We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands

 

As we approach the tenth anniversary of this weekly blog, I thought current readers would appreciate one of my earliest posts, from April 6, 2011.

During recess in the second grade, my friend Mary and I enjoyed swinging as high as we could on the swing set, singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” It’s a great song of comfort, basically affirming that, no matter what, God is holding us. Note the song doesn’t say God is in control, just that God is there for us. And I still believe that.

These days we have a better grip on what it means for God to hold the whole world because we have the internet and a 24/7 news cycle. Now we too have the whole world in our hands every time we log on.

The narrator in my as-yet-unpublished mystery novel so reveres the internet that, just as many of us only visit God on Sunday mornings, he only visits the internet on Saturday mornings. Comparing it to touching the forbidden Mt. Sinai, he drolly writes: 

The internet is such an awesome god—so extensive we can only glimpse a part of it, so powerful that it has crashed many a computer, so desirous that many humans and their marriages have been sacrificed on its local altars. Okay, I’m a little over the top here, but it’s an amusing analogy, don’t you think? 

My point is, like any powerful and overwhelming god, the internet must be approached guardedly, with respect, on appointed days and at appointed times, lest we take it for granted (as if our computers are always up) or believe we can domesticate it (making it entirely user-friendly). 

Just as the ancient monastics limited human intercourse of all kinds, even so, those of us who practice an ascetic lifestyle must limit our intercourse with the internet, lest it lead us into idolatry or distract us from reality. To switch mythological metaphors, the internet is the Medusa’s head of our time, a face whose tresses are cables rather than snakes, but still able to turn men to stone. 

Demonstrating a similar reverence, only recently has my spell-check stopped correcting me when I fail to capitalize the word “internet,” though it never corrects me when I fail to capitalize “god”! 

A retreat leader once scandalized my progressive theology—you know, the theology that tells you to have the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other during your morning prayers—by observing the omnipresent news cycle hooks us in other people’s stories before we know our own story for the day. And, during a retreat I was leading on finding space in our busy lives to rest in God, a woman had the “aha” moment that she was busy even in her prayers, listing the world’s concerns, as if the whole world were not already in God’s hands! 

Now more than ever, we have the whole world in our hands. And more than ever, we need to step back, take a breath, take moments of Sabbath rest, and resist the temptation to use Eden’s apple or the Silicon Valley’s Apple to be like the gods. 

Yet we are not absolved of responsibility. Now, also more than ever, the internet gives what we do and say the power to transform the world for good or for ill. 

We’ve got the whole world in our hands. If we are God’s, then that should be a comfort rather than a concern.

 

Copyright © 2011 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 in Chris Glaser’s name to the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

A Flower's Tears

The flowers I was contemplating.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post last week that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Last Wednesday and today I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and this one from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s pastoral sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem:

A flower’s tears

are the dewdrops

that drip, orb by orb,

as sun rises.

A flower’s tears

are the raindrops

that stream, string by string,

as storms rage.

A flower’s tears

are the petals

that drop, one by one,

as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

Donations to this blog ministry may be given 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. 

When God Gets Too Big

As a child my parents told me not to take more on my plate than I could eat. When I did, I dawdled at our table after everyone left, expected to finish my meal. I won’t make that mistake tomorrow as we celebrate Thanksgiving in America.

I’m aware of a similar dynamic as I have paused reading The Tao of Physics. Not only the science got a little too detailed for me, but the God in the details got too large, too impersonal and even frightening, more than I could “eat”! My bookmark with excerpts from Psalm 139 kept tempting me to abandon God’s incarnation in reality to welcome God’s intimate presence, “you who formed my inmost being, knit me together in my mother’s womb.” “Comfort food” theology, so to speak.

Maybe that’s why the ancient Hebrews chose to follow one God out of the pantheon of gods polytheism offered. Maybe that’s why the first Christians chose to follow Jesus out of the panoply of prophetic voices in Judaism. It was a matter of focus, a matter of admitting, in the words of Psalm 131:

My heart is not lifted up,

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

I am now contemplating the Psalms in the 130’s, their uplifting poetry a pleasant contrast to dispassionately documented subatomic and cosmic interactions, though still filled with “signs and wonders” (Ps 135:9). I’ve been yearning to walk naked with God in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden, or to share “the sympathizing tear” with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This coming Sunday is traditionally the end of the Christian calendar, “Christ the King” Sunday, when Jesus is celebrated and elevated as sovereign of the universe. By the following Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent, we once again await his nativity, a baby born in a barn. Thus I’m following a pattern, perhaps, of being overwhelmed theologically and then discerning divinity in something tiny as an infant. God is indeed in the small things.

The Tao of Physics informed me, in the words of astronomer Fred Hoyle:

Present-day developments in cosmology are coming to suggest rather insistently that everyday conditions could not persist but for the distant parts of the Universe, that all our ideas of space and geometry would become entirely invalid if the distant parts of the Universe were taken away. Our everyday experience even down to the smallest details seems to be so closely integrated to the grand-scale features of the Universe that it is well-nigh impossible to contemplate the two being separated. [p 195-6]

And, addressing Yahweh, Psalm 138:3 reminds me:

On the day I called, you answered me,

you increased my strength of soul.

I once wrote a piece entitled “Advent Is a Time to Look for a Star.” It should not surprise us that the star of Bethlehem may portend an answer to a prayer like the psalmist’s.

Dear Readers,

Recently my visitors per post dropped from a couple thousand to around a hundred. Because most come from Facebook, I gather it has something to do with Facebook algorithms. Facebook would probably like me to pay to boost my posts, but I’ve never done that—it feels like “cheating,” and I couldn’t afford it anyway.

You can help me—if you like a particular post, please share it with your friends and/or groups. Subscribers have an email option and a “share on Facebook” link and Facebook also provides a “share” option, or, if you are on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com, you will find tiny icons at the bottom of a post for various ways to share it by clicking on one.

Finally, subscribers may now have to click on “show images and enable links” to see the photo(s) provided in each delivered post and to use links.

I am also aware that some of us have missed delivery of some posts, including me! Check spam filters and be sure your server allows delivery, though it may be a fault with the delivery system.

Thanks for your patience and support!

Chris

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

A Flower's Tears

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem: 

A flower’s tears

are the dewdrops

that drip, orb by orb,

as sun rises.

A flower’s tears

are the raindrops

that stream, string by string,

as storms rage.

A flower’s tears

are the petals

that drop, one by one,

as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight  just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A post for the 15^th anniversary of 9/11 on Sunday: 9/11: When We Were One

Donations to this blog ministry may be given 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.  

Hounds in Heaven

My name is Hobbes. I’m a 15-year-old female retriever mix. I’ve watched my human do this over 200 times, so I’ve decided to mark this post myself. It’s taken me a few weeks because I type slower than he does. Be grateful that I have substituted this for the post he wrote, which was just not right for New Year’s Eve: all about the gloom and doom of this past year—y’know, disease, torture, rendition, racism,* guns, rape, climate change, war, you name it.

The occasion? Pope Francis’s statement while comforting a child in the death of his dog: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”** He said this several weeks ago, but as I said, I type slowly and I like to chew on things for a while, the canine form of contemplation.

Paradise would not be paradise for my humans if I wasn’t there. As it is, I bring them a little heaven on earth, if I may say so. Remember, if Eve hadn’t come along, animals were made to be Adam’s companions, and we would never have let them be fooled by that snake. Eden was idyllic for us, too, as Adam and Eve were both vegans before The Fall. We too yearn to return to that Paradise in which all animals, including humans, will get along.

Of course Mr. Pope stirred up controversy, because what he said suggests that animals have souls. How can humans not see my soulful expression in the photo that accompanies this post? And what makes humans think they have a soul and we do not? Isn’t that presumptuous?

My late brother Calvin wrote about his philosophy in a book, Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog. In his chapter “On Evolution,” he questioned that dogs descended from wolves, but never doubted humans descended from apes. He asserted: 

Rather, I believe that I and other dogs were created by God and made in God’s image. We are God’s mirror reflection. That’s why God backwards spells dog. Isn’t that one of the first things you English-speaking humans notice, the spelling thing? And who else but God loves as unconditionally as a dog? We don’t care who you humans are or what you humans do, as long as you take some time to be with us, praise us, worship us, and do our bidding occasionally. Isn’t that godlike? Even when you treat us badly or forget we’re around, the minute you turn about and give us the attention we deserve, we lick your faces and give you comfort. Isn’t that divine? 

Beware, all those who mistreat or abuse animals in this life or allow us to be treated badly by others, because heaven will seem like hell to you, not because we are vengeful (that’s a human thing) but because you will feel so ashamed!

Instead, consider my brother’s hope for the world this New Year: 

Avoid that misnamed “dog-eat-dog” world (after all, we’re not cannibals) and drool over a dog-sniff-dog world in which we smell one another’s delicious scents, see the wonder of all creation, dig out a safe lair for all (especially puppies), perk up our ears at worthy lead dogs, take opportunities to rest and play and nest, and sense the presence of our Mother Dog watching over all of us.

Then together, as one pack, we can sniff out life’s buried treats.

*I have a bone to pick with humans. Why breed so much diversity among us dogs, but resist diversity among yourselves?

** This is Chris adding this editorial note. I didn’t have the heart to tell Hobbes that the quote was subsequently attributed to Paul VI! She loves Pope Francis’s choice of name so very much! -CG

P.S. Since Hobbes posted this, Pope Francis, in his June 18, 2015 encyclical on climate change, wrote, “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.” He ends the encyclical with prayers, including, “Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey toward your infinite light.” Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for his column, “A Pope for All Species.”

See Hobbes referenced in The New York Times by clicking here!

Posts that have gone to the dogs:

A Bone to Pick with Scripture

My Dog Ate My Scripture

Let God Rub Your Belly

Miss the Rapture?

What Calvin Taught Me about God

So I can get more treats, please support my human’s 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 pet-friendly denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

The Sound of Eden

I look forward to seeing some of you at the Georgia Winter Institute next week.

These thoughts may not be ripe enough for picking for a post, but several encounters prompt this. Sunday I preached at St. Paul UCC in Barrington near Chicago during their lively monthly praise service. At the O’Hare Hilton that afternoon just before my flight home, I delightedly met two longtime friends who are gifted church musicians, Jan Graves and Mark Bowman, both of whom I worked alongside on the magazine Open Hands, and we talked about many things, including music in worship. I shared some of Hildegard of Bingen’s thoughts on the subject, which I had just read about on the flight to Chicago in preparation for a weekend course in February.

As many of you know, Hildegard was a visionary abbess of a Benedictine community of women in the 12^th century who composed music and verse for worship. While I personally stumble on her visions, I am taken with her attitudes toward music.

Hildegard scholar and editor Barbara Newman writes, “For Hildegard, not only inspired canticles but all music was associated with prophecy and the nostalgia for Eden. That is why, she says, ‘a person often sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of the celestial harmony’” before human beings were, in Hildegard’s words from another context, “lured…away from the celestial harmony and the delights of paradise.”

Newman explains Hildegard’s view that “Music could not only express the prophetic spirit; it might even awaken that spirit,” offering the example of Elisha calling for a musician and, upon hearing the music, “the Spirit suddenly descended upon him and he prophesied” (2 Kings 3:15).

Newman observes that Augustine found the sensual nature of music problematic, but for Hildegard, “liturgical song was a medium that perfectly united soul and body.” Personally, I have thought of church music as an integration of word and sacrament, because it’s verbal as well as embodied.  Thus how appropriate that my sermon about “Discerning the Body of Christ” in one another enjoyed the context of a praise service led by four outstanding female singers, one of whom is the pastor. Hildegard viewed Christ as a second Adam, weaving the broken body of humanity into the one body which God shaped “in the primal dawn / before all creation.”

What also strikes me as I study Hildegard is that her theology of music was developed during a period when she and her community were forbidden by the church hierarchy to sing, a punishment for their refusal to exhume an “unworthy” body from their churchyard. Newman summarizes Hildegard’s adamant defense to church leaders in this way: “To silence music in the Church is to create an artificial rift between earth and heaven, to put asunder that which God has joined together.” Want often makes us more keenly aware of the meaning of what we’re denied.

Those of us who have been denied by the church because of our own embodied praise—women, LGBT, racial minorities, those with disabilities, those with reasoning brains, and so on—have our own theologies that the church needs to hear.  May we be as adamant as Hildegard opposing “an artificial rift between earth and heaven.”

Related post:

In Praise of Praise

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

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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. 

We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

During recess in the second grade, my friend Mary and I enjoyed swinging as high as we could on the swing set, singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” It’s a great song of comfort, basically affirming that, no matter what, God is holding us. Note the song doesn’t say God is in control, just that God is there for us. And I still believe that.

These days we have a better grip on what it means for God to hold the whole world because we have the internet and a 24/7 news cycle. Now we too have the whole world in our hands every time we log on.

The narrator in my as-yet-unpublished mystery novel so reveres the internet that, just as many of us only visit God on Sunday mornings, he only visits the internet on Saturday mornings. Comparing it to touching the forbidden Mt. Sinai, he drolly writes:

The internet is such an awesome god—so extensive we can only glimpse a part of it, so powerful that it has crashed many a computer, so desirous that many humans and their marriages have been sacrificed on its local altars. Okay, I’m a little over the top here, but it’s an amusing analogy, don’t you think? My point is, like any powerful and overwhelming god, the internet must be approached guardedly, with respect, on appointed days and at appointed times, lest we take it for granted (as if our computers are always up) or believe we can domesticate it (making it entirely user-friendly). Just as the ancient monastics limited human intercourse of all kinds, even so, those of us who practice an ascetic lifestyle must limit our intercourse with the internet, lest it lead us into idolatry or distract us from reality. To switch mythological metaphors, the internet is the Medusa’s head of our time, a face whose tresses are cables rather than snakes, but still able to turn men to stone.

Demonstrating a similar reverence, only recently has my spell-check stopped correcting me when I fail to capitalize the word “internet,” though it never corrects me when I fail to capitalize “god”!

A retreat leader once scandalized my progressive theology—you know, the theology that tells you to have the Bible in one hand and The New York Times in the other during your morning prayers—by observing that the omnipresent news cycle hooks us in other people’s stories before we know our own story for the day. And, during a retreat I was leading on finding space in our busy lives to rest in God, a woman had the “aha” moment that she was busy even in her prayers, listing the world’s concerns, as if the whole world were not already in God’s hands!

Now more than ever, we have the whole world in our hands. And more than ever, we need to step back, take a breath, take moments of Sabbath rest, and resist the temptation to use Eden’s apple or the Silicon Valley’s Apple to be like the gods.

Yet we are not absolved of responsibility. Now, also more than ever, the internet gives what we do and say the power to transform the world for good or for ill.

We’ve got the whole world in our hands. If we are God’s, then that should be a comfort rather than a concern.