Squandering Eternity

If you are looking for devotional material for Advent, may I recommend my own Reformation of the Heart, which leads the reader through each day of Advent, Christmastide, Epiphany, Lent, and Holy Week. It includes a handy scripture index.

A thought crossed my mind today that I can’t let go of.

It took a virtual eternity to get to me, to you, to our present lives.

We think of eternity as a thing of the future. “Where will you spend eternity?” billboards and bellicose Bible-thumpers ask. Much religion is based on this premise. “Squandering eternity” has come to mean giving up heaven, an everlasting future with God.

But the only eternity we “know” is in the past, the billions of years it took to form the universe, solar systems, planets, inhabitable planets, life, and the forms of life those planets host today.

Eternity has brought us to this moment, the breath I take as I write this, the breath you take as you read this. Squandering eternity is not living up to this moment, not being fully mindful of it, not reverencing all that has come into balance, into play, to make this moment “work,” to create this eco-sphere in which we live and move and have our being, to evolve my/your consciousness to reflect its magnificence.

Much of our lives is denial and distraction. We fill our moments rather than letting them fill us. We’re occupied with our pasts and preoccupied with our futures.

The founder of the Jesuits, Saint Ignatius, believed that, in the Final Judgment, God will not ask what we didn’t do, but rather, “How much of my creation did you not enjoy?”

Given our current displays of xenophobia and environmental arrogance, we could ask ourselves, how many of God’s creatures do we not enjoy? And, given various inequalities, how much enjoyment is being denied others?

Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And it was the Jesuit-educated priest and physicist George Lemaître who gave us the wondrous concept behind the Big Bang. Talk about a singular moment!

I lost my muse in July, our beloved dog Hobbes. Though now she joins me only in spirit for my morning prayers on the deck, I am not bereft of “wildlife,” so to speak. Identical twin cats sometimes watch me from a neighbor’s window.  A hummingbird occasionally flies inquisitively before my face. Almost every morning, a bee gathers nectar from the flowers in our hanging baskets.

I once said the Lord’s Prayer as my eyes followed the bee move from tiny blossom to blossom, as if the bee were praying it. How differently God’s kingdom and power and glory seemed then!

“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough,” Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote.

Ignatius defined sin as anything that blocks the love that God is trying to share with you, or blocks your love for God. And for Ignatian spirituality, God is part of everything.

To Ignatius, what bothers God is not our being fully human, but our trying to be God.

Let God be eternal.

Take this moment to wonder that you have come to be after all this time.

Cultural anthropologist Rene Girard died earlier this month. As many of you know, I used his understandings of mimesis, mimetic rivalry, violence, and the scapegoat mechanism in my book, Coming Out as Sacrament. For an excellent analysis of his life’s work, please click here.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

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

When "the Least of These" Overwhelm

During Saturday’s opening online session of an Advent retreat I’m leading, someone asked what to do when “the least of these” are overwhelming in terms of kinds, conditions, and count.

Of course “the least of these” comes from this past Sunday’s Gospel reading from Matthew when those who tend to the stranger, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned are welcomed into eternal life in the reign of Christ.

My response was that Jesus’ ethic of attending to the nearest neighbor could be a way to focus.  I thought but did not quote the Stephen Stills hit, “if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with,” advice borrowed from musician Billy Preston.

For example, the Samaritan proved “good” because he tended to the stripped, robbed, and beaten traveler along the road between Jericho and Jerusalem, while the priest and Levite passed by, perhaps on their way to the Temple. Ritual requirements of the time would have rendered them unclean and unable to enter the temple, given the man’s condition.

But most of us are not on our way to perform such solemn duties. Rather, we are picking up the kids or the dry cleaning or groceries for dinner. Unlike Jesus, we don’t live in a world expecting that the kingdom of God could break in before we get to Kroger’s. So we prioritize.

The questioner was lamenting that we are torn among many divergent needs in our communities. How do we handle that?

NPR recently reported a study indicating that people are more likely to give to a cause when it’s singular or limited. Feature a homeless person or an abused animal and donations pour in. But if you add “there are millions of people with no shelter” or “there are millions of animals mistreated,” donors are overwhelmed and feel their gift would make little difference, and give less or not at all.

From time to time I have felt guilty that I do not volunteer at a soup kitchen. I have had to remind myself that my blog and my books and my correspondence offer a bit of spiritual soup for readers’ souls, and given that it brings in very little money, I do most of what I do as a volunteer. It is my calling rather than a job.

I can’t do everything. Neither can you. But we can each do something.

Forget about the millions. Think about one neighbor. A Palestinian. An Israeli. A Syrian refugee. An Ebola patient. A wounded veteran. A violated woman. A transgender child. An undocumented immigrant. An elderly person. A youth with little hope. A homeless pet.

Then figure out how you can make that individual’s life a little better, either personally or through existing organizations. And for God’s sake, let’s all do what we can to influence public policy, the most extensive and inclusive way of helping “the least of these.”

This week I learned that the gay priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was once asked how best to believe. A spiritually “sophisticated” response was anticipated, but Hopkins said only, “Give alms.”

Maybe a case of spiritual “practice makes perfect”?

Other research indicates that the same area of the brain is pleasured when we give as when we meditate or win the lottery. So, let’s feel good as well as believe by attending to a neighbor, nearby or across the globe. It’s a better bet than playing the lottery!

Related Post: Our Own Fiscal Cliffs

Who made ya, baby? Consider reading this post for American Thanksgiving tomorrow: The Making of You

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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 © 2014 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. 

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

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

In his novel Zorba the Greek, the Greek author and lifelong spiritual seeker Nikos Kazantzakis observed that poets, artists, and visionaries see things “as if for the first time.” The narrator’s friend Zorba, based on an acquaintance of the author, witnessed a rock rolling down a hill and observed in awe, “Boss, did you see that? On slopes, stones come to life again!”

Such fresh vision, without prejudice or jadedness, opens God’s commonwealth to us in the here and now. As the gay poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins observed, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

“Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it,” Jesus said. A teacher of children, “Ranger Rich,” helped me see a tree as if for the first time by inviting several of us to lie down beneath its branches with the tops of our heads toward the trunk and look up. I highly recommend you try this!

Mystics, too, see the world and God “as if for the first time” as they cast aside expectations and look beyond tradition to embrace imagination as spiritual artists and poets, and welcome fresh insight as spiritual children. Remember the famous story of Thomas Merton’s vision at a Louisville intersection, after a prolonged solitary retreat, that people were “walking around shining like the sun.”

Mystics, artists, poets, and children are all “progressives” in this sense.

Perhaps no mystic was so imaginative and so playfully childlike as Saint Francis, who is said to have hugged a leper and saw Jesus, preached to a tree and made it blossom, gathered the birds of the air for a sermon, befriended a wild animal and prevented it from killing villagers, called earth, wind, fire, earth, sun, and moon mother and brother and sister, recognized the dignity of those in poverty, and regarded popes, beggars, and robbers equally.

According to Kazantzakis, in his book, Saint Francis, this little saint even saw the devil differently. To his companion Brother Leo he says, “Do not lose heart, Brother Leo,” he told him, stroking his head. “Stand on your feet, and if the Tempter has straddled you, have no fears: the gates [of heaven] will open, and the two of you will enter together!”

Brother Leo exclaims, “The Tempter too! He’ll enter [the gates of heaven] too? How do you know, Brother Francis?”

To which Francis replies, “I know because of my heart, which opens and receives everything. Surely paradise must be the same.”

Enjoy a conversation led by Chris Glaser about sex "as if for the first time" this Saturday, June 11, 10-3, at First MCC Atlanta. No charge, free lunch, his books available. Open to everyone!