The Empty Closet

Jerusalem passageway, 1981 -crg

Approaching Easter, I found myself in a kind of Holy Saturday malaise—you know, that dreary interim when Jesus is in the tomb, and all is lost. I read again the narratives around the empty tomb, the resurrection stories, one Gospel each day. I wanted to encounter the risen Christ. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!

Then it occurred to me that I was looking for a literal resurrection, like Thomas demanding to see the prints of the nails in Jesus' hands and feel the wound in his side. In truth, the stories that most appeal to me are the mystical ones, like the Emmaus disciples experiencing Jesus in the kerygma of “opening scriptures” and the sacrament of breaking bread.

The literal miracle I was overlooking was what came out of that empty tomb: a new faith and spiritual community that would attract much of humanity and change the world; a fresh understanding of God and, to take it personally, a fresh understanding of myself. “God brought us to life with Christ,” in the words of Ephesians 2:5 (NJB). I recognized the resurrection of Jesus in countless others, thanks to his passion and compassion.

Coming out of the closet helped me better grasp resurrection. I know how differently life and God and the world are experienced when free of confinement, restriction, and hiddenness. Everything is new and seen/felt/heard/smelled/tasted as if for the first time. It’s wonderful and terrifying, uplifting and burdensome. It calls for an entirely different way of being, acting, speaking, and loving.

It entails both freedom and responsibility. Its heights and depths make one soar and sink at the same time. It helps one focus and broaden all at once. Suddenly, when first coming out, I was in the “rapids” of my life excursion, exhilarating and frightening, both limiting and opening possibilities, tearing me away from safer shores and hurling me toward the unknown. “Thar be dragons thar,” I feared.

In my 1998 book Coming Out as Sacrament, I used “coming out” as a hermeneutic for biblical interpretation. One reviewer groused about my introducing yet another hermeneutic, or lens, through which to view scripture, but I believe “the more the merrier,” the greater the opportunity for diverse populations to understand and apply the spiritual wisdom of the Bible to their own lives and the lives of their communities.

I boldly asserted that the Bible was God’s coming out story.  After all, in Christian tradition, self-revelation is how we know God. From the burning bush to Jesus of Nazareth to the Holy Spirit, all awareness and knowledge of God comes at divine initiative. I suggested God came out of the closet of heaven to dwell with us and even dwell within us.

The empty tomb may be viewed as a kind of empty closet. “Do not hold on to me!” Jesus told the weeping Mary in another one of those mystical resurrection stories. “Do not hold onto me!” each of us says to peers and colleagues as Jesus calls us from confining beliefs, practices, prejudices, perspectives, and expectations.

Jesus goes before us into Galilee, or any region or culture or community or vocation or workplace or movement in which we live and move and have our being, if only we have eyes to see and hearts to feel. With his dearly beloved Lazarus, he challenges us, “Come out!”

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Stay with Me

On the sacred mountain of Haleakala, a lone silversword, 1982.

My friend, Henri Nouwen biographer Michael Ford, asked me to write something about Henri, his affinity for Vincent van Gogh, and loneliness, as he prepares to write a book about Henri and loneliness.

Loneliness is the wilderness for the writer, the artist, and the contemplative. Writing, creativity, and prayer are not ways out of the wilderness, but a way to make the wilderness blossom, to turn the ache of feeling lonely to a fulfilling solitude, transforming “lone” to “alone,” derived from joining the words “all-one.”

French existentialist and novelist Albert Camus wrote a book of short stories, The Exile and the Kingdom, stories contrasting being alone and being with others. I’ll never forget the Algerian woman who leaves her husband’s bedside in the middle of the night to ascend to the roof and commune alone with the stars.

The story pertinent here is about an artist whose work makes him famous, acquiring admirers and students alike until he can’t work anymore—that is, until he finds a hidden attic in which to rediscover his art in solitude.

In his prolific and often profound letters to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh writes sometimes of his loneliness, while tending the fire in his hearth should a passerby stop to be warmed by its glow. His paintings became a way of offering himself to others, his “sermons,” as he once called them, that he hoped would have the same consoling effect that the Christian religion once offered. “While I sit here lonely,” Vincent wrote, “My work perhaps speaks to a friend.”

A theme or strand of loneliness wove its way into every one of Henri’s “letters to Theo,” his dozens of books on the spiritual life. A desperate extrovert, Henri nonetheless needed times of exile to hone his craft as writer and contemplative. His most severe exile, a time away from his community nursing a heart broken at the ending of a promising relationship, arguably produced his most profound, most simple, and most heartfelt spiritual treatise, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom.

Henri’s loneliness spoke to my own. Upon hearing a tape of a lecture on loneliness for his class, I enrolled in the course, the notes of which became Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. The movements were from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, and from illusion to prayer. Of all his books, Henri later observed, this was closest to his lived Christian experience.

When I write, create, and pray, my loneliness is transformed, my exile becomes community, my wilderness blossoms and communion is possible.

My writing is talking to a friend, making conversation, or a stranger, breaking the ice. My creativity is imagination let loose, hopefully to entertain as well as to encourage. My prayer is recognizing and enjoying God’s presence and remembering people I care about as well as those I should care about.

Jesus taught love, compassion, mercy, and gratitude as ways of transforming our wilderness. Reaching out to one another is the way to the kingdom, the commonwealth of God.

“Pray with me,” he urged his disciples in Gethsemane.

“Stay with us,” the Emmaus disciples urged their fellow traveler.

“Stay with me,” the haunting cry of a popular song goes, explaining “Guess it’s true, I’m not good at a one-night stand.”

That’s true of all of us, even God.

Related post:

My Loneliness Led Me to God

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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.  

"I Had No Idea Your Blog Was Gay"

After posting the link to my blog last Wednesday on a number of Facebook pages, I took our dog Hobbes to the park, and began to wonder what I would write for today’s post. I returned to an e-mail asking to be unsubscribed from my back-up list (those whose servers do not allow Feedburner delivery of my blog) which simply said, “Unsubscribe me. I had no idea that your blog was gay.”

Surprised, I responded, “My blog is not gay, I am.”

Now I had the opening of this post, and one of my longer runs to contemplate it.

The person apparently was subscribed for some time, and I wondered what prompted this realization. Was the Emmaus disciples’ story somehow misunderstood? I had written, “The eros of their hearts has been unleashed and ignited and they burn as one.” Perhaps this was understood as sexual, when in fact I view eros simply as “the urge to merge” which drives both the mystic as well as the lover.

I remembered once, when reviewing scriptures said to be about homosexuality for a congregation, a listener asked me to turn to a biblical passage in which Jesus describes the end times: “Two men shall be sleeping in a bed—one shall be taken, and the other not; two women shall be grinding in the field—one shall be taken, and the other not.”

I gathered the questioner was thinking of the couple sleeping in one bed, so I played dumb. “There’s nothing about homosexuality here,” I observed. She responded, “You mean to tell me that two women ‘grinding’ in the field, isn’t about homosexuality?” The gathering burst out laughing, and her pastor rose to his feet to explain that “grinding” did not mean that then!

But the subscriber’s decision prompted me to think of larger issues (of course).

First, the person had apparently appreciated the posts he or she had read, perhaps even benefiting spiritually. Only when realizing their source did they become unwelcome.

Second, so many Christians throughout the centuries have been blessed by reading LGBT mystics and spiritual writers, though they may not have known their sexual or gender identities.

Third, Christians of the 20^th and 21^st century had so many opportunities to grow from the spiritual experience of openly LGBT Christians denied membership, marriage, and ministry in the church. Denominational publishers and periodicals initially would not publish us, Christian book catalogues would not carry our books, and religious bookstores would not stock them.

Perhaps worst of all and best of all, my colleagues and I were often forced to write and speak about sexuality rather than spirituality! (Worst of all, because of the limitations; best of all, because the church REALLY needed to grapple with sexuality—any kind, not just ours.)

We had so much to share about our spiritual experience, yet the church, for the most part and until recently, missed out, unless we stayed in the closet. Denied access to pulpits and to a large extent, teaching positions from Sunday school to seminaries, we formed our own spiritual support groups, congregations, and a denomination, Metropolitan Community Churches.

One of my reasons for writing this blog is to share what I’ve learned and am learning spiritually with other progressive Christians. It’s not a “gay blog” (though there’d be nothing wrong with that!) but the blog of a progressive Christian.

Yet the unsubscribed subscriber is not alone in refusing the spiritual writings of someone who is different: we do it all the time, sometimes unconsciously and sometimes purposely when we do not read people because of their gender, race, religion, sexuality, education, culture, politics, you name it.

I thought of a white friend who intentionally taught in black neighborhoods. Holding a little African American girl on her lap, the child revealed her distrust of white people. My friend explained, “Well, I’m white.” The child jumped off her lap and looked at her disbelievingly, though my friend’s skin is white as it comes. “No,” the child said, “You can’t be.” White had become a label, rather than the color of someone’s experience.

I think of all the labels that have prevented me over the years to attend to the spirituality of so many who had so much to teach me about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, what it means to be deeply spiritual, and what it means to be a citizen of the world.

I am grateful to God for the world’s diversity that challenges me more and more to open my mind and my heart.

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. 

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.