The Inner Light

Celebrating a gay couple's wedding in Florida

a few years ago.

A beloved transgender member of Ormewood Church, formerly a member of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church, died unexpectedly last week, and, in addition to her own outstanding “Message of Hope” about this longtime member, our pastor Jenelle requested me to offer a brief reflection on her life based on our shared love of Star Trek during her memorial service this past Sunday afternoon. Afterward, her lifelong spouse gave me a beautiful Star Trek t-shirt commemorating its various incarnations over 55 years, 1966-2021. 

In recent weeks I had tossed about various ideas for my final post on this blog. Should I re-post an earlier blog about LGBT Pride for this Pride Month or write something new? I’ve decided that this reflection is a fitting way to end this ten-year-long blog. 

Star Trek, The Next Generation, was one of my binge-watched series during the pandemic, and one episode in particular stood out, entitled, “The Inner Light.” For those who want to watch it on Netflix, it is episode 25 of season 5. I had talked with Jenelle about it at the time, and I discovered lots of other people liked it too, receiving awards. 

The episode is simply described: “Picard awakens to find himself in a village where he is a well-known member of the community suffering from a delusion of being a starship captain.” I watched it again to prepare. 

I have come to think of Star Trek as a kind of “biblical stories of the future.” They often relate to something going on in the present, offering meaning and values and purpose, just as the Bible does. 

Spoiler alert, but what occurs in this episode is that the current Enterprise has happened upon an unoccupied alien spacecraft that sends a beam of memory into Captain Picard’s head, causing him to faint, unconscious for half an hour. But during that brief period, Picard realizes a whole lifetime on another planet. No one in his village believes him to be a starship captain, no one affirms his own “inner light,” thus the reason he is considered under a delusion. 

Instead he is recognized as a community leader and scientist who tackles his host planet’s own form of global warming, an unrelenting drought. He is married and has children, and we watch them grow from infancy to adulthood, as Picard and his wife age, and as Picard finally learns to play the flute. 

He eventually finds a solution to the planetary drought and offers it to his community leaders. Come to find out, their own scientists had figured out the same solution, but the local leaders (read “politicians”) refuse to make the hard choice to put it into practice, for fear of the average citizen. Again, his own “inner light,” his own “aha,” is rejected. 

The beam directed into Jean Luc Picard’s inner consciousness is the way the people of this now destroyed planet have finally told their story, perhaps as a warning for those of other planets. The people of the planet have been gone for a thousand years, but their history and their lives have been preserved and now communicated. Their inner light has become Picard’s (and our own) inner light. The parallel with scriptures and sacred texts of every faith handed down to us is clear, at least to me. 

What really moves me about this story is that this is what I experience in every death, including our beloved church member. With every death, we lose a vital (as in “life-giving”) story about ourselves, about life, about the universe, about the nature of things. We will miss their “inner light.” 

I will miss her grin, cheerfulness, intelligence, wit, and welcome. I will miss her story, her own inner light. Surely it was a reflection of the very nature and nobility of God. 

Some outside our welcoming community of Ormewood Church may have written off as delusion her inner light. But she came to understand something about herself, her gender experience and expression, and I would say, something about all of us and about all of our gender expressions. 

Her inner light has brightened our world on her journey into the inner light of God. To quote the opening of Star Trek episodes: “Space, the final frontier…[our] mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” 

Hallelujah! Amen! Thanks be to God!

 

Please visit my website: https://chrisglaser.com  

Though this is my final post, more than ten years of posts remain available to you on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and I encourage you to enjoy them. I regret that I never created an index of post titles, but the search engine in the upper left corner of my blog can help you find posts of interest by typing in a subject, topic, name, scripture reference, religious season or holy day. Or you may work through them by year and month listed in the right column. 

Comments are still welcome on any post. 

Though they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to be read meaningfully at any point in time. It has been a pleasure writing this blog, but now, I believe, is a time for silence, something I considered when writing the Zen series. 

I assure you I am well, content, and thankful to God for this extension of my ministry. Thank you for your interest, comments, correspondence, and contributions. I am grateful to Metropolitan Community Churches for recognizing this blog as an “Emerging Ministry” and ProgressiveChristianity.org for reposting many of my reflections, as well as the dozens of Facebook pages that allowed me to provide links to particular posts. I am grateful for the free services of Blogspot, Google, Facebook, and the delivery service, FeedBurner. I am grateful for artist and friend Becki Jayne Harrelson and my husband Wade Jones for their technical and moral support. 

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Copyright © 2021 Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

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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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You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Thank God for Atheists!

I believe we need to imagine a world without God.

We then might take greater responsibility for our own lives and the circumstances of others, as well as life on this planet.  Our consciences would not be alleviated by the notion that suffering or poverty is God’s will.  There would be no “acts of God” that can toss a baby through a window, drown a family, suffocate the elderly, or destroy a coastline. There would just be tornadoes, tsunamis, heat waves, and hurricanes.

We wouldn’t wait for God to fix things, or save us, or take care of the world. We wouldn’t exclude anyone from basic human rights because God demands purity or orthodoxy or a particular form of religion or worship. We wouldn’t have those who do violence to themselves or others for the reward of various versions of an afterlife. We wouldn’t have American politicians who insist on saying “God bless America” rather than “God bless the world.”

Diseases, disabilities, and infirmities would not be blamed on God but on their true causes ascertained by science. Global warming and evolution would not be things of “belief” but challenges to human arrogance and pride. Sin would be viewed not as an offense against God but as an offense against ourselves, others, and the earth. Redemption would not be considered a supernatural event but a coming together of forgiveness, responsibility, mentoring, and community. Death would remind us of the unpostponable value of life.

Rather than prefer and await an invisible world, we might better value bodies, earth, the cosmos, and the moment.

So I am grateful for atheists and agnostics who remind me of my own “cloud of unknowing” when it comes to God’s definitions, actions, and desires.

Yet I still believe in God.

Letting go of the concepts above prompts me to believe still more that all we say and do and all we fail to say or do matters.

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Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution. Perhaps your congregation might include it in your mission budget. Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.