At Most a Lighthouse Can Beam an Instant

A friend caught my surprise when the congregation

applauded my ordination at Christ Covenant MCC, October 2, 2005.

I miss a custom I created for myself when living in Southern California. New Year’s Eve parties left me wanting some more meaningful way of observing the passing of an old year and the welcome of a new year. I did not want to “pray in” the new year as we did in my Baptist church with us kids keeping one eye open to see the sanctuary clock silently clap its hands together on the number 12. 

But the ticking of a clock or the descent of a ball in Times Square felt artificial, so I began watching the sun set as I walked along the beach in Santa Monica every New Year’s Eve. I would spend the time revisiting the events of the past year and imagining what the new year might bring, thanking God for the good and the bad as well as the possibilities. It was something I could do alone, well before the parties. And it felt more natural. 

This bit of shoreline is the sanctuary where, in college, I ruminated on my sexuality, spirituality, and call to ministry. This is where I thought I’d like to be reincarnated as a seagull so I could stay near the shore and see my friends on the beach occasionally! This is where I stumbled onto a gay meeting place long before I knew about gay bars. This is where, on a day off from my church work, I would do a long run and work out on the outdoor gymnastic bars. 

This is a walk I’ve shared with many friends, including some of you, and others you might know, such as John Boswell, Isabel Rogers, and Malcolm Boyd. This is the walk that Henri Nouwen declined, insisting instead that we sit down on my sofa and “have a really good talk”! 

This is where I walked weekly on Thursday evenings with a partner to share whatever was on our minds and hearts. This is where we walked one Easter after worship, ending up at Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s hangout, the S. S. Friendship, bumping into an old friend there whose partner we learned had died the previous week, who gave me the Easter message I needed to hear, “He died in my arms. I felt him leave his body. That’s why I’m sure I’ll see him again.” 

This is where I took my mom and her dog for her last walk along the shore a few weeks before she died, where she mischievously chose an ice cream cone over lunch. And this is where at least some of my ashes will be scattered. 

Though I live far from that shore now, I go there often. 

There is no lighthouse there, but in college I composed this poem using the metaphor, which feels all the more apt in later life: 

            To Be the Sea 

The sea beside, I stand alone,

By seasons, wait and search

To be discovered and to discover

In boundless quest.

The sea has all at any time—

No search nor wait.

 

At most a lighthouse

Can beam an instant

Before bowing to the sea.

 

This post originally appeared as “New Year” on January 1, 2014.

Please visit my website: https://chrisglaser.com  

My final post on my blog “Progressive Christian Reflections” will occur next Wednesday, June 30, 2021. More than ten years of posts will remain available to you on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and I encourage you to enjoy them. I regret that I never created an index of post titles, but the search engine in the upper left corner of my blog can help you find posts of interest by typing in a subject, topic, name, scripture reference, religious season or holy day. Or you may work through them by year and month listed in the right column. 

Though they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to be read meaningfully at any point in time. You may continue to contact me at my email address used by the delivery service or by leaving a comment on a particular post. FeedBurner has announced it will discontinue all subscription services sometime in July, the occasion for my timing. It has been a pleasure writing this blog, but now, I believe, is a time for silence, something I considered when writing the Zen series. 

I assure you I am well, content, and thankful to God for this extension of my ministry. Thank you for your interest, comments, correspondence, and contributions. I am grateful to Metropolitan Community Churches for recognizing this blog as an “Emerging Ministry” and ProgressiveChristianity.org for reposting many of my reflections, as well as the dozens of Facebook pages that allowed me to provide links to particular posts. I am grateful for the free services of Blogspot, Google, Facebook, and the delivery service, FeedBurner. I am grateful for artist and friend Becki Jayne Harrelson and my husband Wade Jones for their technical and moral support. 

To date, the blog has had 512,000 visits, a count that does not include almost 500 free weekly subscribers. Once donations were possible, the highest annual income ever was $2,000. Subscriptions have always been free and the blog non-monetized (no ads). Permission has always been granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Donations may still be made through the links provided at the end of this post. Thank you! 

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

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Resurrection Today - Part Two

Today’s post is adapted from the chapter, “Healing AIDS,” in my book, Come Home: Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians (Harper & Row 1990, Chi Rho Press 1998).

During one Holy Week, I found myself immersed in grief at the widespread experience of death from AIDS in our community. A close friend infected with HIV and searching for spiritual hope commented on a 1989 Newsweek survey, “If half the clergy doesn’t believe there’s an afterlife, why should we?”

My pastor’s sermon on Easter Sunday was the kind of sermon I would have given, the kind that I have given in the past. Humorously confessing a desire to avoid heresy and controversy, she chose not to discuss whether there was a physical or spiritual resurrection of Jesus.

Instead, she focused on the question put to Mary Magdalene as she wept in the garden of his tomb. Jesus asked her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?” Mary’s grief blinded her at first to a vision of a living Christ. I recognized the connection with my present grief that was blinding me to a living God who is “God of the living, for all live to God,” in the words of Jesus refuting those who didn’t believe in resurrection.

Though my pastor’s Easter sermon was excellent, provocative, and comforting, it did not make me celebrative that day. Who was my friend infected with HIV looking for, and whom did I seek? Someone who would tell us that God loved us, loved us eternally, gave us life eternal.

My lover and I walked along the cliffs and beach of Santa Monica that afternoon. Santa Ana winds had cleared the sky, and the air was cold and crisp, the sea blue and choppy. But, unlike previous walks in this flood of God’s natural grace, the beauty did not heal my troubled soul.

At the end of our walk, we entered a bar named the S. S. Friendship to get some warming coffee. This had once been the gay writer Christopher Isherwood’s neighborhood hangout.  Sitting down, I looked across the room at a vaguely familiar face. “John?” I said, just as he asked, “Chris?”

We had not seen each other for over five years. Typically, on seeing an old friend in our community, I thanked God to find him still alive. George and I invited him and his friend to join us. He seemed relaxed and content, and I was happy to discover that he had been with a lover for five years with whom he had bought a home. With so much death in our neighborhood, I enjoyed finding him well and happy and in a relationship.

He shared his spiritual journey. He reminded me that he had begun as a Catholic. I remembered that he had been a Lutheran shortly before joining the Presbyterian Church. Now he told us that most recently he’d been attending the Church of Religious Science.

“I got something I needed in each church, without getting involved in the garbage of each denomination,” he admitted. I envied, admired, and resented his ability to avoid the garbage, myself feeling buried in the Presbyterian refuse of committee meetings, petty bickering, and outrageous injustice toward gays and lesbians.

As I asked him about his lover, he said simply, “He died last week.” “AIDS?” I asked, astounded that even this idyllic picture could be shattered. “Yes,” he said. “He was diagnosed two years ago, and he used what time he had left to help others. It was wonderful to see. We had a good time together. I have no regrets. He died in my arms. I felt him leave his body. That’s why I’m sure I’ll see him again.”

As we later took our leave and I hugged John goodbye, I whispered in his ear, “Thank you for giving me the Easter message I needed to hear today.” I had somehow heard the gospel in a gay bar. Just as Mary had been called by name and thereby recognized the risen Christ, so I had been called by name and thereby witnessed a resurrection.

Last week’s post: Resurrection Today – Part One 

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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 Adventures of a Gay Red-headed Boy in His Search for God

Washing my first puppy, Taffy.

Last week I referenced “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search of God,” a George Bernard Shaw story about a young woman who takes the search for God literally, encountering various forms of the deity that require confrontation, sometimes with a knobkierre, a kind of club used primarily in southern and eastern Africa. At age 18, I was intrigued by gay icon Christopher Isherwood’s stage adaptation of the story for L.A.’s frequently experimental theater, the Mark Taper Forum.

In context, I mentioned that all my writings could be said to be “the adventures of a gay red-headed boy in his search for God.”

The adventure continues as I am (finally) reading Karen Armstrong’s 1993 tome, The History of God, which I found on sale on the remainder table of our nearby Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago. As I read, I discover that many of the questions I have asked in my books and my blog have been asked before in the multi-millennia search for God!  As I have suggested on this blog, such books remind me of how little I know!

But reading about the fourth century Cappadocian theologians of Eastern Turkey puzzling over the essence and manifestations of God, I realized what I missed dropping a church patristics course my first semester of seminary.  I recognized the names of Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus. Having their wisdom summarized by Armstrong reminded me that this is what I missed when I summarily dropped the course because it conflicted with a class on spirituality I happened into, Henri Nouwen’s “Discipline and Discipleship.”

At the same time, these theologians may very well have understood my need for spiritual experience over church doctrine. As Armstrong puts it: 

Plato had contrasted philosophy (which was expressed in terms of reason and was thus capable of proof) with the equally important teaching handed down by means of mythology, which eluded scientific demonstration. … Aristotle had made a similar distinction when he had noted that people attended the mystery religions not to learn anything but to experience something.

Basil expressed the same insight in a Christian sense when he distinguished between dogma and kerygma. Both kinds of Christian teaching were essential to religion. Kerygma was the public teaching of the Church, based on the scriptures. Dogma, however, represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth, which could only be apprehended through religious experience and expressed in symbolic form. …

Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual in his own time during what Plato had called theoria, contemplation. … As Basil said, these elusive religious realities could only be suggested in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy or, better still, by silence.

Western Christianity would become a much more talkative religion and would concentrate on the kerygma: this would be one of its chief problems with God. In the Greek Orthodox Church, however, all good theology would be silent or apophatic.*  …

[Quoting Basil:] “We know our God only by his operations (energeiai) but we do not undertake to approach his essence.” 

Paradoxically, I mistook church patristics with dogma as in doctrines, when I was looking for spiritual experience as in contemplation, which was how Eastern theologians understood true dogma. So I was drawn to a class whose notes would become Nouwen’s Reaching Out: Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, the movements from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, from illusion to prayer.

“The adventures of a gay red-headed boy in his search for God” has been full of meandering such as this. When I wrote an occasional column for the progressive periodical Christianity and Crisis, my then pastor observed that, in my writing, I went hither and yon, letting everything from events to conversations shape my thinking, till I came to some conclusion reflective of the whole.

Etymologists dispute the following theory of the origin of the term “saunter” (which means “to muse, be in reverie” or “to walk with a leisurely gait”) but I like the myth that the word described the meanderings of those who went on pilgrimages. Though the OED thinks it unlikely, the Anglo-French sauntrer may have been derived from the French word s’aventurer, “to take risks.”

This to me describes the spiritual life. Like the black girl in search of God, this gay red-headed boy’s search has been convoluted and risky.

One more twist. I briefly dated a gay porn star, though I was unfamiliar with his work, even his genre! He was very well-read, devouring everything from novels to philosophy. And he introduced me to Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy. The gay red-headed boy, in his search for God, now encountered a gay pioneer, who was also, as it turns out, a Hindu scholar.

God is good—and full of surprises.

*The best way I could illustrate the term apophatic would be with my post, Spiritual Picassos.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“I Thirst.” (The water crisis of Flint, Michigan, has given new relevance to this post.)

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!

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

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.

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