” Vacation is defined as freedom from such an impulse, a letting go of our compulsions to do things we have always done, a release from doing things the way we have always done them. Thus vacation invites play.

I’ve known too many people, including clergy, who brag about never or rarely taking a vacation. In my view, vacation is a vital balance to vocation, as necessary to one’s work as sleep and nutrition and compensation.

Some of us get away from our work by going away, but others of us get away from our work by going within: inside ourselves, listening to that inner voice that is the root of the word “vocation.”

I’ve been reading a lot about the spiritualities of the desert: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. The desert is an excellent place to listen for God’s voice, our own voice, the voice of a lover or friend or calling. Distractions are diminished, silence surrounds, we may breathe easier, we may breathe.

In deserts, Moses heard God’s voice, Miriam danced, Elijah listened for “a voice of a gentle stillness,” Naomi accepted Ruth’s vow, Jesus pondered his vocation and found lonely places to pray, Amma Theodora identified acedia (spiritual lethargy), Muhammad received his divine mission. 

Progressive Christians have our wilderness too. We are letting go of religious compulsions to rediscover the God of the desert (metaphorically).

Writing of desert spirituality in Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton concluded that “without the disquieting capacity to see and to repudiate the idolatry of devout ideas and imaginings…the Christian cannot be delivered from the smug self-assurance of the devout ones who know all the answers in advance, who possess all the clichés of the inner life and can defend themselves with infallible ritual forms against every risk and every demand of dialogue with human need and human desperation [108-9].”

Perhaps vacation from religious compulsion is also our vocation.

This post appeared on this blog on July 11, 2012.

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Copyright © 2012 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

A Grief Observed

Hobbes resting just last month. Photos by Wade Jones.

Maybe a scholarly English gentleman like C. S. Lewis can observe his grief with detachment, but most of us would rather write something like “Wracked with Grief” to best capture the panic that ensues with great loss.

I read Lewis’s A Grief Observed in youth when I knew far less about grief than I do now. I can’t find my copy, but I remember a passage in which Lewis describes wanting to bang on the gates of heaven after the early death of his wife, to whom he was married late in life and for only a few years. As I recall, he came to believe his panic shut heaven’s gates even tighter.

Right now I am preparing to facilitate a spiritual formation course on the Beatitudes, based on a text by its instructor, my friend J. Marshall Jenkins, entitled Blessed at the Broken Places. Hemingway’s concept in A Farewell to Arms that we become “strong at the broken places,” spiritual director, campus chaplain, and therapist Jenkins adapts to interpret Jesus’ sayings that the poor in spirit, those who grieve, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and so on, are “blessed”—not “happy” as the Beatitudes have sometimes been mistranslated—but “blessed” with sacred possibilities.

He reminds us that much in the Bible is a crying out from a poverty of spirit or goods or well-being or freedom or equality, from Exodus to Job to the Psalms to the Prophets to the Gospels. Thus I would challenge Lewis’ notion (as I recall it) that panic automatically closes doors to God’s comfort and care and compassion. “Out of the depths I cry to thee,” the psalmist and our liturgies cry. “I have heard their cry,” Yahweh says of the oppressed Hebrews.

That may be why Matthew’s version of the Beatitudes begins with “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” We need to know our need, to have humility, to ask for help, whether from God or others.

Though some may think this an unworthy grief, the death of our beloved dog, Hobbes, two weeks ago came crashing down on us. (See last week’s post, “Hobbes Found Me,” for her great significance to me.) After months of stressful caregiving, we made the difficult decision to have an in-home euthanasia when she could no longer walk or stand, having lost weight and muscle mass because of her greatly diminished appetite and nausea related to a mass on her liver. She was also nearly 16 years old, aged for a Lab/retriever mix. 

Wade and I sobbed at the choice, and, as I had done when I needed to do the same for her companion dog, Calvin, I wailed like a banshee! And unanticipated grief comes here and there and now and then, as we notice her missing, from our walks and naps and meals to her many corners and places in our home where she liked to sit or sleep or look out. Think Tiny Tim’s empty chimney corner multiplied by the dozens.

And then I have been wracked with guilt about our decision to euthanize her. Multiply that second-guessing many times and you know the wariness of making end-of-life decisions for family members, or a woman’s decision to end a pregnancy. That’s why those families and those women need all the support we can provide.

Something in the not-yet-published Blessed at the Broken Places helped me with my second-guessing. Jenkins points out that Jesus does not say that those who are righteous will be blessed, but rather those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be blessed. Believing one is righteous easily leads to self-righteousness, an absurd notion of perfection, with no need for God’s help. It is those who hunger and thirst for righteousness who will be blessed.

Trying to do the right thing for our dear dog was our hungering and thirsting for the good, the right, the compassionate. My preoccupation with whether or not we did the right thing at the right time was coming from my perfectionism, a need to justify myself (even in this post!), rather than rely on God’s grace (and that of my readers, as well as of Hobbes!).

I also realized it was a way to avoid fully embracing my grief at our loss, and in “our” I include Hobbes as well as Wade and me. Over-analysis was causing paralysis in my grieving process.

In my book, Henri’s Mantle, I described our need to “stand under” grief rather than attempt to “understand” grief, using a concept of the novelist Albert Camus that trying to understand something is often a wish to be in control, to have “superior” knowledge, to be on top of things, as it were.

Jesus’ Beatitudes are all about “standing under,” knowing our needs, trusting his path.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” We’re still a mess, but neighbors, friends, and family have offered comfort with visits, hugs, Facebook “likes” and messages, e-mails, cards, phone calls, flowers, wine, and even brownies. Thank you! And Jesus has offered comfort through the Beatitudes, and providentially at this time, a fresh interpretation of them.

We are also blessed by our many happy memories of our dear friend, Hobbes, whose absence highlights the joy she brought us and the love we exchanged that will endure long after our present pain. Thank you, Hobbes, and thanks be to God for you!

Hobbes waiting for a treat from our table.

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

Something Divinely Providential about Our Deaths

I think we got off on the wrong foot, believing that death came into the world because of sin. If there is something divinely providential about our lives, there must be something divinely providential about our deaths. In the language of the previous post, “The Universe in Your Soul,” the cosmos that begat life must have also begat death.

This insight, this revelation, came to me as clear as day while reading Julian of Norwich’s Revelations one morning. And it gave me great peace, and dare I say, bliss. I felt as I imagine C. S. Lewis’s wife did when she was “surprised by joy.”

Was it something Julian said? Probably, but not directly. The idea welled up in me as she described our yearning to see the face of God, though I don’t assume as she does that death provides that experience. Neither do I reject that hope. After all, if we can imagine an infinite multiverse, who knows what death may bring?

I believe that whatever death means, it is intended as providentially as our lives.  It is part of the natural order of things or the divine order of things, however one chooses to view it.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” in death as in life. “In life and in death we belong to God.”

Because we resist death, and our deaths in particular, as part of life, we view death as a kind of failure rather than an accomplishment or completion. It is not only the medical profession that suffers this. Because long ago death was associated with sin, even those who don’t think much about sin may search obituaries for self-inflicted causes, even if it’s simply to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I wrote a sonnet to a friend in college that rather romantically compared our life cycle with that of alpine wildflowers, ending with the couplet:

And then someday we’ll lose compose

While out of us, another grows.

Even then I wanted to be buried straight into the ground, recycled, as it were, into the earth, and into other forms of life.

But recycling has other expressions. 

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” Jesus said.

Having sold only two paintings in his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “Life is only a kind of sowing time; the harvest is not here.”

Echoing this, Henri Nouwen spoke of the “fruitfulness of our lives” that may only be realized after our brief lifespans.

In one of her letters of spiritual direction, Evelyn Underhill wrote, “No one, not even the greatest saint, is irreplaceable. It is a greater act of trust and love to give your work into fresh hands…”

Finally, it takes an artist like Van Gogh seeing death as if for the first time to observe: 

It certainly is a strange phenomenon that all the artists, poets, musicians, painters, are unfortunate in material things…  That brings up again the eternal question: is the whole of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side [of] death we see one hemisphere only? 

Painters—to take them only—dead and buried, speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations through their work.

Is that all, or is there more besides? In a painter’s life death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is.

For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this, that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train. 

So it seems to me possible that cholera, gravel, phthisis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. 

My preference would be to go there on foot, but regardless of how I get there, I hope to trust the benevolent providence of God and the universe. They’ve been doing life and death much, much longer and better than I have.

Readers are this blog’s only means of support. To donate, please click here or mail to Metropolitan Community Churches, 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 © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Vacation and Vocation

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Readers are this blog’s only means of support. Tax-deductible donations to this Emerging Ministry may be given online or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Thank you!

Chris hopes to see those of you in or near Roanoke, VA, this weekend at one or more of his events related to the theme “Claim the God in You!” beginning with lunch, Fri. July 13, two events on Sat. July 14, and morning worship Sun. July 15, hosted by the MCC of the Blue Ridge. Everyone is welcome! See details on the church’s website, clicking on the far right box: MCCBR Retreat.

Very early one morning I saw a woman doing a walking meditation, such as Buddhists do, pausing after each step taken, perhaps pondering a koan. As I drew closer, I realized the “koan” she concentrated on so intently was, in truth, an iPad. 

Running through the park, I approached a young man sitting in the lotus position, his face downturned in meditation. As I passed by, however, I saw his thumbs busily texting. 

On each occasion, the only hope of my original fantasy was that they were tweeting or texting their spiritual directors or gurus! 

We all know of such impulses to check tweets, messages, e-mails, and news media! C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters comes to mind, in which Screwtape advises Wormwood, his tempter in training, to put into his ward’s head the impulse to take a break just as he’s about to discover something important to his spiritual progress, thus distracting him. 

One dictionary defines vocation as “an impulse to perform a certain function.” Vacation is defined as freedom from such an impulse, a letting go of our compulsions to do things we have always done, a release from doing things the way we have always done them. Thus vacation invites play. 

I’ve known too many people, including clergy, who brag about never or rarely taking a vacation. In my view, vacation is a vital balance to vocation, as necessary to one’s work as sleep and nutrition and compensation. 

Some of us get away from our work by going away, but others of us get away from our work by going within: inside ourselves, listening to that inner voice that is the root of the word “vocation.” 

I’ve been reading a lot about the spiritualities of the desert: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. The desert is an excellent place to listen for God’s voice, our own voice, the voice of a lover or friend or calling. Distractions are diminished, silence surrounds, we may breathe easier, we may breathe. 

In deserts, Moses heard God’s voice, Miriam danced, Elijah listened for “a voice of a gentle stillness,” Naomi accepted Ruth’s vow, Jesus pondered his vocation and found lonely places to pray, Amma Theodora identified acedia (spiritual lethargy), Muhammad received his divine mission. 

Progressive Christians have our wilderness too. We are letting go of religious compulsions to rediscover the God of the desert (metaphorically).  

Writing of desert spirituality in Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton concluded that “without the disquieting capacity to see and to repudiate the idolatry of devout ideas and imaginings…the Christian cannot be delivered from the smug self-assurance of the devout ones who know all the answers in advance, who possess all the clichés of the inner life and can defend themselves with infallible ritual forms against every risk and every demand of dialogue with human need and human desperation.”  

Perhaps vacation from religious compulsion is also our vocation.

+++

 

Read Glaser’s recent Huffington Post columns:

Modern Marriage Is Not Biblical

Anderson Cooper, Welcome to the Club!

BEWARE OF THE GOD!

According to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the chief end of humanity is “to enjoy God and glorify God forever.” How many of us actually “enjoy” God?

A former missionary told me a childhood experience of being taught in church that if he prayed diligently enough, God would heal his ailing grandfather. So he prayed three times a day on his knees. When his grandfather died anyway, he felt terrified, believing that God must be some sort of monster to let such a beloved man as his grandfather die. He told me that’s why, a few weeks later at a revival, he “accepted Jesus.” He wanted to be on the good side of this Monster God.

That week, walking my dog, I noticed lettering on a fence that was intended to read, “Beware of the dog.” But two of the letters were missing—so that it read “Beware of the g.” My mischievous mind couldn’t help but think, “Beware of the god,” and I thought that would be an appropriate sign to have on too many churches: BEWARE OF THE GOD. Believe me, you can’t enjoy a God of which you have to beware, nor can you enjoy God in a church that bites you.

As a teenager, C. S. Lewis was the first intellectually rigorous Christian writer that I read. He gave me a framework of reason on which to hang my more intuitive faith of the heart. Not long ago, I picked up Walter Hooper’s C. S. Lewis: Readings for Meditation and Reflection, and began using it during my morning prayers. But in the weeks that followed I found I disagreed with some of Lewis's notions and switched to a different writer. Lewis was too reminiscent of the God I had grown up with, who, while not a monster, is not the God I enjoy today.  Not long after, I gave Lewis another try and decided that there was enough helpful stuff to put up with areas of disagreement.

As with the Bible, we may read all inspirational books critically, as well as listen to every sermon and reading and hymn with the questions: 

Does this speak to me?

Does this match my own experience?

Do I really believe this? 

What’s wrong with this picture?

What part is really helpful?

One entry from Lewis was entitled, “We delight to praise.” He pictures our ultimate enjoyment of God to be like lovers spiraling higher and higher in their love as they praise one another’s attributes: “You have such a great sense of humor.” “I like the shape of your nose.” “Your eyes are so expressive.” “I admire your integrity.” “I appreciate your honesty.” “I love being close to you.” “I love holding you…you holding me.”

He writes that such heavenly praise:

…Does not mean, as it can so dismally suggest, that it is like “being in church.” For our “services,” both in their conduct and in our power to participate, are merely attempts at worship; never fully successful, often 99.9 per cent failures, sometimes total failures. We are not riders but pupils in the riding school; for most of us, the falls and bruises, the aching muscles and the severity of the exercise, far outweigh those few moments in which we were, to our own astonishment, actually galloping without terror and without disaster.

As a runner, I love getting into a similar “zone,” that delightful focus “galloping” for miles in the sun and the breeze. One time, someone from a car distracted me with annoying questions, and I fell headlong onto the sidewalk, bloodying my hands and knees. 

For many of us, our disappointments in church or with God may distract us from enjoying God, and we can fall headlong into anger or resentment or self-pity. I was tempted in my running mishap to fall headlong into anger or resentment or self-pity. But I remembered the Brazilian marathon runner in the Athens Olympics who had his dreams of Olympic gold dashed by a priest knocking him out of the roadway in a crazy attempt to make some religious statement. The Brazilian, who came in third, receiving the bronze, was so gracious that he was also awarded the medal for the most sportsmanlike conduct of the games.

It’s too easy to be knocked out of the zone, enjoying God, by some misguided theology or religious zealot. Getting back on the horse or back in the race is too frequently our challenge.