Held by God

Following last week’s reprise of A Healing Touch, this September 28, 2016 post reminds us that we are ultimately held by God. Given the verdict yesterday, you may want to read, "I Can't Breathe!"

Okay, so now you’re gonna think I’ve gone off the deep end. 

I’ve had a lot going on lately, and when I wake at night, I start thinking of all those things I need to do, should have done, am anxious about. I don’t mind when I use such nocturnal musings constructively, as when a post or talk or retreat comes to me and I develop it, lying still. But when my thoughts serve no purpose, I am bothered that I’m losing sleep over them. The worry gene runs in my family, so I’m not alone. 

Lately my usual way of simply blocking thoughts, or using a mantra, verse, short prayer, or Psalm 23 has not been working, so I’ve discovered a new strategy. 

I imagine I’m being held by God: the soft bedding, the warmth of Wade, the firmness of the mattress, the caress of the ceiling fan, the enveloping darkness become God holding me. And lest you think I am centering God on me, I believe this is true for everyone. 

Process theology talks of the cosmos as God’s “body.” God is not separate from the world—what is material is God’s incarnation, God’s embodiment. And body theologians try to recover the body as a locus of divinity. So I do have theological legs to stand on. 

And Christianity’s premise is the Incarnation, that God became one of us, and offers God’s body and blood that we may become the Body of Christ, an agent of redemption in the world. So I also have a Christian leg to stand on. 

Jesus said the kingdom or commonwealth of God was coming into the world and already in our midst. The trajectory of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that of God coming into the world, not abandoning it. And Paul remarked that the whole creation was groaning in birthpangs to bring something new into the world, and that in God “we live and move and have our being.” So I have a biblical leg to stand on. 

I also believe that I’m a part of God as well, so I think of cuddling with Wade as having divine inspiration. Teresa of Avila said that on earth, God’s body, Christ’s body is our own. And Augustine’s spiritual goal was resting in God. So I have church tradition behind me. 

My “ah-hah” is how good it feels to be held by God and to hold as God. It awakens a new kind of eroticism, if you will, that feeling of bliss one experiences in the unity of lovemaking or prayermaking. I’ve written elsewhere that “eros” is our “urge to merge,” what inspires the lover as well as the mystic. 

I’ve also spoken and written about the Beloved Disciple, who lay his head on Jesus’ chest during the Last Supper, “listening for the heartbeat of God,” as Celtic Christianity would have it. I’ve poked fun at recent English translations of that passage that seem to keep distancing the beloved disciple until I fear the next translation will have the beloved disciple in another room entirely! 

The NRSV translates simply that the beloved disciple is “reclining next” to Jesus. But it also translates John 1:18  as Jesus being “close to the Father’s heart” rather than the actual meaning, that Jesus is “close to the Father’s bosom.” 

What I believe is that we fear such intimacy with God, one of the earliest themes of my writing on spirituality, a cover article for Presbyterian Survey in the 1980s. 

Jesus experienced or was experienced as being a child of God, the essence of Yahweh, and the mystical gospel writer John declared that Jesus came so that we might all be children of God. So I have a mystic’s reason for my experience. 

I encourage you—no, I urge you—imagine yourself being held and touched and cuddled by God. Imagine God dwelling in you, your breath, your body, your touch. 

It feels good because it is good. 

 

FYI-I considered retiring from my blog on its tenth anniversary in February but didn’t want to “abandon” readers during the pandemic! My brother suggested I run “the best of” posts, and I decided to run past posts that speak to our current experience. This will also give me the opportunity to write a new post occasionally. Thanks for your continued interest! 

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

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

Easter Rising and Saint Patrick

 

Today I will fix my traditional St. Patrick’s Day dinner of corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, and carrots. 

I’ve always loved the story of Patrick, an English youth enslaved by the Irish, who, after escaping, became a priest and returned to evangelize his former oppressors. And, in How the Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill asserts Patrick was “the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against slavery.” 

Yet even more I love the stories of how Christianity blended with the earlier Celtic spirituality of the British Isles to offer a spiritual alternative to Rome/Hierarchy/Augustine/Original Sin/Organizational Man/ Peter.  

Celtic Christianity, whose model was the beloved disciple whose head rested on Jesus’ breast during the Last Supper “listening for the heartbeat of God,” offered more equality between male and female leadership and less differentiation between clergy and laity, permitted married and unmarried clergy, innovated the use of soul friends/guides, believed redemption was possible through either sacraments or nature, recognized and valued the theophanies of the natural world, and recognized that everyone was a child of God, created in God’s image. 

If only that characterized the global church today! 

I fancy that I may be related spiritually and politically to Ireland, not just biologically. My Irish ancestral name is Plunkett. In the 17^th century, Archbishop Oliver Plunkett, Primate of All Ireland, became its last Roman Catholic martyr. Canonized in 1975, he is regarded as Ireland’s patron saint for peace and reconciliation. 

In the 20^th century, young poet and journalist Joseph Plunkett was one of the instigators (all ultimately executed by firing squad) of the Easter Rising of 1916, whose centennial I was reminded of by reading Timothy Egan’s column, “Irish Spring.” 

Egan reminds readers, not only of the Irish struggle for independence, but of its seven-century history of having its culture disrespected and the resulting poverty, starvation, and injustice it endured. The “troubles” of Northern Ireland, he writes, were finally (mostly) resolved by the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. 

As a progressive Christian, I appreciate the spiritual and political woven together in me/us like the intertwining strands depicted on Celtic symbols, from the Celtic knot to the Celtic cross. I like to think that Oliver’s spiritual fealty and Joseph’s political passion might be “genetic,” and that I may have inherited my spiritual/political bent. 

What strikes me is that the Easter Rising, which occurred during Easter Week (which is not Holy Week but the week following Easter) may have had spiritual inspiration in the story of Resurrection. And that the Good Friday Agreement may have had spiritual impetus in the story of Atonement. 

I wrote in my second book that the nexus of politics and faith is the cross. Every time we enter a church and see a cross or crucifix, we are confronted with a political reality, because the cross was a political solution of empire. So the political is at the heart of our spirituality. We cannot ignore it, nor can we segregate these two realms. 

Jesus was a political victim, not a theological one. It doesn’t mean his sacrifice is any less noble or godly or transforming. 

As I wrote in Coming Out as Sacrament, the crucifixion was our idea, not God’s. God’s will is made known in resurrection—always resurrection, however we understand it. 

 

I offered this post on March 16, 2016. It has been amended to reflect being reposted today, St. Patrick’s Day. We've just passed a half-million visitors, not including five-hundred free weekly subscribers! 

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

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

Caesar and God

“Give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s”

Last week’s post was declined by at least two mainstream Christian Facebook pages that had always seemed to welcome my free, ad-free weekly posts. The admins who declined them determined them “political,” unsuitable for their Christian audience. One even claimed that spirituality had nothing to do with politics!

As long as everyday Christians avoid the marketplace of ideas, extremist Christians will seem the prevailing voice of Christianity and/or the church. As Bishop Spong has said, religion is like a public pool: all the noise comes from the shallow end.

My post challenged a reactionary politician’s rejection of one of my Celtic Christian spiritual saints, Pelagius. Yes, he was declared a heretic, but initially by the State and not by the Pope at the time. In J. Philip Newell’s words in Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality: 

Two attempts were made to condemn [Pelagius] in 415, but twice Pelagius was acquitted by the Church in Palestine. In 416 Augustine and the African bishops reacted by convening two diocesan councils, at which Pelagius and his Celtic friend Celestius were condemned. In the following year the Pope himself convened a synod in Rome to consider the conflict; here Pelagius’ teaching was declared entirely true and orthodox. 

In an attempt to reconcile Pelagius’ emphasis on our essential goodness with Augustine’s emphasis on the prevalence of evil, the Pope wrote to the African bishops, “Love peace, prize love, strive after harmony. For it is written, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”  

The Pope’s guidance was not heeded by Augustine [who championed the concepts of “human depravity” and “original sin”] and the Western Church began to lose sight of the essential God-given goodness of the human. This loss would have implications for the Church’s perspective on the world, as a fundamentally unholy realm [p 20]. 

When tested by religious leaders about the relationship of faith to empire, Jesus famously said, “Give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s.” Of course, in our faith, everything belongs to God. Some conservative/reactionary Christians instead see Jesus drawing a line between religion and politics, citing the apostle Paul’s dictum about obeying authorities.  Progressive Christians, on the other hand, see Jesus declaring the political realm also an avenue for welcoming the kingdom, or commonwealth, of God. 

So many political advances would not have been made without Christian and more broadly religious investment: more humane treatment of those who break the law, which led to establishing prisons and reform movements instead of inflicting physical punishment or death; the abolition of slavery and the much later Civil Rights Movement; the establishment of social safety nets to alleviate poverty, hunger, homelessness, and lack of education. 

Jesus was crucified for his political views, even if betrayed by religious colleagues. The cross was an execution by the state, the Roman Empire. If it were for religious reasons, he would have been stoned. 

Some of our present religious colleagues would like to silence or betray those of us with progressive views on refugees, immigrants, racial justice, women, LGBTQ people, peace, and justice. Theirs should not be the only Christian voices heard in the media and on social networks.

 

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely in Chris Glaser’s name to the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you! 

Copyright © 2021 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

"Take Heart, It Is I, Do Not Be Afraid!"

The anxious uncertainty of the U.S. elections coupled with the anxiety of the worldwide pandemic prompts me to reprise the February 1, 2017 post entitled “You Can Walk through a Storm.” I schedule posts on Tuesday for Wednesday publication and thus have no idea how the election will turn out, but there may be a protracted process calming the electoral waters, thus the need to reach out to One who can “still the waters.”

There’s a wonderful biblical story about the disciples seeing Jesus strolling on a stormy Sea of Galilee. Peter decides to join him, only to falter, frightened by the strong wind, and begins to sink. He cries to Jesus, “Lord, save me!” Jesus comes to the rescue, chiding him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

I was helping with a spiritual formation course on discernment the week of the U.S. election in 2016. The morning after, sensing the downcast feelings of many if not most of us, instructor Marjorie Thompson (Soul Feast) began the class with a rhetorical question, “Does God still reign?” As I recall, she repeated it a couple of times for emphasis, smiling. “Does God still reign?” To the participants, however we felt about the election results, the answer was obvious. Yes, of course, God still reigns.

It reminded me of a visit to the Capitol Hill office of Mary Jane Patterson, the Presbyterian Church lobbyist in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan presidency. An African American longtime activist on behalf of all kinds of progressive causes, the plaque prominently displayed on her desk grabbed my attention, “This too shall pass.” My inquiry about it brought a mischievous smile and a twinkle of an eye to her face, and without a word, she communicated her hope about future administrations.

Teilhard de Chardin, whose essay “A Note on Progress” was the subject of my post last week, did not come to his faith in the future in a storm-free place, but rather, as a stretcher bearer in the trenches of World War I.  In Christ of the Celts, J. Philip Newell reminded me of that:

As Teilhard wrote after the harrowing Battle of Ypres in 1915, “More than ever I believe that life is beautiful.” … As he agonized over what was happening between the nations and personally despaired about the direction of the world, he heard himself being addressed by Christ, “Ego sum, noli timere (It is I, be not afraid).”

These were the words the disciples heard when they witnessed Jesus walking on the waters of the storm on Galilee, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Fellow Jesuit scholar John McNeill (The Church and the Homosexual) experienced Christ also on the battlefields, that of World War II.  As I wrote on this blog on the occasion of his death:

Being silenced by the church and then ousted from the Jesuits gave him the opportunity to fulfill a greater calling than he originally anticipated when, as a starving prisoner of war during WW II, a slave laborer, at risk of death from a vigilant SS guard, tossed him a potato, making the sign of the cross. John dated his priesthood from the moment of that courageous and compassionate act.

During the spiritual formation course on discernment, a participant came to me, her fear palpable, wondering what the election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence could mean for her and her partner. I had met this couple when they attended my course on Henri Nouwen earlier in the fall. I tried to assure her, but I’ve found similar apprehension among all kinds of people, even among likely Trump voters, who fear what this administration bodes for us.

It deeply troubles me how my hopes and so many others’ hopes in the future have been dashed.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” was my high school principal’s favorite song, and, with the school choir, The Chanters, I would sing it with passion and pride whenever we performed it for him. James B. Taylor, an African American, was very popular with students, faculty, and parents, but had been prevented from buying a home for his family in the neighborhoods surrounding the school, and this was in “liberal” California in the 1960s!

“When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from Carousel begins, and “though your dreams be tossed and blown,” concludes with the assurance, “You’ll never walk alone.”

“Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

“Does God still reign?”

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

The God of Anticipation

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life,” Simone Weil famously said, a quote I have used several times in my writings. But I wonder if she would be satisfied with this translation. In her “Spiritual Autobiography,” a letter to a Roman Catholic priest, she declares that the Greek word for “steadfastness” is “more beautiful” than the Latin word for patience, derived from the word for suffering. And one of my favorite biblical descriptions of God highlights his/her/their “steadfast love.”

Perhaps “waiting steadfast* in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life” is a better rendering of her insight. “Steadfast in expectation” sounds like “anticipation” to me.

I stretch this quote because of an “aha” I’ve recently experienced. God is a God of anticipation for me right now—anticipation of the end of the pandemic, but also anticipation of the end of my life.

We see this God of anticipation in our biblical tradition.

“I will be what I will be,” Moses hears from the blazing wilderness shrub as Yahweh commissions him to deliver a message to Pharaoh to “let my people go.”

“Behold I am doing a new thing,” Yahweh says through Isaiah.

“Follow me,” Jesus invited.

“I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, you will be guided into all the truth,” Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper. “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am, there you may be also.”

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth,” Jesus said in his final parting.

“I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” the mystic John testified of God’s future. “See, the home of God is among mortals.”

The kingdom or commonwealth of God is even now revealing itself to us. I witness a parallel in the Tao of Taoism and the “thin places” between heaven and earth in Celtic spirituality.

Recently I was quite taken with an ending of a prayer of an MCC pastor and leader that went something like this, “in the names of how you have been experienced in the past and the names of how you will be experienced in the future.”

Anticipation lifts us up. Etty Hillesum, who died at Auschwitz, wrote in her diary that she thought of God as her best self. My own experience is that simply the thought of God lifts me to my better self.

Undoubtedly a spin from my Process theology view—as I reflect on the universe, I see a process that anticipates life, that anticipates sentient beings who make the universe aware of its very existence, how it came to be, its possible meanings, as well as its hope for deliverance from its own destructive elements, whether viral as in a pandemic, or human when we disregard one another and our environment.

That process is how I am thinking of God in these difficult days.

*I chose not to use the seemingly more appropriate word “steadfastly” because it applies to the following phrase “in expectation” rather than the previous word “waiting.”

Recent posts that offer hope during our pandemic:

The Pandemic’s Monastic Opportunity

The World Is My Cloister

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

Earth, Air, Water, and Fire

Sunset on the Nile, January 1981 - crg

I offer four meditations from my book Communion of Life that celebrates the gifts of earth, air, water and fire. You will better understand how Celtic spirituality and Celtic Christianity deeply touch me.

Cycle One: Day 1 Earth

Sacred earth :

Holding us fast,

Whirling to keep us steady,

Shifting axis to temper climate,

Yielding nutrients of life.

Holy ground :

A grassy belly cradling us in rest,

A rounded, rocky bosom inspiring dreamers,

A birth canal whose current is destiny.

Grateful, grateful am I,

To stand, to sit, to lie on you,

To ride, to sail, to drive on you,

To look down, to look up, to look out

And see you there.

Sacred ground,

I remove my shoes in reverence.

Cycle Three: Day 10 Air

The sun’s glory

Wraps around us,

Dives into valleys,

Peaks behind ridges,

Slinks through city streets,

Explodes on beaches

As if through thin air.

The sun’s grandeur

Glows green through branches,

Bounces lavender off irises,

Mushrooms grey above factories,

Canopies blue on clear days,

Gilds with age,

As if through thin air.

The sun’s gospel

Proclaimed to earth’s ends

Effortlessly, gracefully,

Baptizing us all,

Just and unjust,

Believer and nonbeliever,

Grateful and ungrateful,

Enlightened and unenlightened—

Immersing us all

In our star’s splashing splendor

As if through thin air.

Cycle Two: Day 7 Water

You live within me—

In my eyes, in my flesh,

In my thoughts, in my movements :

My liquidity.

You cleanse me inside and out,

Rinsing each cell,

Flushing out toxins,

Boiling out sweat,

Crying out grief.

Most of me is you.

Before air, I knew you,

Bundled by embryonic fluids :

Echo of primordial waters

Where first were fused

Earth, air, water, fire,

The things that make for life.

As you held me,

Now I hold you,

Precious, unasked gift from eternity—

Living water.

Cycle Eleven: Day 44 Fire

You have been the center of our dance.

From bonfires ablaze to candles flickering,

Wildly we have swung around you,

Howling, shouting, singing, chanting,

Igniting our passion for uniting

For war, for the hunt, for community, for the gods.

Flame mesmerized by flame :

Our burning, restless insides

Stretch outside unfired clay

For flames of unity, at-one-ment in immolation :

The burning flash of bullets and bombs,

The stinging, fatal wound by carnivores,

The searing of the heretic at the stake,

The burnt offering of sacrifice.

Attacking the enemy,

Devouring our prey,

Excommunicating the stranger,

Slaughtering a scapegoat

Do not make us one.

We are one—

With one another and the gods,

With the enemy, the prey, the stranger, the scapegoat—

Clay lamps burning with the same divine starstuff

That prompts bowing in reverence and awe

Before one another.

To know more about how the book came to be, see my earlier post “Communion of Life.”

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Copyright © 2018 and Communion of Life copyright © 1999 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Self-Examination and Childhood Quirks

With Celtic Cross at Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta.

Photo by Wade Jones

This weekend I am looking forward to seeing those of you coming to Kirkridge for its Celebration of LGBTQ Lives over the past 40 years. One or two places are available, but call rather than register on the site: http://www.kirkridge.org/?e=event&eventId=26746&rDate=1504878949

My recent post critiquing white supremacy prompted a reader to provide a link to his Facebook post about his own white privilege. It was a remarkable self-examination, profoundly confessional, that would inspire all white people to consider our unearned advantages in this world. I believe his thoroughgoing analysis can lead to positive action.

But I have known others stymied by over-analyzing themselves, and I have tried to avoid this myself.

I had a friend in a congregation I served who had trouble committing himself to any church event, program, or mission. He would always say, “I’m re-examining my priorities.” He would miss or leave early or show up late for a meeting or day-long workshop or weekend retreat because he could never fully commit himself. Even when he enjoyed a long-term relationship, he and his partner had date nights for outside encounters.

When I was a child I had what my family kindly referred to as a benign “quirk,” occasionally looking up for no apparent reason. It was only toward the end of my mother’s life that I explained why. Every time I had a sinful or uncharitable thought, I would look up to God, asking forgiveness.

It is said that Martin Luther was so fastidious accounting for his sins that his confessor grew frustrated and impatient. It was this very obsessive practice that may have led him to his breakthrough about being saved by faith in God’s grace alone.

I had to give up my childhood quirk for similar reasons. Not only was it burdensome, but one I had to practice surreptitiously in public, even though I attended a Christian school, lest I be written off as just too weird! I had to trust God’s grace.

According to Thomas Merton, though examinations of conscience were practiced by Stoics and Pythagoreans, and played a role in Rabbinical and Muslim spirituality, it did not appear to play a role in early Christianity.  After the twelfth century it began to play a much larger role.

In between, after the Roman Emperor Constantine’s embrace of the faith in the fourth century, self-examination seemed needful as church and world colluded and collided.

Merton writes in Mystics and Zen Masters: 

St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory recommend a daily examination of conscience. Yet St. Gregory attributes more importance to habitual self-custody, living in the presence of God, and a general spirit of prayer, than to psychological self-analysis at fixed times (p 160-1; italics Merton’s). 

He claims that the monastic tradition emphasized “discernment of spirits” to reign in “passionate thoughts from which faults may arise,” rather than “examination of dubious psychological motives” after a fault has been committed.

What I substituted for my quirk of “looking up” was beginning my day in prayer and not concluding my prayer with “Amen,” so I was in God’s presence all day. I had no idea that I was practicing St. Gregory’s “habitual self-custody, living in the presence of God, and a general spirit of prayer.”

I can guess what you, the reader, are making of all this: “What a spiritually precocious child!” Or, “What an obsessively religious child.”

But, rather than precocious or obsessive, spiritual or religious, I think I—as a fearful, introverted, sensitive, and queer child—was simply looking for the safety of God’s presence.

The truth is, I always know God is present, even when or especially when that challenges my thinking or behavior, actions or attitudes. In my better times, I also “feel” God’s presence.

Thus I find Celtic spirituality to my liking in its emphasis on “thin places” on earth where heaven and the sacred can be revealed and witnessed, and I am grateful for body- and earth-centered spiritualities that resist separating spirituality from bodily and earthly experience, and I appreciate the mythological import of the stories of Creation and Incarnation and Resurrection which all recognize the holiness of our bodies and our earth, and I am thankful for liberation theologies which challenge me to seek justice for every body and all creation.

I confess my sins have all come from my failures to recognize God in all, including myself.

With colleague Debra Weir, I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat open to all April 30-May 4, 2018, at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama, entitled “Beside Still Waters.” Sacred Heart is a welcoming community and a beautiful place. Please come!

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

Altars in the World

Nature's baptismal font, Hawai'i

When you’ve finished reading this, I invite you to click on “comments” at the end of the post and share your favorite/most meaningful “altar in the world.” Click on “comment as” and if you do not have an account with one of the services listed, choose “anonymous” and enter your comment followed by your name, if desired. I will be publishing your comment later in the day. Thanks!

A seminary friend, Barbara Brown Taylor, has a book titled something like the title of this post. I haven’t read it yet, but having read three other books of hers, including Leaving Church, I have a sense that its theme parallels what I write here.

The contemplative life is about finding altars everywhere. Celtic “thin places” where heaven shows itself on earth. Creatures who, much like Meister Eckhart’s caterpillar, are so full of God a sermon is unnecessary. Leonard Cohen’s broken places that let the light shine in. Strangers who are angels unawares. The “least of these” who are Christ himself. People who, as in Thomas Merton’s epiphany at a city intersection, do not realize they are walking around “shining like the sun.” Maya Angelou’s “caged bird,” Ruben Alves’s dates, Rumi’s beloved guide Shams, Mother Teresa’s “Christ in a distressing disguise.” 

For a contemplative like Hildegard of Bingen, music is another altar: “a person often sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of the celestial harmony.”

Etty Hillesum, who was to die at Auschwitz, might smile to be considered a contemplative, but who but a contemplative could observe the following in Nazi-occupied Holland, when Jews were forced to wear yellow stars of David? 

That man in Beethovenstraat this afternoon won’t get a mention in [the history books]. I looked at him as one might at the first crocus in spring, with pure enchantment. He was wearing a huge golden star, wearing it triumphantly on his chest. He was a procession and a demonstration all by himself as he cycled along so happily. And all that yellow—I suddenly had a poetic vision of the sun rising above him, so radiant and smiling did he look. 

In her “Spiritual Autobiography,” Simone Weil saw herself forever standing on the threshold of the church, because so much that she loved and that God loves is outside the church.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins declared, as so many poets, artists, visionaries, and mystics have witnessed through the ages.

The contemplative knows no bounds, no walls, no restrictive or exclusive way of experiencing the sacred. Altars are everywhere for those with fingers to touch or noses to smell or tongues to taste or ears to hear or eyes to see or bodies to be held or minds to imagine or love to be made or justice to be done. Anyone with any sense may know the altars of God’s presence and pleasure.

That’s why contemplatives often find more in common with mystics of other faiths than their fellow “believers,” why they find kindred spirits in so-called “primitive” religions that are more down to earth, or why, even among “godless” sciences they find a cause for awe and praise and—reverence.

Contemplatives do not have an exclusive view of their vocation: they learn from everyone, for, just as it is sometimes said “we are all theologians,” we are all contemplatives who do it more or less. The trick is to do more, to find ways to open ourselves to the altars in the world, to the sacred ways of other cultures, to the guidance and wisdom of other spiritual communities, to the diversity of spiritual experiences and practices even within our own faith traditions.

Listening is key. Self-Realization Fellowship founder and contemplative Paramahansa Yogananda wrote a song I use in leading retreats: 

Listen, listen, listen to my heart song;

Listen, listen, listen to my heart song:

I will never forget you, I will never forsake you;

I will never forget you, I will never forsake you—

Listen, listen, listen to my heart song.

“In this tempestuous, havoc-ridden world of ours, all real communication comes from the heart,” Etty Hillesum also wrote. Hearts may be altars as well, and listening is something we best do with our hearts.

Attending, attention, mindfulness, presence—these are our teachers, these are our guides, and these are the ways we bring healing to one another and to the world—one person at a time. “Ninety percent of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen famously quipped--and yes, comics may also be contemplatives. We need more of them!

So many places to find God; so little time!

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

Is God Too Grand for Us?

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Is God too grand for us? In a word, yes.

God has become so big to me that with the psalmist, I worry, who are we that God is mindful of us?

Progressive Christians (hopefully) have not settled for “a pocket God,” a term introduced to me by Evelyn Underhill biographer Dana Greene, a god we can pull out of our vest pocket like a dependable watch, an anthropomorphized deity that reflects our narcissism as well as our peculiar ideologies. Earth, for us, is not the center of God’s universe. We have theologized the Copernican revolution.

That’s why I was struck by one sentence in The Temple of God’s Wounds that longtime readers of this blog will remember I read day-by-day, chapter-by-chapter each day of Holy Week. Each time I find something freshly insightful as well as things that do not speak to me, but in all my years of reading it, I have only underlined one sentence: 

To break God’s heart is beyond human imagining. 

Can the grand God progressive Christians imagine be so personal as to be heartbroken? What happened to the personal God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Mary and Jesus? What happened to the personal God of the psalmist who wants to “cling” to us, the God whose providence Jesus claims we should trust for our food and clothing like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field?

Do progressives only have left the impartial and somewhat impersonal God of judgment, the God of Micah who commands us “to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God,” or the judgment day Christ who separates the sheep from the goats, those who helped “the least of these” from those who  failed to do so?

Can we also find a “warm and fuzzy” encounter with God, such as the beloved disciple cuddling with Jesus or the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her hair?

Following the lead of contemplatives and mystics and Celtic spirituality, I have repeatedly encouraged “intimacy with God,” believing we can enjoy such intimacy in our prayers and meditation and praise through which we may discover, discern, and disclose God’s proximity in ourselves, our neighbor, our opposition, the stranger.

The God of the Bible is One big enough to create the cosmos as well as the creatures, going so far as to–in the words of the psalmist—shape our inward parts, be with us in every place and condition, and in Christian terms, be welcomed into our hearts and homes and humanity.

Much theology is metaphor, and much of religion is storytelling. Progressive spirituality encourages looking behind, beneath, within and beyond the metaphor, even as our Christian faith challenges us to find the personal in its story.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers. This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

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

"What's Playing Down at the Presbyterian?"

The king in the comic strip Wizard of Id once passed a church sign with the sermon title, “The Wages of Sin.” Consternated, hoping for an alternative, he bewildered his faithful knight by asking, “I wonder what’s playing down at the Presbyterian?”

In progressive circles, sin is not center stage.  Kathleen Norris, in her book Amazing Grace, notes, “Pastors can be so reluctant to use the word ‘sin’ that in church we end up confessing nothing except our highly developed capacity for denial. One week, for example, the confession began, ‘Our communication with Jesus tends to be too infrequent to experience the transformation in our lives You want us to have,’ which,” she writes, “seems less a prayer than a memo from one professional to another.”

A seminary classmate resisted corporate prayers of confession because they often confessed abuses of power, when she felt her sin as a woman was her inability to claim her power, to assert herself. Celtic Christian scholar J. Philip Newell objects to beginning worship with prayers of confession, rightly asking, “How would it be if I began every encounter with my wife telling her what a piece of garbage I am?”

Progressive Christian theologian Marcus Borg thinks that the priestly story of “sin, guilt, sacrifice, and forgiveness” in Sunday worship can lead to a passive spirituality. In Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, he writes, “Rather than seeing [religious] life as a process of spiritual transformation, it stresses believing that God has already done what needs to be done.” He explains: 

This story is very hard to believe. The notion that God’s only son came to this planet to offer his life as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, and that God could not forgive us without that having happened, and that we are saved by believing this story, is simply incredible. Taken metaphorically, this story can be very powerful. But taken literally, it is a profound obstacle to accepting the Christian message. To many people, it simply makes no sense, and I think we need to be straightforward about that. 

(Btw, Hildegard of Bingen believed the Incarnation was planned from the beginning, not as the result of human sin.)

Borg believes that the stories of the Exodus and the Babylonian exile speak more to the oppression and alienation people experience and/or witness in this world. Though receiving the Law at Mt. Sinai is a part of the Exodus story, the concept of spiritual journey better captures our spiritual imaginations.

And indeed, the first Christians considered themselves “people of the way.” “Disciple” means follower, and the disciples were Jesus followers, as many Christians choose to be designated today.  

To me this is preferable to accepting an identity as “sinners,” which is why I embrace the Celtic Christian understanding that sin is not an inborn characteristic, and its effects can be expunged by encounters with either Creation or Christ.

Confession thus becomes a way of acknowledging we are better than sin as beloved children of God. The New Testament word for sin ’amartia derives from ’amartano, which means “to miss the mark,” confirming a more positive understanding of our nature.

President Calvin Coolidge was a progressive Republican who voted for women’s suffrage. He was also a taciturn Congregationalist, which means he didn’t have much to say, known as “Silent Cal,” unconsciously practicing Benedictine “restraint of speech” (taciturnitas). You probably have heard the possibly apocryphal story of him returning from church one Sunday, his wife asking what the preacher’s sermon was about. “Sin,” he declared. “Well, what did he say about it?” she prodded. “He was agin’ it,” he replied.

We too can oppose sin. Sin doesn’t have to come “naturally.”

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.