Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: Epiphany

Showing posts with label Epiphany. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Communion of Life

Grant Park, where I often walk or run.

As a follow-up to last week’s post, “Thank You for the Body that Loves Me,” I present another meditation on our earthiness, another in a series of reflections from my earlier books that I hope may lift our spirits in this new year. The series opened with “Peace of Mind” and will continue throughout the season of Epiphany and, who knows, maybe beyond.

The late gifted editor Stephanie Egnotovich at Westminster John Knox Press helped me “birth” a number of books, for which I am grateful. In 1998, she came to me with an idea. Sitting next to someone on an airplane reading a kind of generic book on spirituality, she asked him about his selection. As I wrote in my acknowledgments of what became Communion of Life, “He explained [to her] that he had no religious background and was attempting to discover spirituality.”

“Why don’t you write something like that for spiritual seekers?” she asked me.

Not knowing this was a common plan for New Age books, I chose a mythology that no one would take literally, that everything consists of earth, air, water, fire. And I wrote 12 cycles of meditations on earth, air, water, and fire.

I was so self-conscious of this adventure that I showed them to no one until complete, and then only to Stephanie. She loved them, and took them to marketing at the Press. The marketing department loved them even more, she said, and though later admitting their limitations with this very different market, we proceeded with this experiment.

Stephanie herself paired my meditations with the outstanding art of National Geographic photographers, so I can honestly say without self-pride that Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium became the most visually beautiful book I’ve ever helped create.

Cycle Three: Day 9 Earth

Tangible earth,

You touch yourself through us.

We grasp your hand,

Stroke your fur,

Prune your branches,

Cast your stones,

Bury your seed,

Birth your children.

But it’s not just us,

It’s you in us.

You have developed your sense of touch

Within our bodies—

Communing through us

With air, water, fire,

In pleasure, buoyancy, and passion;

And communing through us with yourself

Delightedly, painfully, compassionately:

A communion of life

Giving rise to soul:

More than the sum of your parts.

Earth—in us, in me,

You have become sensual and sensitive.

Blessed earth!

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Wednesday, December 26, 2018

Peace of Mind

In recent troubles and dark days, personal and political, my peace of mind has been “saved” by reading one poem a day by J. Barrie Shepherd, an octogenarian retired Presbyterian pastor but unretired author who this summer sent me his “chapbook” (a small collection of poetry) entitled, If You Don’t Have Twenty Minutes Don’t Stop! The title is a reference to a sign on Chebeague Island off the coast of Maine that graced the garage door of an inveterate storyteller who loved chatting people up.

After floundering for morning prayer reading material following the eventually overwhelming Tao of Physics, which regular readers will remember, I chose Barrie’s brief book of poetry. Initially I read several poems at a time, but soon realized contemplation was better served by reading only one per day. “Be here now!” each poem urged, as poems tend to do, much like pericopes of scripture, exactly what I needed as Wade and I dealt with the vicissitudes of a friend dealing with mental health and addiction issues, even as we in the United States deal daily with a leader like that in our government.

Focusing on one-a-day made me think of that wonderful Psalm 131 (NJB):

Yahweh, my heart is not haughty,

I do not set my sights too high.

I have taken no part in great affairs,

in wonders beyond my scope.

No, I hold myself in quiet and silence,

like a little child in its mother’s arms,

like a little child, so I keep myself.

Let [us] hope in Yahweh

henceforth and for ever.

Barrie and I have exchanged emails from time to time about this blog, and I am grateful to have his encouragement and readership. I have told him that his books of poetic meditations helped me, early in life, to maintain a steady prayer life. Knowing I had one of his books made me eager to make time in my morning routine to read and reflect and pray. His gifts and those of others whose meditations I have used inspired my own books of meditations and prayers, including this blog to encourage progressive Christians to take time for contemplation.

Longtime readers will remember that I began this blog when I was told by publishers that there was no market for meditation books for progressive Christians because we supposedly don’t take time for contemplation! My first publisher told me the same thing about LGBT Christians when I wrote Coming Out to God: Prayers for Lesbians and Gay Men, Their Families and Friends. Publication of those prayers by another publisher helped create a market, and then my first publisher asked me to write a daily med book for LGBT Christians, which I entitled The Word Is Out.

As we approach and begin a new year and through the season of Epiphany, I’ve decided to re-present some of my writings for you in the hopes that they will have the same effect Barrie’s poems have had on me during the last several weeks, offering you peace of mind. I begin with Day 10 of Coming Out to God, a book whose prayers are broken into phrases not with any poetic pretensions but to slow the reader down:

All-embracing Spirit,

I don’t know what to say to you today.

It’s like sharing a meal in silence with a friend,

or dropping wordlessly exhausted once home from work.

I do not believe

I will be saved by my words,

though I usually feel compelled

to say them.

I do believe, God,

your grace is sufficient

to save me

even if I were silent.

I believe

I need times

to express your grace

in words.

I also believe

I need times

to experience your grace

in silence.

Intimate Spirit, today

I simply want to be in your presence.

Speak to me in this silence,

and let this silence speak to me.

Copies of either J. Barrie Shepherd’s If You Don’t Have Twenty Minutes Don’t Stop! or his latest chapbook, A Piper Shores Christmas may be purchased @ $10 + $2 shipping by writing: J. Barrie Shepherd, 15 Piper Road, Apt K325, Scarborough, ME 04074. Proceeds go to charities. (Remember, there are twelve days of Christmas to use the latter chapbook!) You may also write him at barrieshep@aol.com.

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Wednesday, January 10, 2018

"Darwin's Epiphany on the Meaning of Flowers"

Our orchids are budding and blooming

this month thanks to Wade's care.

I confess I am approaching Oliver Sacks’s posthumously published book, The River of Consciousness, as a sacred text. The richness and depth of both his writing style and his content made his articles in the newspaper favorites of mine in the years preceding his death.

The first essay, “Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers,” which I anonymously alluded to last week, has not disappointed. Darwin observed that flowers and insects co-evolved, and he once contrasted his (in Sacks’s words) “frontal assault…on creationism” in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection to his subsequent work with flowers.

In Darwin’s words, “no one else has perceived that my chief interest in my orchid book has been that it was a ‘flank movement’ on the enemy,” the opponents of evolution. As Darwin’s botanist friend Asa Gray suggested, if his book on orchids “had appeared before the Origin, the author would have been canonized rather than anathematized by the natural theologians.”

In other words, we human beings would have felt less threatened understanding how flowers and insects evolved characteristics over eons that were mutually beneficial. The evolution of mammals like us threatened our sense of superiority, our presumption that we were made ex nihilo in the image of God, not descended from other animals.

The second but more ancient Genesis creation myth that describes Yahweh shaping the first human being from earth is closer to Darwin’s own observation in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Dust we art, to dust we shalt return.

Sacks writes,

The notion of such vast eons of time—and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety—was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided, for many of us, a sense of deep meaning and satisfaction that belief in a divine plan never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life.

Reminds me of Paul’s metaphor of how “we see through a glass darkly.”

With Oliver Sacks,

I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world.

Sacks credits this insight to “Darwin’s epiphany on the meaning of flowers” and Sacks’s own childhood experience of the natural world.

I once worked with a pastor who gave as much attention to the arrangement of flowers, cuttings, and plants on the chancel as he did to the words of sermons, the sacraments, prayers, and liturgies. When he died, I entitled his eulogy, “The Importance of Flowers.” To this day, I remember less of his theology than of his aesthetics—or truer, his aesthetic was his theology.

The impertinence of youth caused me once to chide my father for spending so much time on his garden “rather than on something that lasts.” “What lasts?” was his wise response, making no apology.

Possibly the better way to proclaim the Gospel is to “say it with flowers.”

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Wednesday, January 4, 2017

"In Earth"

On my way to Petra, 1981.

Thank you, Huston Smith, for widely sharing your lifelong spiritual quest.

The morning that I write this, I completed my re-reading of the Gospel texts of Jesus’ Nativity, a habit of Advent for me. As I have several posts already prepared, this will be published toward the end of Christmastide, a few days before Epiphany. Given that it’s a “Christmas epiphany” of sorts, that feels just about right. Epiphany and its season have come to mean for me a time to celebrate all glimpses of divinity, including spiritual and scientific, and this “glimpse” juxtaposes both categories.

The reading this morning was the Gospel of John’s famous prologue about the Word, the Word that called creation into being, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. My blogpost “The Word We Need This Christmas” reflected on this passage, and I had this in mind as I read again John’s very grand interpretation of Jesus’ birth.

But my “a-ha” came when I recited the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, as I do every morning. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth”—and here I stopped, not adding my usual “on earth,” an alternate wording that suggests an alliance of human will. “Thy kingdom come…in earth.” “The Word made flesh.” The connection was obvious and inescapable. From the beginning, God’s “kingdom” and God’s “word” has been embodied, enfleshed, in earth, in matter and energy.

God’s kingdom and God’s will is the spark that began the universe in the eyes of people of faith. “Thy kingdom come in earth as in heaven” is as much about origins as it is about hoped-for destinations. Faith posits that the more we know of our origin—our reason for being who and what and where we are—the better we know our destination, our purpose, our meaning.

The scientific search for the origins of the universe is no less than an attempt to find our place in it, how and why and when we came to be. For most of human history, we have relied on our spiritual imaginations to speculate on our place: myth-making, ritual-performing, story-telling. Now that our scientific imaginations are given a freer reign, we have fact-oriented, experiment-performing, evidence-gathering methods of discerning something like what our spiritual imaginations have sought.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc that bends toward justice” may be a way of recognizing that justice (God’s will, God’s kingdom) is built-in. This is a high-view of creation in general and humankind in particular, and would seem to belie the notion of “The Fall,” but to “fall” requires heighth. In my belief, “The Fall” is not built-in, though most Christians probably believe that to be so. As Matthew Fox and others have pointed out, it’s our “original blessing” that is built-in.

Genesis has us created in God’s image, thus in Jesus’ lineage the Gospel of Luke calls Adam “son of God.” The Gospel of John has the Word giving us “power to become children of God,” restoring us to our rightful heritage.

My reasoning will seem sophomoric to some, but the profound sense that matter and energy and we are also incarnations of God’s will and kingdom will not leave me.

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The intense beauty of colors in the stone of Petra

brought involuntary tears to my eyes.