Cuddling with Jesus

Wade and Hobbes cuddling.

I can imagine red flags going up for my more progressive readers, fearing I’ve gone evangelical on them with a title like “Cuddling with Jesus.” And my more mainstream readers may fear I’m getting too familiar, even sexual, with our spiritual leader.

But the deity with whom Jacob wrestles in Genesis becomes the deity with whom the Beloved Disciple cuddles during the Last Supper in John. It’s okay for males to wrestle (God was imagined as male, remember) but not to cuddle (Jesus was imagined as God, remember).

In As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage, I pointed out how recent translations have distanced the Beloved Disciple, believed to be John, from Jesus. In the King James Version “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” The Revised Standard Version describes him as “lying close to the breast of Jesus.” But the New Revised Standard Version and the New Jerusalem Bible have the Beloved Disciple simply “reclining next” to Jesus. As the Beloved disciple moves farther away from Jesus with newer versions, I imagine in the next translation he will be in another room!

In his book, The Man Jesus Loved, Theodore Jennings translates the passage this way:

One of his disciples was lying in Jesus’ lap, the one Jesus loved; so Simon Peter nods to this one and says: “Tell, whom is he talking about?” That one, falling back on Jesus’ chest says to him: “Lord, who is it?”

Imagine watching TV with a group of close friends, some of whom are seated on the floor. Arms may rest on knees, heads lean on shoulders, hands draped affectionately on legs. This would be like the scene of the Last Supper, where the custom would be for everyone to be on the floor with cushions or mats, not seated upright at a table.

This is the casual intimacy between John and Jesus, but it affords John the opportunity, in the understanding of Celtic Christianity, to “listen for the heartbeat of God” with his head on Jesus’ breast. It is a symbol of mysticism, not sexuality, though mysticism is also erotic, understanding “eros” as the force that compels us toward God or another human being.

What prompts this reflection is a recent opinion piece by Stanford anthropology professor T. M. Luhrmann, who suggests the success of evangelical churches is that they promise such a personal relationship with God, but then overstates the case by claiming—mistakenly, I believe—that mainstream Christians do not imagine a God so intimate. (Since writing this I discovered agreement from a Letter to the Editor by Sister Mary Ann Walsh.)

I do believe mainstream Christians have a problem with intimacy. I once heard seminary professor and author Carter Heyward describe their God as a “Gentleman God,” embarrassed by sexual passion, yet too polite and dispassionate to be rabidly anti-gay. And the changing position of the Beloved Disciple may have to do with a fear of homoerotic implications.

But I believe the broader fear is intimacy with God. I’ve noticed that the same translation that has John “reclining next” to Jesus in John 13:23 also translates John 1:18 about Jesus’ intimacy with God as “who is close to the Father’s heart” when the actual text reads “who is close to the Father’s bosom.”

Yet I believe many mainstream Christians’ embrace of contemplation also chooses an intimate relationship with God. And though it may seem new, it has always been with us, from the Desert Fathers and Mothers, monastic communities, and Celtic spirituality to our present day interest in all things spiritual.

My purpose in writing this blog is to encourage progressive Christians, too, to come out of the closet about their intimacy with God, with Jesus, and with the Spirit. Ours may be a different experience, but no less worthy to strengthen our resolve, challenge others’ certainties, and enjoy communion with all we hold sacred and dear.

I posted this on April 24, 2013 and thought current readers of this blog might enjoy it.

Please join me for a five-day contemplative retreat April 27-May 1, 2020 in Cullman, Alabama, through the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary. It is open to the public.

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. Use the search engine in the upper left corner of the blog to find particular topics.

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When Evangelicals Were Kinder

Qumran, West Bank, 

Palestinian desert, 1981 (CRG)

Christian got tired of hanging out with God in the wilderness and began having temptations to be something more than a mere follower of Jesus.

Turn these stones to “bread,” as in “money,” and with that money enjoy the prosperity you were intended to have! It’s long been believed that those with big houses and expensive cars and material wealth are especially blessed by God. You can’t live by God’s words alone!

See the high steeple of this megachurch: this will be yours—large and influential, popular and spectacular, maybe even global!—as proof of your faith and goodness and success to the world and to other churches. God will surely be tempted to reward you bigtime!

You will have political power if you bow to leaders who join you in abusing and controlling the bodies of others: workers, women, trans people, lesbians and gays, immigrants, people of color, the needy, and anyone who stands in your way. You can have all the power you need to make the world in your image! It will be sweet.

No, Jesus can’t come along. He would never understand. He had a good idea but just doesn’t know how to capitalize on it. You do. You’re better than he is. Remember even he said you’d do greater things than he did.  And such a loser! Got himself crucified!

This parable came to me in the middle of the night, as I thought about how much kinder my evangelical, fundamentalist parents were than the evangelical Christians of today. I realize, in their hunger for power, influence, and control, evangelicals have lost their way.

What got me to thinking of this was an opinion piece written by Liesl Schwabe, “Everything I Know about Feminism I Learned from Nuns.” It reminded me that many of the values I now hold and promote as a progressive Christian I learned from evangelical, fundamentalist Christians. Now, I know that many of you may have had quite a different experience, either of nuns and Catholic school, or of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, but some of us at least have takeaways from those experiences that may never have been imagined or anticipated or desired by those spiritual communities.

“Jesus loves the little children,” we were taught to sing, “all the children of the world: red and yellow, black and white, all are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.” In no way does this support white privilege, let alone white supremacy. There are no boundaries or borders to God’s love; we are all God’s children.

“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to him belong, they are weak, but he is strong.” The vulnerable, deprived, underprivileged, marginalized, and abused alike belong to those whom Jesus loves. And, as process theologian Daniel Day Williams pointed out, it is more vital (as in life-giving) and needful to belong than to believe.

How many times we were taught that Jesus welcomed lepers, children, women, people with disabilities, those with mental health issues, the poor, the oppressed, while, in the words of his mother Mary, “sending the rich away empty” and in his own words calling upon the wealthy to sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds to the poor! Jesus was an early advocate of health care for all and a challenger of income inequality.

We learned that Jesus praised the faith of a child, the faith of those outside his religious community, the faith of foreigners, the faith of outcasts.

And, as he was himself dying on a cross, he welcomed a convicted criminal into Paradise, surely a subversion of the death penalty.

Jesus witnessed a God of mercy that too many fundamentalist evangelical Christians have abandoned, ignored, or forgotten.

Related Posts:

Beware of the God

Killing God

The Terrible God

“Pride Goeth before a Fall”—and Getting Back Up!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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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. 

Wishful Thinking

Surprisingly, Yale Law School professor Dan Kahan has found in a recent study that beliefs about such things as evolution and global warming are not necessarily based on ignorance, but often on a knowledge of the scientific facts that is wilfully resisted because of a person’s political or religious identity and affiliation. In other words, engaging in what the economist Paul Krugman characterizes as “wishful thinking.”

I first found out about the study from New York Times columnist Krugman’s application of the principle to economics in “Belief, Facts, and Money.” Then I read the Times article by political scientist Brendan Nyhan that Krugman references about Kahan’s discoveries, “When Beliefs and Facts Collide.”

People may be current on the science of evolution and global warming, but because of their identities as evangelical Christians or conservative Republicans, they reject the science because it doesn’t fit their faith and values. Surveys indicate the gap between facts and beliefs are wider among those believers familiar with the facts, because, apparently, they know what facts to reject!

This explains so much.

In college, when I spoke out against the Vietnam War, from churches to Rotarian groups and Kiwanis clubs, I believed that if people knew the factual history of Vietnam from French colonialism to American involvement, they too would oppose the war. I produced a page-long summary of that history for distribution, certain that would convert my listeners.

What I found was that the historical facts didn’t matter to most, even when they supposed them to be true. “My country: Love it or Leave It,” was not just a bumper sticker to them, it was a belief system. And the myth of the Domino theory of how communism spread further undergirded support of American intervention.

In churches, when I spoke for the full welcome and inclusion of LGBT people, listeners resisted current biblical scholarship and contemporary scientific studies. John Boswell’s landmark tome Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and his subsequent Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, revealing that historically the church has not been of one mind on homosexual persons and relationships, did not convince those Christians most opposed to homosexuality, nor did it convince those gays and lesbians most opposed to the church. Indeed, Boswell told me that he had anticipated vigorous attacks on his work from the church, but not from the LGBT community!

Long after HIV was identified as the culprit causing AIDS, and long after it was proven that HIV could not be communicated by casual contact, a well-informed evangelical Christian friend of mine insisted that she believed it could be, thus warranting caution and quarantines. Today there are still myths held dearly around HIV/AIDS by those across the political spectrum and around the world in spite of exhaustive medical evidence that contradicts them.

Niehan writes, “One implication of Mr. Kahan’s study and other research in this field is that we need to try to break the association between identity and factual beliefs on high-profile issues” such as evolution and climate change.

Progressive Christians know about this process. We identify as Christian, but we don’t feel compelled to express our faith as “old time religion.” It’s vital that we out-evangelize our evangelical brothers and sisters by spreading the good news that Christians can be Christians without taking the Bible literally, without accepting doctrine without question and reason, without losing our minds or our hearts.

We too engage in “wishful thinking”: that all might honor human rights, hunger to know the truth, work agreeably with those with whom they differ, accept responsibility as careful stewards of the earth, and practice a vocation of compassion for all.

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A Call to Civility

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

Civility is on many of our minds in the midst of Congressional quagmire and election year politics. Too many politicians resort to throwing red meat to their constituencies (chum to their chums, I call it), whether that of their opponents or of easy scapegoats. An election year is not the time, it seems, to give thoughtful, nuanced, even tolerant responses to another’s position; but in our 24/7/12 news cycle, every year has become an election year. Nietzsche’s Myth of Eternal Return translated into today’s politics means that every thoughtful, nuanced, even tolerant response is up for eternal review and rebuttal.

The fault lies not only in our political stars, but in our selves. I too can grow harsh and dismissive and ridiculing when I know I’m right. I’ve just learned, on my better days, to keep it to myself.  The proverb, “A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger,” comes to mind.

I’ve recently read two books urging civil discourse. Both are gifts from people I respect. The first was written by an orthodox rabbi leaning toward the left, You Don’t Have to be Wrong for Me to Be Right: Finding Faith Without Fanaticism by Brad Hirschfield. The other was written by an evangelical Christian leaning toward the right, Lord, Save Us from Your Followers: Why Is the Gospel of Love Dividing America? by Dan Merchant. The first contains many quotable quotes, the latter includes interviews with such disparate characters as Al Franken and Rick Santorum. Each author made comments that made me wince as well as offering challenging insights.

Hirschfield quotes Reinhold Niebuhr, “Fanatic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt; it is when we are not sure that we are doubly sure.” Then Hirschfield explains how he grew out of his youthful fanatic Zionism to pray alongside Muslims, even lead Havdalah (prayers at the close of Sabbath that welcome the new week) on top of the Reichstag (the onetime seat of Nazi power) in Berlin, as well as attend a Catholic mass at Auschwitz after opening a synagogue there. He says faith traditions should “help us imagine a better world and nurture our ability to get there.” He explains compassion “is about noticing the person in front of you before the ideology inside of you.” Ultimately, he says, “I have come to believe that religious traditions exist not to serve the faithful, but to help the faithful serve the world.”

A similar insight about religious traditions helping us serve the world occurred to Dan Merchant a year before he decided to address the “divisive rhetoric” of “bumper sticker theology” and “culture wars” in his documentary and book, Lord, Save Us from Your Followers. He personally witnessed Christians who preferred to be called “followers of Jesus” simply helping people in Ethiopia, observing, “these Followers of Jesus are here to meet a need and not win an argument.” He writes, “Our tendency to reduce the gospel of Jesus to a couple of isolated issues, our willingness to oversimplify this complex life just so we can be right and win an argument is, as a smart person would say, antithetical to Jesus’ teachings.”

He says, for example, that when evangelicals say they “want to preserve the traditional institution of marriage,” it comes across as “I hate gay people.” Merchant writes, “I can’t accept this communication breakdown. Should the burden be on my lips or their ears? I guess it depends on whether I really want to have a conversation or I simply want to be right.”

I was both challenged by and proud of the gay Washington state legislator who recently said it was important that those who voted against that state’s same-gender marriage bill not be called bigots, just as those who voted for it not be accused of undermining family values.

Though we may resist turning the other cheek, we might at least turn another ear.