Becoming What We Behold

Evelyn Underhill biographer Dana Greene requested last year that I write this for the Underhill newsletter. This past summer, I had hoped to honor the 75^th anniversary of Underhill’s death by posting this, but it coincided with the Orlando shootings and I felt the need to write about that.

If you like this, please share the link with your Facebook friends and groups and/or other social media by clicking on the appropriate logo at the bottom of this post. Thank you!

Daily we behold terrible and diminishing things, not just in the newspaper and on the news, but in films, television programs, books, plays, even music.  Daily we also behold our “golden calves” of consumer products in ads, commercials, and our neighbor’s latest acquisition. Daily we are bombarded and distracted by e-mails, text messages, and the multiple layers of the internet. If, as in Evelyn Underhill’s estimation, we become what we behold, we are becoming a mess of noise, violence, and greed with little room for the divine, the holy, and God.

Saints are to be found in “the mess,” as Underhill suggests, but not overwhelmed by it. The reason?  Saints, mystics, and everyday fellow travelers take time to be present and available to the eternal, to the inbreaking commonwealth of God, to God. Not for self-improvement, but for their own sakes. But being present to eternity, God’s hope for the world, and God herself is transformative, offering peace that passes understanding—not just for ourselves but for the world. Underhill might as well have quoted Mahatma Gandhi, “become the change you want to see in the world.”

The danger she observes is that too often those who want to change the world do so without changing ourselves. In youth I wanted to “change the world.” In adulthood I wanted to change my little part of the world, the church. Now I feel blessed if I am able to change myself! But the truth is, whatever I’ve been able to do for various causes has come to whatever extent I have spent time in God’s presence. God is a very good influence, and I wish I had spent more time with God. This is why I find mystics and the contemplative life so appealing.

Of all the mystics and spiritual guides I have encountered, mostly through reading and courses, Evelyn Underhill writes the closest to my own spiritual experience. I too am theocentric, as she was at first. I too have reservations about the attempts of theology, ethics, religion, and the church to “capture” God, as if that were even possible. I too value other religions and the multiple expressions of Christian faith.

But I too have needed spiritual guidance, spiritual community, belief systems, and liturgy and worship to better understand that God is love. And perhaps most intimately, I too believe in the “homeliness” of the spiritual experience. For me it is not ethereal, other-worldly or supernatural, but an incarnated, earthly, and embodied encounter with the sacred—yet no less profound because of that! God’s love was first embodied for me in my parents, and then multiple church “families.”

That’s why Jesus is important to me, more so than “Christ.” The homeliness of Jesus, his everyday compassion and yet need for prayer, his teachings and also his teachings on prayer, praying in our pantry or closet (remembering to “shut the door” in Underhill’s words), the simple prayer he taught his disciples, and his trust in a loving God—all suggest spiritual maturity. Yet “Christ” too is important for me, as it was for Underhill, that we as Christ and as part of Christ live redemptively for the world and as part of the Body of Christ, the church.

Click here for all my posts that reference Evelyn Underhill, and scroll down.

You may 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 © 2015 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?

Free subscribers and visitors are up—thank you! Please find ways to support this ministry by clicking here. Thank you!

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.  

Why Can't It Always Be This Way?

“Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?”

The two Emmaus disciples say this to each other, together, reflecting on the mysterious stranger who joins them on the road and for a meal. Luke’s gospel does not say that one said it to the other. “They said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’” They spoke as one, in unison, as if from a liturgy, as if two had become one.

That is spirituality. All of our particularities, our differences, our edges, our boundaries, our isms—all melt in the presence of the eternal, the cosmic, God, love, justice, faith, truth—whatever word captures for us ultimate reality.

It is where we encounter the fragility of our own lives and yet where we encounter the ultimate and eternal meaning of our life together. Our hearts burn within us as we discover the truth, the meaning, the context of our own lives and of life itself. And to do so with another—a friend, a lover, a fellow person of faith, a spiritual community—is exquisite.

These two disciples who traveled to Emmaus have the dream of disciples throughout the ages; they have enjoyed a revelation that is the object of all spiritual quests. The eros of their hearts has been unleashed and ignited and they burn as one. It doesn’t matter who said what to whom, who said it first, whose idea it was, who gets the credit for the observation, insight, or conclusion, or who should get footnoted. Personal or private ownership no longer matters. They own it together, this most holy communion.

Why can’t it always be that way?

That’s my question every time I complete a retreat or a course in spiritual formation.

Last week I mentioned I was reading a lot of Evelyn Underhill. It was for a course in the spiritual formation program at Columbia Theological Seminary here in Atlanta this past weekend, expertly led by Underhill’s biographer, Dana Greene, with morning and evening prayers created by Linda Abel, using Underhill’s writings. These courses always include small groups and spiritual friendships, rare opportunities for spiritual intimacy.

             

No doubt you have had similar experiences. Soul friends. People with whom you’ve intimately and passionately connected in prayer-making, truth-seeking, justice-making, and possibly, love-making. Friends who can finish one another’s sentences. Shared spiritual searching makes us one with people with whom we may have little else in common. It opens doors to a communion hardly thought possible by our privilege or lack thereof.

I’ve learned that Evelyn Underhill’s spiritual development began as theocentric, with intellectual curiosity about Mysticism, the title of her first book on the spiritual life. Only gradually, under the guidance of a spiritual director and her initially reluctant embrace of spiritual community (the church), was her intellectualizing transformed to a more incarnational faith, realizing we are called to union with Christ’s “redemptive work always going on in the world.”

I recognize the experience, though my faith began more incarnationally and became more theocentric. Yet I find that when I need forgiveness, compassion, and encouragement, I turn to the more incarnational expressions of our faith, such as friends, family, Jesus, and spiritual community.

In their own need for consolation, the Emmaus disciples invite the stranger to dinner and suddenly, at table, their fellow pilgrim is revealed to them not as their guest but as their host, blessing and breaking and offering them their own bread as a sacrament, and their eyes are opened and they recognize their hope alive again, their passion resurrected.

Posts referencing the Emmaus disciples:

Resurrecting Jesus

Whose Resurrection Was It Anyway?

Open Your Refrigerator

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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