The Temple of God's Wounds

The cross at Mt. Calvary Guesthouse.

Every Holy Week for many years I have travelled to The Temple of God’s Wounds, a small book written in 1951 by the Anglican Bishop of Bombay, ‘Will Quinlan’ nee William Quinlan Lash, a mystic. Originally from England, in India the bishop helped found the Christa Prema Seva Sangha (sangha means “community”), which, according to his stub bio in Wikipedia, “sought to live Christianity in a way that was faithful to Indian culture.” 

That explains how I received the book during Eastertide of 1988 from the Rev. John Cole, who served in India as a “fraternal worker” (missionary) his entire professional life, immersing himself in its culture and spirituality. John was a sweet and gentle and unassuming man who adopted the speech patterns and body language of the Indian people, complete with their signature deferential slight wobbling of the head.  

John arrived in India the year before Gandhi was assassinated, but never met him because, he confessed to me, his Western reserve initially resisted the cult of personality often associated with Hindu teachers. But eventually India’s spirituality had as much or more effect on John than he on it. He spent his furloughs in the States with the church I served, and so became a friend and confidant and spiritual guide, especially after he retired to southern California. 

You can tell that the story of how I came to have The Temple of God’s Wounds is as important to me as the story within the book. It took me a few years before I started using it regularly as part of my spiritual practice for Holy Week. In first person, the book tells the story of a discouraged, worldly but faithful man who is referred by a colleague to a contemplative community “in the West” that neither advertises nor hides its presence, but is accessible to its neighbors for help and prayers. He soon realizes that men and women of accomplishment in the world come there for solace, self-inventory, centering, and strength. 

The central task he is assigned is the contemplation of seven paintings—one on each day—in the central circular sanctuary. Three have to do with the crucifixion, three with what follows, and the seventh with a vision of their meaning. Each bear witness to God’s wounded love. 

It took me a few years of reading this little book to refrain from trying in vain to picture the author’s detailed descriptions of the buildings, which I can’t follow. Instead of exteriors, I am more interested in the interior life. His life in that week is enriched by walking the surrounding hills, tending the courtyard garden, visiting the sick and dying in nearby villages, sharing silence and worship, conversing with spiritual guides in the community, and reading helpful spiritual writers. 

I also learned to set aside any discomfort I had with any Christian concepts that I may not embrace and accept the central truths about the spiritual life being revealed in this story. In other words, just like reading the Bible, I am looking for the “inside” story in the storytelling—what is intended to be conveyed in the particulars. 

Each time I visit The Temple of God’s Wounds, with its central courtyard cross pierced with nails for each of Jesus’ five wounds, I think of the retreat house in the hills above Santa Barbara that I visited from time to time when I lived in southern California. Mt. Calvary was run by the Episcopal Order of the Holy Cross. It too had such a cross at the heart of its central courtyard. 

My last two opportunities to visit there before it was destroyed in the Montecito fire of 2008 proved spiritual metaphors. The first, I wanted to show my partner and my family members who live nearby the spectacular view Mt. Calvary afforded of Santa Barbara and its shoreline. But my family members wanted us to see a still more spectacular view, and took us to a ridge high above Mt. Calvary, which, given the haze and the height, precluded good vision. The second, on the way home to Atlanta after my interim ministry in San Francisco, was my last opportunity to show Mt. Calvary to my partner and our dog, and we enjoyed a breathtaking view. 

This contrast reminded me that the higher up you are does not guarantee an inspiring view. The Vatican, an ivory tower, a corporate ladder do not assure anyone a better perspective. Success, wealth, even fitness do not ensure vision. The successful but searching narrator of the bishop’s book gives further evidence of this. 

That’s why we need centers and stories like The Temple of God’s Wounds. 

 

I posted this on April 11, 2012, without the photo above, which depicts the cross at Mt. Calvary mentioned in the post. 

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

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Love Force

 

Today and next Wednesday I am revisiting two posts relevant to the upcoming U.S. elections. This post appeared on Nov. 7, 2012, but was written on election day, Nov. 6, before results were known.

Mid-October I read in the morning paper about the Lance Armstrong doping scandal, the Taliban shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai for encouraging the education of girls in Pakistan, and the death of George Whitmore, an African American whose life was never good after a reckless and wrongful conviction for murders committed while witnesses actually placed him in a catering hall where he was employed, watching Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech on August 28, 1963.

Not exactly the stuff of contemplation, you might think.

Yet exactly the reason we need contemplation. In Soul Friend, Kenneth Leech echoes Merton and other contemplatives when he writes:

The contemplative is more of a threat to injustice than the social activist who merely sees the piecemeal need. For contemplative vision is revolutionary vision, and it is the achievement of this vision which is the fruit of true spiritual direction. A spirituality of clear vision goes hand in hand with love. To see with the eyes of God is to see truthfully and lovingly. Such a love is not sentimental or naïve: it is a love which undermines oppression and burns away illusion and falsehood, a love which has been through the fire, a love which has been purified through struggle. It is a love which has known solitude and despair.

I’ve been re-reading insights I’ve underlined in books I read long ago. The morning that I saw the above articles, I happened onto one of Mahatma Gandhi’s ruminations in The Gandhi Reader (ed. Homer A. Jack) on satyagraha, variously interpreted as love force, truth force, and soul force and politically expressed in non-violent direct action. “The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth,” Gandhi wrote.

When asked for proof of its existence in history, he replies, “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.” He uses the illustration of two siblings arguing. If they go to war or sue (for Gandhi, a lawyer, another form of violence) their quarrel will be remembered, but if their love for one another is reawakened and they reconcile, few notice because that’s as it should be. “Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history,” Gandhi explains, declaring that what’s true of families is true of nations.

The next day our newspaper carried an article about studies indicating we retrospectively characterize a week or a time in our lives by its peaks rather than intervening constancy, which to me seems to validate Gandhi’s point.

But I would add that satyagraha is revealed in history when love stands up to the test, such as Gandhi’s challenges to injustice through civil disobedience. This may give us a new way of understanding the cross: Jesus’ love force stood up to “the powers that be,” and the crucifixion interrupted the natural trajectory of truth, love, and soul of the inbreaking commonwealth of God, just as it was subsequently interrupted by the persecution of early Christians who tried to live into that commonwealth. Thus Easter is an affirmation of the triumph of truth, love, and soul and non-cooperation with the forces of violence and death.

I schedule my posts on Tuesday for Wednesday publication, so this was put in final form on election day in the U.S., which means I do not know the outcome. Indeed, the outcome may not be known by the time you read this, given the anticipated closeness of the presidential election and the possibility of contested election results.

No matter. Whoever is elected will have to deal with those who want to make a name for themselves or their party or their ideologies by exploiting division and divisive issues—in other words, making history rather than letting the forces of love, truth, and soul bring reconciliation, mercy, and justice to Washington, D.C. As much as I believe in recovery programs and understand alcohol may easily exacerbate orneriness, I long for the time when lawmakers would end their day having cocktails together and trust working together and compromise without looking to give the latest sound bite to inflame their constituencies, satisfy their contributors, promote their ideologies, and enlarge their egos.

What we need in government—as elected officials and voters—are more contemplatives.

 

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Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Rediscover Your "Ox Mountain"

Living in China during the fourth and third century BCE, Meng Tzu* (Latinized by the West as “Mencius”), following in the footsteps of his sixth century spiritual ancestor, Kung Tzu (Confucius), represented their shared belief in the essential goodness of human beings and our “basic tendency to love” with the memorable Parable of Ox Mountain.

My paraphrase: 

Once upon a time there was a great forest on Ox Mountain, near an urban area. Residents of the city came and cut down all the trees, and the forest was no more. But nature tried to reclaim the forest, and the stumps sprang green shoots. The people, however, let their flocks loose to graze on the mountain, and they ate all the new growth. Their children and grandchildren never knew there had once been a grand forest on Ox Mountain, because now it appeared barren and desolate. 

In his 1967 book, Mystics and Zen Masters, (an unread copy of which I discovered a few weeks ago in one of those free libraries popping up in neighbors’ yards), Thomas Merton presents Meng Tzu’s conclusion: 

So too with man: he is naturally inclined to virtue, but his actions, in a greedy and grasping society, so completely destroys all evidence of his innate goodness that he appears to be naturally evil. 

This parallels the understanding of sin and human nature in Celtic Christianity, which I’ve written of admiringly.

To me, Meng Tzu’s experience gets magnified in a media culture, and magnified exponentially in our own time of a 24/7 news cycle on a global internet stage (or platform, if you will) in which the worst news gets our attention. Mahatma Gandhi once illustrated the problem with an example of two people locked in a dispute who resolve things peacefully, so do not get the attention they would draw if they fought publically or took the matter to court.  Gandhi suggested that’s why we have a skewed perspective on human nature. The good, the peaceful, the loving, the compassionate is not “news” because it aligns with how we believe things ought to be.

All of this flies in the face of what many of us are feeling these days, as we see fists raised angrily in the air in opposition to many of the values and people we hold dear.

But Meng Tzu, Merton writes, lived also “in an age (like ours) of war and chaos” (Parenthetical observation Merton’s).

Kung Tzu (Confucius) had not, according to Merton, entertained any sort of “sentimental humanitarianism.” Rather, he believed that people “could be good, but that for them to actualize these potentialities they had to live in a society that fully respected their hidden goodness, respected them as persons, with sacred and God-given rights, and educated them in the same respect…”

This sounds like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved community.”

Merton explains that Kung Tzu’s understanding of personal development is very different from that of the West: 

Here we come closer to certain modern and pragmatic misconceptions concerning the development of the person: that is, the development of aggressiveness, of astuteness, of attractiveness, of diplomatic skills; in a word, the ability to succeed.  ‘Personality’ in this sense is the power to impose yourself and your wishes on others. For Kung Tzu, wisdom by no means consists in imposing your will or your ‘personality’ on somebody else, and making him serve your own ends by domination or by flattery. It is not that this is ‘wrong’ according to some abstract standard, but before all else it is unhealthy because it is unreal. The man who acts like this is untrue to himself and at the same moment, by the same token, untrue to heaven, whose will is embedded deep in his very heart. He can only act so because he has failed to get to the root of good action. He does not really know himself (p 63). 

Sorry for such a long quote! But I wrote “WOW!” in the margin beside this conclusion, because it opens my eyes to the stark contrast between views about the development of a person. It reminded me of Merton’s critique of the “false” or “inauthentic” self that too often characterizes our personhood. He writes of the feeling in his book Contemplative Prayer: “A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one’s own inmost truth” (p 24).

Merton earlier clarified that Kung Tzu does not describe “heaven” as a metaphysical concept but “a transcendent and objective reality,” parallel but more down-to-earth and anthropocentric than what his contemporary, mystic Lao Tzu, referred to as the Tao. Being in line with it brings order to chaos, harmonizing “with the ultimately real.” And it requires both religious community and sacred ritual, Li (“rites’), the way of life that gives “visible expression of the hidden reality of the universe”—in my view, a kind of living sacrament, which gives me new appreciation for the Christian Eucharist, whose central element could be said to be sacrificial love, another organizing principle bringing harmony out of chaos.

The Confucian ethic, Merton writes, “is the fruit of spiritual awareness. Thus, moral action is at the same time contemplative and liturgical.” Wow again!

My post on The Lord’s Prayer explained that it helps me align myself with the universe, so to speak: “Thy will be done in my earth and on this earth as it is in heaven.” For me, heaven is where human will is in sync with God’s will.

Our own “Ox Mountains” may have been deforested by the actions of the world and of ourselves.  Contemplation is an opportunity to let seedlings grow, replenishing our natural state. As the Ox Mountain Parable declares, “The moisture of the dawn spirit / Awakens in us the right loves, the right aversions.” 

*I am using Merton’s spellings of these names. I hope to explain the title “tzu” in a future post.

With colleague Debra Weir, I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat open to all April 30-May 4, 2018, at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama, entitled “Beside Still Waters.” Sacred Heart is a welcoming community and a beautiful place. Please come!

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Photo and text Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Pilgrim's Progress

Hindu pilgrims, India

My third-grade teacher at my Christian school, Mrs. Olive Sandvig, was innovative, teaching us things like how to churn cream into butter, and inviting us to listen occasionally to stories on the radio, helping us, the first television generation, learn the power of words without pictures.

For a while, during quiet time, she read to us from Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s metaphorical tale of Christian’s pilgrimage to the Celestial City. Though Christian met with dangers and challenges and temptations, the spoken words had a calming influence on me, and to this day, I can place myself at my classroom desk with my head laid down, eyes closed, imagining the trip.

When I was spiritual leader of Atlanta’s Midtown Spiritual Community, a congregation that had left the Unity denomination because it was “too Christian,” I appreciated the challenge of talking about spirituality in a more generic way. I still had much to learn. Once I spoke of the need to move and to travel in order to grow spiritually—in essence, the need for pilgrimage, and I was taken to task by my dear friend Linda Pogue, who explained that a neighbor in her English village had never gone anywhere all his life, yet she knew of few as spiritually mature as he! For some of us, our only necessary pilgrimage is through time.

Due to economic limitations, my own pilgrimages these days are mostly limited to my imagination and my morning walks. But I have travelled widely when my circumstances permitted it.

During my first decade of ministry at a Presbyterian Church, I was expected to take study leaves, and I travelled on two Fordham University religious studies tours led by Byron Shafer: one to Egypt, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel; the other to India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.

Though we were visiting sacred sites of the world’s religions, these were not billed as “pilgrimages,” but I approached them as if they were. My personal text for the first trip was The Bible, and for the second was Gandhi: Selected Writings.

Given last week’s post on “Altars in the World,” blog readers may not be surprised that the open, natural places I encountered felt more “spiritual” to me than the closed, box-like structures (as beautiful as they are) that housed religious meaning.

Though early one morning I walked the Stations of the Cross alone along Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa, what spoke more to me were the green pastures beside the Sea of Galilee, the great rivers of the Nile and of the Ganges, the Egyptian wilderness devoid of any visible plant life, the gnarled trees of Gethsemane, the everflowing sea of faces throughout India, the wild-elephant-populated jungles of Sri Lanka, the Himalayas as seen from Nepal, and the colors of the stone of Petra in Jordan, which I’ve written about earlier.

Given my predilection for open spaces, I found that the retaining wall that served as the Jerusalem Temple’s base, known now as the Western Wall, is a fitting place for prayer and contemplation all by itself, without reconstructing the temple.

And, in New Delhi, serendipitously stumbling alone upon the garden where Mahatma Gandhi was martyred gave me the opportunity to give in to my spiritual emotions un-self-consciously.

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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.

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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.

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

"Turn To, Not Against Each Other"

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch:

"I ask you to turn to each other, not against each other."

Progressive Christian Reflections has been named one of the Top 100 Christian Blogs--number 27 in terms of quality and searches. Congratulations also to the designer of this blog and of my website, Becki Jayne Harrelson.

“Shoot first. Ask questions later.”
“The best defense is a good offense.”

These seem to be the mantras of our time. Waking as we do each morning to a new shooting in our country or bombing in our world, accompanied by sights and sounds of shots and explosions, shouting and screaming, followed by the heart-rending wailing of the grieving, gives new impetus to the cry: 

O God, make speed to save us.

O Lord, make haste to help us. 

Decades ago, I read of a study revealing that U.S. soldiers grew increasingly willing to fire their weapons from WW I to WW II to Vietnam. I would not be surprised if this same “progression” could be documented in the civilian populace, including the police and the communities they serve.

Most of us only shoot our mouths off, but the principle is the same.  And it is multiplied exponentially through social media, where the snarky comment is common, where anger, paranoia, prejudice, and scapegoating present themselves as truth.

However we pull the trigger, we must take responsibility, and expect “an eye for an eye.”

I have worked with people who have taken on an adversarial role with others or with me, when they could have easily gotten what they wanted with courtesy and conversation.  

And I have experienced toxic environments with unexplained animosity and bickering, much like that old Star Trek episode in which the crew of the starship Enterprise could not explain uncharacteristic fighting among themselves, until they discovered a parasite on board feeding off their hatred, fear, anger, and violence; a parasite that could only be defeated by overcoming their animosities. (Gives a whole new meaning to “exorcism”!)

I do know how fear, anxiety, distrust, and poverty can make us more confrontational than we need to be. A small and everyday example: I have been undergoing a few sessions with a physical therapist for back problems. Having limited resources, I feared I was being taken advantage of, that I didn’t need a whole series of appointments. Apprehensive, I decided to talk things out with the clinic without expressing my worst fears, and found that indeed, they had my best interests at heart and were good people. The matter has been resolved without conflict or confrontation.

But not everyone has the opportunity to do that. Either there is such a long and painful history with “the system,” or “the system” is impervious to correction and change, that peaceful resolution seems impossible.

But as Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”

Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn found himself entangled in the multi-generational feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords. With the Grangerfords, Huck recounts: 

Next Sunday we all went to church, about three mile, everybody a-horseback. The men took their guns along, so did Buck, and kept them between their knees or stood them handy against the wall. The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and pre-foreordestination, and I don’t know what all, that it did seem to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet. 

We need more brotherly and sisterly love, “and such-like tiresomeness,” without our defenses at the ready to blast one another.

Jesus’ answer to violence was vulnerability. Ask questions first, try to understand, and don’t shoot at all. His best offense was no defense. It has changed many hearts that otherwise might have remained hardened.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch proclaimed the gospel last week when she said, “I ask you to turn to each other, not against each other.”

Related posts:

Violence—What to Do?

Stand Your Ground: Ferguson, Washington, Jerusalem

Black Lives Matter

Please 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 © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Natural World Is Super Enough

Last week, subscribers received a link that failed to work! I substituted a better one for Teresa of Avila’s quote.

Pope Francis recognized a second miracle associated with Mother Teresa, meaning she will soon be canonized as a saint.

When I visited her home for the dying in Calcutta, a woman in front of me whined contemptuously to a companion, “Do you think Mother Teresa is a saint?” I held my peace, as this woman had been antagonistic during most of our Fordham University religious studies tour of India, severely testing my contemplative reading about non-violence during the trip, selected writings of Gandhi.

To me, Mother Teresa’s whole life was a miracle, far surpassing any unexplained healings from those who pray for her intercession.

Miracles do not convince me. What Mother Teresa did “naturally” is enough.

I’ve been reading through Matthew lately and I love Jesus’ teachings, but am put off by the many miracle stories recorded in the gospel. I believe Jesus was a healer in a larger sense, bringing spiritual healing to individuals, neighborhoods, even rivals. But I can’t fathom the “unnatural” and, in my mind, unlikely restorations of sight, hearing, and speech.

I eventually stopped reading Autobiography of a Yogi by one of my spiritual heroes, Paramahansa Yogananda, when I became overwhelmed by the increasingly magical elements of his self-reporting, though I learned in a recent documentary about his life that the book was the only one Steve Jobs had on his iPad.

I feel pretty much the same way about Jesus’ miracle stories. For a long time I’ve interpreted these metaphorically, or considered them a retrospective hagiographical portrait of Jesus painted by his early followers.  “No signs shall be given this generation,” Jesus was believed to have said, but he ironically delivered many signs and wonders, according to the Gospels.

Personally I don’t feel a spiritual need for the supernatural; the natural world is super enough! That’s one of the things we learn from the great mystics, our spiritual poets, as well as scientists.

The natural world seems so miraculous, from infinitesimal neutrinos and organisms to galaxies far, far away (homage to the Star Wars’ fresh release, wink-wink) in space and time, one shouldn’t need an interruption or intervention of the natural order to believe in a Higher Power—why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face and the brain in your head and the heart of your compassion.

Even if there are dimensions of reality as yet unrecognized by our limited perceptions, that doesn’t make them magical or supernatural, just unperceived. I for one am hoping against hope that death is but an entrance into another dimension of existence. If not, the life I’ve been given is miracle enough.

Over the Christmas holidays, watching again several versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I realized that Scrooge’s resurrection is the most accessible and believable miracle that the birth of Jesus invites. Scrooge becomes downright giddy and playful, gracious and generous, embracing life and others and causes with gusto.

“God brought you to life with Christ,” Saint Paul wrote the church at Ephesus. Contemplating this long ago, I realized how true this was for me. And it’s taken a lifetime to get used to it.

Jesus has given me a life. You too.

A reading for Christmastide: The Soul Feels Its Worth

My personal pick for “the” Moment of the Year 2015.

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Words as Weapons

My weapons of choice are words.

A friend once told me that, as a youth, he would torment his brother verbally until his less articulate sibling hit him. Then he’d get sympathy from his parents and his brother would get in trouble. Think “Billy Budd” and the otherwise innocent Herman Melville character’s fatal blow against a harassing shipmate.

Freedom of speech is one thing. License to offend, bully, denigrate, deprive, manipulate, panic, incite is another. Think falsely crying “fire” in a crowded theater or “hellfire” from a pulpit. Think “n-word” or “faggot” or “towel-head” in any context. Think “misrepresentation” or “stereotype” or “innuendo” in the media.

To me, freedom of speech is for responsible use, not a license to say anything we damn well please. Because words may serve as weapons too. Virtually all the injuries I have inflicted or endured have been done with words (and sometimes the withholding of words): hurting, offending, rejecting, excluding, profaning, degrading—the list goes on.

I’m not talking censorship here—I’m talking self-restraint and respectful engagement. If there is little or no respect for the opponent, at least respect for those who might be caught in the crossfire.

Jesus was concerned with thought as much as deed, and so addressed the violent use of words: “If you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” He says this in the context of the obviously grievous sins of murder, anger, and offense contrasted with the virtue of reconciliation. (Matt. 5:21-24)

The epistle to the Colossians urges, “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God,” and advises, regarding “outsiders”: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt [spiritual understanding], so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone” (Col. 3:17, 4:6].

Mahatma Gandhi’s ahimsa, non-violence, included words equally with deeds. He wrote, “Non-violence is therefore in its active form good will towards all life. It is pure Love. I read it in the Hindu scriptures, in the Bible, in the Koran.”

In a subsequent essay, he exchanged the word love for benevolence, “Non-violence in its positive aspect as benevolence (I do not use the word love, as it has fallen into disrepute) is the greatest force because of the limitless scope it affords for self-suffering without causing or intending any physical or material injury to the wrong doer. The object always is to evoke the best in him.”

He then goes on to say, “To practice non-violence…is to bring heaven upon earth. There is no such thing as the other world. All worlds are one. There is no ‘here’ and no ‘there.’”

Christian agape is benevolent love that may be visited even upon adversaries in Jesus’ view and in light of the spiritual commonwealth of God, whether Yahweh or Allah.

Insightful articles:

“Teaching Islam’s ‘Forgotten’ Side as Germany Changes”

“French Humor, Turned Into Tragedy”

MCC invites you to fast and pray tomorrow, January 15, the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  You are welcome to leave messages and prayers on a special Facebook page or on a special page of MCC’s website.

When leaving a comment on this blog, a URL is requested but not required to submit your response. 

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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.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Spiritual Arboretums

Walking and running along Atlanta’s BeltLine, while others wheel and roll, has given me a new appreciation for the term “arboretum.” I always thought of arboretums as enclosed spaces with exotic, tropical plants, like the ones in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and multiple other cities I have lived or visited.

The Beltline is an abandoned railroad track being transformed into a walkway that encircles the city and connects neighborhoods. Planting native grasses, wildflowers, shrubs and trees along this path, Trees Atlanta and the Atlanta BeltLine Arboretum explain their efforts with signs like the one pictured above, broadening my understanding of the term: 

ar-bo-re-tum / noun - A botanical garden devoted to trees or a place where an extensive variety of woody plants are cultivated for scientific, educational, and ornamental purposes.

When doing a five or ten-mile run, I have a lot of time to meditate on such words, and of course my mind goes to things spiritual, and I find myself amplifying it to read, “cultivated for scientific, educational, ornamental, and spiritual purposes.”

As I once thought of an arboretum as a confined and controlled environment, many of us think of a house of worship as a kind of spiritual arboretum, an enclosed space or sanctuary in which delicate hothouse plants are cultivated—plants that could not survive outside, either in their communities or the world.  And it is true, many worshipers wilt at the notion of being involved outside their churches, temples, and mosques. I’ve been told that some plants do better in pots, so being “potted” in one place might benefit some—a good reason, perhaps, for the monastic vow of “stability.”

But I need the outside, which is why I run outside rather than use a treadmill in a gym. In my first book, Uncommon Calling, I wrote that “though the church could give sanctuary to so much of me and so many of my concerns, it was to the sanctuary of the seashore that I fled to reflect on the relationship of my sexuality and spirituality. … Particularly at sunset and twilight, the colors of water and sky joined the rhythm of the waves to mete out God’s grace in language both more primitive and profound than that of liturgies.”

I could identify with William Blake’s reservations about church as he remembered his youthful innocence in this Song of Experience, “The Garden of Love”: 

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

Affirming that houses of worship can also be helpful, Mahatma Gandhi contrasted their limitations with the limitless sky: 

Churches, mosques, and temples which cover so much hypocrisy and humbug and shut the poorest out of them seem but a mockery of God and His worship when one sees the eternally renewed temple of worship under the vast blue canopy inviting every one of us to real worship, instead of abusing His name by quarrelling in the name of religion. 

Celtic Christianity saw the effects of grace and redemption not only in Christ and church but in creation, a creation that the apostle Paul—a progressive in spite of his blindspots and ours—described in Romans 1 as making God “plain” even to Gentiles, in which divinity is “seen through the things God has made.” “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” the gay Catholic priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins affirmed.

Mary Oliver captures an aspect of the contemplative life: 

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields.

When our Good Shepherd prompts us to lie down in green pastures and leads us beside still waters, restoring our souls, we better understand the assurance of the Psalmist: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations by mail or credit card are its only means of support. Thank you!

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

Gandhi Died Today

Today I read a few of the final entries of The Gandhi Reader (ed. Homer A. Jack) about Mahatma Gandhi’s death. And I cried as if I were there.

I’ve been re-reading passages regarding Gandhi’s belief that non-violent direct action could have challenged Hitler or even atomic bombs, just as it brought British colonialism to an end in India and Pakistan; his concern about Europe’s anti-semitism as well as the establishment of a state of Israel in Palestine; his encounter with the African American preacher and civil rights leader Howard Thurman and his wife; and his multiple fastings to stop the bloodshed among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. Whatever you make of his ideas, his compassion is unquestionable, even in death.

I have visited the site in India where his body was cremated. In college I occasionally meditated and studied on the peaceful grounds of the Self Realization Fellowship in southern California’s Pacific Palisades, where some of his ashes are interred in a World Peace Memorial (pictured above) near a “wall-less temple.”   

The Richard Attenborough film Gandhi was released the week before I went to India on a Fordham University religious studies tour. I managed to see it twice before I left, and so, on my first day wandering the neighborhood of our hotel in New Dehli on my own, I discovered Birla House, his last residence, and the garden behind, where he led prayers and met his death. Now a museum, I visited his small room at the rear of the house and followed his final steps in the garden, footprints cast in bronze.

As sacramentals of the visit, I purchased three sets of companion posters, one with Gandhi’s photo and another with a quote of his, two of which I gave to close friends, the Yale historian John Boswell, who contributed so much to the history of gay people in the church; and the other to Linda Culbertson, currently the executive of Pacific Presbytery, with whom I had seen the movie. My friend George Lynch framed my set for my home office, and they serve as a constant reminder of Gandhi’s self-less perseverance to empower “the poorest and the weakest.”

Dr. Thurman asked Gandhi how to train people in the “difficult art” of Ahimsa, non-violence, to which Gandhi replied, “There is no royal road, except through living the creed in your life which must be a living sermon.  … Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and everything else shall be added unto you. The Kingdom of Heaven is Ahimsa.”

Gandhi died today, and still he lives, offering his darshan, the joy of his spiritual presence, to all who read his words and remember his deeds. 

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  This ministry is entirely funded by your donations. 

Love Force

Mid-October I read in the morning paper about the Lance Armstrong doping scandal, the Taliban shooting of 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai for encouraging the education of girls in Pakistan, and the death of George Whitmore, an African American whose life was never good after a reckless prosecution and wrongful conviction for murders committed while witnesses actually placed him in a catering hall where he was employed, watching Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech on August 28, 1963.

Not exactly the stuff of contemplation, you might think.

Yet exactly the reason we need contemplation. In Soul Friend, Kenneth Leech echoes Merton and other contemplatives when he writes:

The contemplative is more of a threat to injustice than the social activist who merely sees the piecemeal need. For contemplative vision is revolutionary vision, and it is the achievement of this vision which is the fruit of true spiritual direction. A spirituality of clear vision goes hand in hand with love. To see with the eyes of God is to see truthfully and lovingly. Such a love is not sentimental or naïve: it is a love which undermines oppression and burns away illusion and falsehood, a love which has been through the fire, a love which has been purified through struggle. It is a love which has known solitude and despair.

I’ve been re-reading insights I’ve underlined in books I read long ago. The morning that I saw the above articles, I happened onto one of Mahatma Gandhi’s ruminations in The Gandhi Reader (ed. Homer A. Jack) on satyagraha, variously interpreted as love force, truth force, and soul force, politically expressed in non-violent direct action. “The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth,” Gandhi wrote.

When asked for proof of its existence in history, he replies, “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of the force of love or of the soul.” He uses the illustration of two siblings arguing. If they go to war or sue (for Gandhi, a lawyer, another form of violence) their quarrel will be remembered, but if their love for one another is reawakened and they reconcile, few notice because that’s as it should be. “Soul-force, being natural, is not noted in history,” Gandhi explains, declaring that what’s true of families is true of nations.

The next day our newspaper carried an article about studies indicating we retrospectively characterize a week or a time in our lives by its peaks rather than intervening constancy, which to me seems to validate Gandhi’s point.

But I would add that satyagraha is revealed in history when love stands up to the test, such as Gandhi’s challenges to injustice through civil disobedience. This may give us a new way of understanding the cross: Jesus’ love force stood up to “the powers that be,” and the crucifixion interrupted the natural trajectory of truth, love, and soul of the inbreaking commonwealth of God, just as it was subsequently interrupted by the persecution of early Christians who tried to live into that commonwealth. Thus Easter is an affirmation of the triumph of truth, love, and soul and non-cooperation with the forces of violence and death.

I schedule my posts on Tuesday for Wednesday publication, so this was put in final form on election day in the U.S., which means I do not know the outcome. Indeed, the outcome may not be known by the time you read this, given the anticipated closeness of the presidential election and the possibility of contested election results.

No matter. Whoever is elected will have to deal with those who want to make a name for themselves or their party or their ideologies by exploiting division and divisive issues—in other words, making history rather than letting the forces of love, truth, and soul bring reconciliation, mercy, and justice to Washington, D.C. As much as I believe in recovery programs and understand alcohol may easily exacerbate orneriness, I long for the time when lawmakers would end their day having cocktails together and trust working together and compromise without looking to give the latest sound bite to inflame their constituencies, satisfy their contributors, promote their ideologies, and enlarge their egos.

What we need in government—as elected officials and voters—are more contemplatives.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  Please visit Chris Glaser's website  to learn more about this ministry and/or make a donation!

The Temple of God's Wounds

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use in worship with attribution of author and blogsite.

Every Holy Week for many years I have travelled to The Temple of God’s Wounds, a small book written in 1951 by the Anglican Bishop of Bombay, ‘Will Quinlan’ nee William Quinlan Lash, a mystic. This past week was no exception. Originally from England, in India the bishop helped found the Christa Prema Seva Sangha (sangha means “community”), which, according to his stub bio in Wikipedia, “sought to live Christianity in a way that was faithful to Indian culture.”

That explains how I received the book during Eastertide of 1988 from the Rev. John Cole, who served in India as a “fraternal worker” (missionary) his entire professional life, immersing himself in its culture and spirituality. John was a sweet and gentle and unassuming man who adopted the speech patterns and body language of the Indian people, complete with their signature deferential slight wobbling of the head. 

John arrived in India the year before Gandhi was assassinated, but never met him because, he confessed to me, his Western reserve initially resisted the cult of personality often associated with Hindu teachers. But eventually India’s spirituality had as much or more effect on John than he on it. He spent his furloughs in the States with the church I served, and so became a friend and confidant and spiritual guide, especially after he retired to southern California.

You can tell that the story of how I came to have The Temple of God’s Wounds is as important to me as the story within the book. It took me a few years before I started using it regularly as part of my spiritual practice for Holy Week. In first person, the book tells the story of a discouraged, worldly but faithful man who is referred by a colleague to a contemplative community “in the West” that neither advertises nor hides its presence, but is accessible to its neighbors for help and prayers. He soon realizes that men and women of accomplishment in the world come there for solace, self-inventory, centering, and strength.

The central task he is assigned is the contemplation of seven paintings—one on each day—in the central circular sanctuary. Three have to do with the crucifixion, three with what follows, and the seventh with a vision of their meaning. Each bear witness to God’s wounded love.

It took me a few years of reading this little book to refrain from trying in vain to picture the author’s detailed descriptions of the buildings, which I can’t follow. Instead of exteriors, I am more interested in the interior life. His life in that week is enriched by walking the surrounding hills, tending the courtyard garden, visiting the sick and dying in nearby villages, sharing silence and worship, conversing with spiritual guides in the community, and reading helpful spiritual writers.

I also learned to set aside any discomfort I had with any Christian concepts that I may not embrace and accept the central truths about the spiritual life being revealed in this story. In other words, just like reading the Bible, I am looking for the “inside” story in the storytelling—what is intended to be conveyed in the particulars.

Each time I visit The Temple of God’s Wounds, with its central courtyard cross pierced with nails for each of Jesus’ five wounds, I think of the retreat house in the hills above Santa Barbara that I visited from time to time when I lived in southern California. Mt. Calvary was run by the Episcopal Order of the Holy Cross. It too had such a cross at the heart of its central courtyard.

My last two opportunities to visit there before it was destroyed in the Montecito fire of 2008 proved spiritual metaphors. The first, I wanted to show my partner and my family members who live nearby the spectacular view Mt. Calvary afforded of Santa Barbara and its shoreline. But my family members wanted us to see a still more spectacular view, and took us to a ridge high above Mt. Calvary, which, given the haze and the height, precluded good vision. The second, on the way home to Atlanta after my interim ministry in San Francisco, was my last opportunity to show Mt. Calvary to my partner and our dog, and we enjoyed a breathtaking view.

This contrast reminded me that the higher up you are does not guarantee an inspiring view.  The Vatican, an ivory tower, a corporate ladder do not assure anyone a better perspective. Success, wealth, even fitness do not ensure vision. The successful but searching narrator of the bishop’s book gives further evidence of this.

That’s why we need centers and stories like The Temple of God’s Wounds.

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Rev. Chris Glaser is available to speak, preach, teach, consult, and lead workshops and retreats. For possible topics, explore the many posts on his blog, www.chrisglaser.blogspot.com and his Speaking Topics page on his website, www.chrisglaser.com.