Find Your Orlando

At first I intended only to post this rainbow flag at half-mast in front of a church—so overwhelmed and silenced I was by the carnage at the LGBT nightclub in Orlando this past weekend.

May those who lost their lives rest in peace. May those who are injured heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually. May those who lost loved ones find healing ways to grieve.

Yet, as I reviewed my notes from the international Henri Nouwen conference I attended in the Toronto area that same weekend, I found many things that might help us all, and now find myself writing a post I had intended to write next month.

A workshop on care and grieving reminded participants that “care” comes from a word that means “to lament, to grieve.” I’ve since learned that even “anger” is derived from a Norse term meaning “grief.”

“Compassion” is “to feel with,” “to suffer with.” Health care professional Saki Santorelli has described care as a “crucible for mutual transformation,” hence Michelle O’Rourke, the workshop presenter, suggested we think of ourselves as “care partners” rather than “caregivers.”

“Where two or three are gathered together,” Jesus said, “I am there…” in the care given and received.

So caring for Orlando is deeply spiritual. Yet we cannot all be in Orlando to help.

Henri’s brother Laurent spoke of how the person with multiple disabilities Henri had cared for as part of his ministry at Daybreak, the L’Arche community in Toronto, had brought him into proximity with God. “Adam helped me get to know God,” Henri wrote.

“The whole world is Daybreak,” Laurent observed, suggesting we ask ourselves, “Who is my Adam?”

This theme echoed in keynote presenter Shane Claiborne’s description of serving with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. As he departed that ministry, he asked how he might next serve God. “Calcuttas are everywhere,” Mother Teresa told him, “Find your Calcutta.”

What is your Orlando? Orlandos are everywhere. Find your Orlando.

Nouwen’s friend and literary executrix, Sister Sue Mosteller, had opened the conference with a story about visiting an art gallery with Henri. Henri sat down in front of the first painting, so she joined him on the bench as he intently gazed upon it. Time passed.

She explained to us that her usual way of visiting a gallery was to look at a painting and read the little card beside it before moving on to the next painting. She was feeling a bit restless, and, after 15 minutes had passed, she finally asked Henri, “What are you doing?” To which Henri replied, surprised, “Are you not in the picture?” Suddenly Sue realized that he was in the south of France, strolling in the fields with van Gogh.

Our encounter with scripture is much the same. Often we read a text without putting ourselves in the story. Contemplation helps us to place ourselves in what we are reading. I realized that contemplating sacred texts is less about finding God than finding ourselves, our true selves in God’s eyes.

And just as many read scripture as if it were a newspaper, we read the newspaper as if it weren’t a transcendental conduit, a sacred text inviting us to put ourselves in its stories.

We are the ones massacred and wounded in the Orlando nightclub. We are their lovers and families and friends awaiting word of their fate, and inconsolably grieving when it is known. We are the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Latino/Latina communities who are targets of hate. We are the Muslims fearful of the prejudice and suspicion engendered by such violence. And—and this is harder to imagine—we are the gunman armed with religious intolerance, sometimes even of one’s self.

I am crying as I complete this post. I am in Orlando, and Orlando is in me. My consolation is that Jesus is there and here too in the community of care such crises awaken.

Related Posts:

We’ll Always Have Paris

Newtown to Newcountry? “We Must Change.”

Wounding God  (Charleston)

What I Love about the U.S.A. (San Bernardino)

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

The Natural World Is Super Enough

Last week, subscribers received a link that failed to work! I substituted a better one for Teresa of Avila’s quote.

Pope Francis recognized a second miracle associated with Mother Teresa, meaning she will soon be canonized as a saint.

When I visited her home for the dying in Calcutta, a woman in front of me whined contemptuously to a companion, “Do you think Mother Teresa is a saint?” I held my peace, as this woman had been antagonistic during most of our Fordham University religious studies tour of India, severely testing my contemplative reading about non-violence during the trip, selected writings of Gandhi.

To me, Mother Teresa’s whole life was a miracle, far surpassing any unexplained healings from those who pray for her intercession.

Miracles do not convince me. What Mother Teresa did “naturally” is enough.

I’ve been reading through Matthew lately and I love Jesus’ teachings, but am put off by the many miracle stories recorded in the gospel. I believe Jesus was a healer in a larger sense, bringing spiritual healing to individuals, neighborhoods, even rivals. But I can’t fathom the “unnatural” and, in my mind, unlikely restorations of sight, hearing, and speech.

I eventually stopped reading Autobiography of a Yogi by one of my spiritual heroes, Paramahansa Yogananda, when I became overwhelmed by the increasingly magical elements of his self-reporting, though I learned in a recent documentary about his life that the book was the only one Steve Jobs had on his iPad.

I feel pretty much the same way about Jesus’ miracle stories. For a long time I’ve interpreted these metaphorically, or considered them a retrospective hagiographical portrait of Jesus painted by his early followers.  “No signs shall be given this generation,” Jesus was believed to have said, but he ironically delivered many signs and wonders, according to the Gospels.

Personally I don’t feel a spiritual need for the supernatural; the natural world is super enough! That’s one of the things we learn from the great mystics, our spiritual poets, as well as scientists.

The natural world seems so miraculous, from infinitesimal neutrinos and organisms to galaxies far, far away (homage to the Star Wars’ fresh release, wink-wink) in space and time, one shouldn’t need an interruption or intervention of the natural order to believe in a Higher Power—why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face and the brain in your head and the heart of your compassion.

Even if there are dimensions of reality as yet unrecognized by our limited perceptions, that doesn’t make them magical or supernatural, just unperceived. I for one am hoping against hope that death is but an entrance into another dimension of existence. If not, the life I’ve been given is miracle enough.

Over the Christmas holidays, watching again several versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I realized that Scrooge’s resurrection is the most accessible and believable miracle that the birth of Jesus invites. Scrooge becomes downright giddy and playful, gracious and generous, embracing life and others and causes with gusto.

“God brought you to life with Christ,” Saint Paul wrote the church at Ephesus. Contemplating this long ago, I realized how true this was for me. And it’s taken a lifetime to get used to it.

Jesus has given me a life. You too.

A reading for Christmastide: The Soul Feels Its Worth

My personal pick for “the” Moment of the Year 2015.

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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.