Compassion and Community

I took this photo of an 80-year-old Nicaraguan who had just voted in her first free and fair election. She is holding up her thumb that had been dipped in red ink to prevent voting more than once.

On our morning walks in the neighborhood before COVID-19, Wade and I would greet and be greeted by neighbors along our various routes (different for each day). But now that more people are out and about, walking, the new walkers seem less likely to look up from their cellphones or hear our greetings under their earbuds, though the runners still do, I guess because they have seen me run in the neighborhood and we have that connection.

I have supposed we have not yet formed with the new walkers the community needed to be acknowledged.

Last week’s post, “Recovering Compassion,” grew out of my current reading of a 1982 book by Henri Nouwen, Douglas Morrison, and Donald McNeill entitled Compassion: A Reflection on the Christian Life. What I have read since is that these three Catholic Christian authors believe compassion requires community: sensed, actual, and/or geographical.

What I first intended for this post was to suggest my difficulty feeling compassion for those with whom I politically disagree because they are not a part of “my” community. But instead let me describe this phenomenon positively. I feel compassion for Black Lives Matter protestors because the Civil Rights Movement “woke” me about equal justice and opportunity for all and inspired my own pursuit of that for LGBTQ people. And I admire the movement, We Are the 99 Percent, because my dad was a blue-collar Teamster truck driver and we lived on working class wages, despite my mom teaching at a Christian school for sacrificially low wages. And I better understand migrants escaping harsh conditions in Latin America because I have visited a post-Somoza Nicaragua and a post-Pinochet Chile.

And, in fact, I have tried to understand friends and family and fellow churchgoers with whom I share love and memories and values whose political bias opposes or diverges from mine. So true community does allow for diversity as well as compassion.

But I need—we need—to enlarge our sense of community.

The authors of Compassion write:

When we are no longer able to recognize suffering persons as fellow human beings, their pain evokes more disgust and anger than compassion.

Responding compassionately to what the media present to us is made even more difficult by its “neutrality.” … Whatever the news announces—war, murder, floods, the weather, and the football scores—is reported with the same ritualized tone of voice and facial expression.  … All of this is regularly interrupted by smiling people urging us to buy products of dubious necessity. The whole “service” is so distant and aloof that the most obvious response is to invest no more energy in it than in brushing your teeth before going to bed.

They contrast this with Jesus and God being moved by compassion, biblically described (multiple times) as feeling it in their guts (Jesus) and in their womb (Yahweh).

They offer as a role model the Trappist monk and social critic Thomas Merton whose “knowledge of the suffering of the world came not from the media but from letters written by friends for whom particular events had personal significance. To these friends a response was possible. When information about human suffering comes to us through a person who can be embraced, it is humanized.”

On occasion, Merton invited many of them to gather at Gethsemani Abbey to share and pray together and community was formed.

I have travelled widely and that has piqued my interest in developments in many states, countries, and locales. I am more attentive to their stories on the news or in the newspaper as a result. When a recent U.S. president was elected who had never traveled abroad, I wondered how he could possibly “get” or care about other regions or cultures.

Martin Luther King’s “Beloved Community” is larger than we can fathom. The commonwealth of God that Jesus proclaimed is more extensive than our fellow believers. Instead of the Prosperity Gospel prayer to “enlarge my territory” for personal success and wealth, we need the Progressive Gospel prayer to “enlarge my community” and thus our compassion.

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

When You Walk through a Storm

Kirkridge panel about the future of our movement.

When witnessing disaster, the spiritual sage Mister Rogers would say, “Look for the helpers.” A corollary I would add is, “Look for community.”

As hurricane Irma passed over Atlanta, I was reminded of hurricane Opal, which did far more damage to our neighborhood. Though without power, what I most remember is the fun we had afterwards alongside our neighbors cleaning up debris in the street and yards, sharing what food we had in potlucks, grateful that none of us had sustained unrepairable damage or loss.

Of course I realize that those with more devastating losses caused by Harvey in Texas,  Irma in Florida, multiple hurricanes in the Caribbean, and the monsoon rains in South Asia may not have such a rosy response, but my cousin and family rescued by boat in Beaumont may have appreciated “community” in a more vital way.

Some years after Opal, the Atlanta tornado barreled through the adjacent neighborhood of Cabbagetown. Its “sound of a freight train” caused us to shelter in our first floor garage briefly that night. On our walk the following day we witnessed the community helping one another pull trees and branches off cars, houses, and streets, while the Carroll Street Café provided free coffee.

Historic Oakland Cemetery also got walloped, and out of respect for the dead, whose bone fragments got pulled out of the ground by uprooted trees and whose headstones got toppled by forceful winds, community members worked for months to restore its quaint beauty and solemn dignity.

Wade and Hobbes and I met a woman whose top floor flat’s roof had been taken off, and she was distraught over her lost puppy. A few days later, invited to dinner by a lesbian couple, we told them about the encounter. “They found the puppy!” they told us, “It was on the news. It was hiding under her sofa!” One of the better purposes of media (including social networks) is that they help community form.

Irma arrived in Atlanta the day after I returned from another community, one formed in the more disastrous days of homophobia and heterosexism. During its 75^th anniversary of spiritual and political activism, Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center celebrated its 40 years offering sanctuary to LGBT people who struggled with the church and society’s rejection and violence. It was true joy being with people I have known and loved for decades. At one point, an actual rainbow graced the skies outside our meeting room.

I am looking forward to a more broadly interfaith and ecumenical gathering of LGBT saints in St. Louis October 31-November 2, “Rolling the Stone Away.” I hope you will consider attending. You can help young activists hear the stories of earlier generations in the LGBT movement by making a donation to their scholarship crowdfunding:

https://www.youcaring.com/rollingthestoneawaygenerationsoflovejustice-896533 

The Bible is, among other things, a reminder of how communities respond to disaster, hardship, and suffering.

In Coming Out as Sacrament, I suggested that it is in such vulnerability that we may experience God coming near to bring deliverance, healing, and resurrection—often through one another, often through one another’s stories.

The book included this wonderful story from holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel: 

In The Gates of the Forest, Elie Wiesel tells the story of a rabbi who averted a disaster for his people by meditating at a certain spot in the forest, lighting a fire, and offering a prayer. The next time catastrophe approached, one of his disciples went to the same site, offered the prayer, but did not know how to light the fire—and still miraculously avoided disaster. Later, another rabbi went to the sacred spot, but knew neither the prayer nor how to light the fire; yet it was enough to save his people. Finally, another rabbi, in a similar desperate situation, knew neither the prayer, the fire, nor the place, but he could tell the story, and that retelling again prevented calamity. … Wiesel concludes, “God made [human beings] because [God] loves stories.”* 

Throughout its history, Kirkridge has been the “campfire” around which activists of all kinds have told our stories, including those in the LGBT Christian movement. St. Louis will prove to be an even more expansive opportunity for LGBT religious activists to shape community and share stories.

This is vital as we resist renewed attacks on us, and transform a world that does not yet view us favorably.

In facing disaster, look for helpers and for community.

Meet me in St. Louis!

P.S. Like scripture, we have our own “begats.” Stony Point Center’s 2015 “Rock Stars and Prophets” begat Kirkridge’s “40^th Year Celebration of LGBTQ Lives” which begat St. Louis’s “Rolling Away the Stone.”  For a video of my personal narrative recorded at Stony Point, go to: https://vimeo.com/172131713

Related Post: You Can Walk through a Storm

*Page 50 of Coming Out as Sacrament, paraphrasing Elie Wiesel in The Gates of the Forest (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966).

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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. 

"Pride Goeth before a Fall"--and Getting Back Up!

Chris speaking at GWI 2014. Photo by Ryan Johnson.

The week of our snow and ice in Georgia, I gingerly stepped and carefully drove to avoid any ice-related accidents. When most ice and snow had melted and the weather warmed, I decided to go for a run, proudly wearing my sleeveless neon-blue running shirt and shorts in which I look quite good if much too blue. (Looking good enhances my workouts and my running, as with most athletes!)

But before I got out of the guest parking lot of our complex, I fell sprawling on the pavement, catching myself with my hands, scraping them and one elbow and both knees. I wish I could blame slipping on ice or tripping on shoelaces or debris, but the asphalt was dry as a bone and clean as a whistle.

I picked myself up, went back to our unit, scrubbed my wounds to avoid infection, treated them with antibiotic cream, and bandaged the bleeding scrapes and cuts.  “Pride goeth before a fall,” the judging Proverb came to me. I realized that wearing my usual winter garb for running—long sleeved shirt, gloves, and long running pants—would have minimized my injuries.

Yet pride is also what prompted me to proceed with my long run—puffy and bruised knees, multiple bandaids, and raw skin notwithstanding—this time wearing my long-sleeved running shirt. Though the fall was humbling, pride is what made me get back up and start again.

As I ran, I thought back on the four days I had spent that week at the Georgia Winter Institute 2014, meeting in a former Confederate weapons factory in Columbus, Georgia, south of Atlanta, where I live.  GWI’s mission is stated in one sentence: “The Georgia Winter Institute connects people with and without disabilities to work together to nurture and use our gifts to strengthen community bonds.”

In my closing keynote I told the assembly of a gathering of people living with HIV and AIDS, their families, friends, volunteer and professional caregivers near Detroit. “I have no memory of what I said to them,” I explained, “I absolutely remember what they ‘said’ to me. As we helped them carry all their medical paraphernalia from their cars to their rooms at the retreat center—their IV drip bottles and tubing, their medicines, oxygen tanks, and various pieces of special equipment—all I could think of was how determined they were to participate in this event, to be part of the community. And by contrast, I thought about how many people pass up on going on retreats or building community simply because it’s ‘inconvenient.’”

They had been knocked down, so to speak, but they had gotten back up again. And that’s what I witnessed among those gathered in Columbus. Perhaps their pride is challenged by how the culture, government, medical establishment, and houses of worship are inadequately mindful of their gifts and challenges, whether their own or those they love or serve, but pride is what gets us all back up again.

Other posts related to running mishaps:

Praying for “Enemies”

BEWARE OF THE GOD! (includes an Olympic running mishap)

Last week’s post also about GWI 2014:

A Dream within a Dream

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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

Word Magic

The morning that I write this, I woke early thinking of how I would shape my talk on Henri Nouwen in Seattle this coming Friday. Some of my best ideas come to me in the middle of the night or early in the morning. Then it occurred to me that a friend, J. Marshall Jenkins, and the Dalai Lama were downstairs awaiting me for morning prayers. As I sometimes do, I got up at 5 a.m. to enjoy an entire hour alone with them, my thoughts, and hopefully with God. With coffee, of course.

It pleasantly reminded me of my visits to Mt. Calvary Retreat House in Santa Barbara, arising in the darkness, picking up a cup of coffee in the coffee room, and finding a nook or cranny or outside space to think, read, or pray—a memory reinforced when our dog came downstairs and I took her out for her morning necessaries and I saw a bright full moon and a handful of visible planets and stars—a contrast to the abundance of planets and stars in the night sky over Santa Barbara, but wondrous nonetheless. I picked up The New York Times in our driveway, remembering today was Science day, being a Tuesday, with its special science section.

And I realized my thrill—no doubt partly induced by my half-decaf coffee—was due to the magic of words. Thinking of Nouwen’s words and how my words might characterize them; anticipating Marshall’s words in his book, A Wakeful Faith: Spiritual Practice in the Real World, with which I’ve been doing a kind of lectio divina for a number of weeks, and my newly acquired book by his holiness the Dalai Lama, The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality, experiencing both challenges and agreement in each; looking forward to reading the morning paper; and finally, eager to sit here writing this post and soon my Nouwen lecture.

I was so giddy by the time I concluded with the Lord’s prayer, I could hardly contain myself!  Those of you who are not morning people may be rolling your eyes right now, and believe me, I do restrain myself when Wade comes down for breakfast before going off to the office.

As if to sober me up, I happened onto a review of a novel by Bruce Wagner, who last year wrote of the “depravity” of Los Angeles in Dead Stars, and now apparently finds among “Buddhists, gurus and spiritual pilgrims” similar “narcissism, self-aggrandizement and the ravenous appetite for fame and renown” in The Empty Chair.

I gave myself up to a moment of self-doubt about why I write this blog, and in my younger years, this might have stopped me cold. But older, I have realized that everything we/I do is prompted partly by ego—how we view ourselves and how we think other people view us—and our need to be heard. In fact, one entry in psychologist and pastoral counselor Marshall Jenkins’s book confirms this: “What we think others think of us—or what we think they would think of us if they really knew us—shapes our self-concept.”

Too many of us are derailed by the snarky and sometimes jealous comments of others, those Henri Nouwen describes as trying to hook you in your wounds “to dismiss what God, through you, is saying to them.”

For me, the magic of words is that they engage me in a community of many voices, some uplifting and affirming, some challenging and humbling, even when I am alone.

Related post:

The Right Word

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Spiritual Community

Church is not for everyone. Even for those who like it, there are as many distractions as attractions to the spiritual life there. I thought of entitling this post “spirituality for loners” because I want to suggest eight ways of experiencing spiritual community outside of church!

Read. I enjoy the most diverse, stimulating, informed, and wise spiritual community on my bookshelves! Fiction and non-fiction, sacred and profane, fantasy and factual—you name it, all connect me to other people, places, and things with whom and with which I may feel a spiritual kinship. Newspaper and magazine human interest stories, op-eds, obits, and news stories also open me to relationships often more spiritually intimate than possible in ordinary life. All are opportunities for witnessing spirituality at work for those who have eyes to see, fingers to feel Braille, or ears to hear recorded versions.

Pray. Immediately, praying puts us into a global and probably universal community of those lifting their hearts and their loved ones and even unloved ones to God, the eternal, the sacred, knitting our hearts with those with whom and for whom we pray. Prayer, meditation, and reflection make us more attentive to those we care about or want to care about, welcoming their presence in deeper ways.

Watch. Being mindful of surroundings wherever we are with all of our senses puts us in community with the material world. Matter matters. The touch of a fabric, the fragrance of a plant, the sound of rain, the vibration of a machine, the breath of  a lover, the view from your favorite chair or mountain ridge—all remind us, in Madonna’s lyrics, that “we are material girls” and boys. And watching films and documentaries can take us to people and places and events we otherwise might never meet or visit or experience.

Walk and Roll. I was asked this week what I would do if I knew I only had 24 hours to live. Promptly I replied, “I’d go walk in the park.” A leisurely stroll or roll on foot or wheelchair through parks, forests, beaches, neighborhoods, downtowns, and more give us an opportunity to relax and be part of something greater than ourselves. An acquaintance gave up city life and lights to work remotely in the countryside just to be able to spend time gazing at the planets, stars, and galaxies each night as earth strolls through the universe.

Communicate. Writing letters or blogs, sketching or painting, playing instruments or sharing CD’s, making videos or recordings, performing or cooking or phoning—finding ways to tell our stories, proclaim our “gospel,” give our viewpoints, share our talents—these are some of the diverse ways we may offer ourselves to spiritual community.

Volunteer or Vocation. Giving time, energy, talent, money, and possessions for a cause,  concern, or a calling connects us to other volunteers or coworkers but also to those for whom we do what we do, whether a movement, a non-profit, a community in need, or the environment.

Receive. It may be more blessed to give than receive, as Paul quoted Jesus in Acts, but being receptive is also a gift to those who want to offer us something of themselves, from company to caregiving. Gratitude “in all circumstances” may open us serendipitously to community.

Breathe. Breathing slowly and deeply and consciously is a common way to begin meditation. Spirit is in the very air we breathe if we are paying attention, if we imagine it, if we believe it. We take in the molecules ancestors breathed, brothers and sisters breathe, posterity will breathe. Every breath connects us with them.

No one should beat themselves up for not going to church, not joining a monastic community, or not belonging to a religion or religious organization. Spiritual community is to be discovered simply by attending to the spiritual life, that which connects us to all.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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Chris will be leading a free public workshop on Just Love entitled “Body Boundaries and the Question of Consent” Saturday, April 27, 2013, from 10 a.m.-1:00 p.m. (free lunch follows) at St. Francis Episcopal Church, Macon, Georgia. It will explore the spiritual dimension of physical encounters.

Posts you may have missed:

On the Threshold of the Church

Interrupted Lives