Where Your Treasure Is

Chris at Kirkridge. Photo taken by Brendan Fay.

 “Master, you are wonderful! You have renounced riches and comforts to seek God and   teach us wisdom!” 

“You are reversing the case!” The saint’s face held a mild rebuke. “I have left a few paltry rupees, a few petty pleasures, for a cosmic empire of endless bliss. How then have I denied myself anything? I know the joy of sharing the treasure. Is that a sacrifice? The shortsighted worldly folk are verily the real renunciants! They relinquish an unparalleled divine possession for a poor handful of earthly toys! … The world is full of uneasy believers in an outward security.” 

I chuckled over this paradoxical view of renunciation—one that puts the cap of Croesus on any saintly beggar, whilst transforming all proud millionaires into unconscious martyrs. 

Paramahansa Yogananda tells this story about Bhaduri Mahasaya on page 63 of his Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) that I am presently reading. In a previous post I referred to Yogananda as founder of the Self Realization Fellowship whose grounds in southern California I frequented in college. While the supernatural experiences of Eastern tradition reported in this book are hard for this Westerner to believe, the philosophy is persuasive and powerful. 

While I have not attained the saint’s dispassion toward rupees and “earthly toys,” many if not most of my colleagues in ministry will identify with the saint’s preference for the spiritual life. To whatever degree we have “gone without,” given the culture’s greater monetary valuing of other professions, we have realized our greater dependency on spiritual treasure—the satisfaction of pastoral care, of preaching and writing, of attending to matters of the heart and soul rather than simply to matter and materialism. 

A church member once told me that she was well into adulthood before she understood that ministers were paid! And I’ve met people who think spiritual leaders should do what they do for the sheer joy of it, unlike other vocations. 

“Worldly people do not like the candor that shatters their delusions,” Bhaduri Mahasaya explained to Yogananda. The gurus Yogananda writes about receive rupees in their slippers from followers. And though I am not a guru, I am grateful that a few of my readers have put rupees in my slippers! 

When I was ordained by MCC in 2005 after a professional lifetime denied ordination by the Presbyterian Church simply because I’m gay, I chose for the Gospel lesson Jesus’ words on God’s Providence from the Sermon on the Mount, which reads in part, “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly [Creator] feeds them.” It is the scripture that gets me through the tough times when I do not rise to the level of a saint’s disposition!

This post was published July 24, 2013. 

Copyright © 2013 Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

Mosquito Consciousness

 

As we approach mosquito season, I thought you’d enjoy this post from August 3, 2013, reflecting on a story in Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, a book I set aside when it became “too magical” for me but have recently picked up again and finished reading with greater appreciation. Incidentally, this is the only book Steve Jobs had on his iPad when he died, and those attending his memorial service received a copy of it at his request.

Sometimes my spiritual life is just plain spooky. 

The morning I write this, my morning prayers on the deck were interrupted by the presence of what I thought to be a mosquito. Now I am considered quite juicy in the mosquito community, unlike my partner Wade, who never needs to use insect repellant as I do to keep the little vampires at bay. And though I had administered that sacred ointment, I thought it possible a missed spot might be too inviting. My heavy New Jerusalem Bible came in handy and dropping it on the pest proved fatal. 

Yet I immediately felt regret taking a life. I’m one of those people who take spiders and other critters (roaches excepted) outside where they belong and liberate flies and wasps from entrapment between windows and screens if I can, though the latter I do at some risk, for a sting sent me to the emergency room a few years back, in an ambulance no less.  

Examining the remains on the back cover of my Bible, I was no longer certain it was a mosquito, and the best I could do was hope that I had sent it on to its next and hopefully better life! Before you think what a gentle and kind person I must be, all of this is a little disingenuous because I am by no means a vegetarian. But though I can eat meat, I could never kill the animal who provided it. 

As you will remember from an earlier post, I am reading Paramahansa Yogananda’s autobiography, and today he finally found his primary guru, Sri Yukteswar. And here’s where it gets spooky, or synchronicitous or miraculous if you like. In answer to his devotee’s concern about mosquitos, the guru tells him, “Is the whole world going to change for you? Change yourself: be rid of the mosquito consciousness.” 

During one teaching session, however, the teenage Yogananda is distracted by a mosquito and, as it proceeded to dig “a poisonous ‘hypodermic needle’” into his thigh, he raised a hand to swat it, but then remembered ahimsa (non-violence). Yuksteswar  offered a puzzling response, “Why didn’t you finish the job?” 

When asked if he agreed with taking a life, the master replied, “No, but in your mind you had already struck the deathblow.” He went on to say that ahimsa means removal of the desire to kill, then explains, “This world is inconveniently arranged for a literal practice of ahimsa. Man may be compelled to exterminate harmful creatures. He is not under a similar compulsion to feel anger or animosity,” thus “overcoming the passion of destruction.” 

Of course the context verifies that “harmful creatures” applies only to dangerous insects or threatening wild animals. Yet even in that context, one is best not driven by anger or animosity. Jesus said something like this when he added to the commandment “You shall not murder” the more far reaching “if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment.” Or added simple lust to “You shall not commit adultery.” 

If only I could achieve mosquito consciousness, realizing that they too, in the words of Yukteswar, “have an equal right to the air of maya,” I could leave them be and save money on bug spray. Maybe in my next and better life!

 

Copyright © 2013 Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

Where's Your Cave?

I hope you will answer this question “Where’s Your Cave?” after reading this post by clicking on “comments” on the blogsite, and following the instructions, which begins with “select profile.” You will not receive spam and you can always reply anonymously! And you might see other readers’ comments. Thanks! -Chris

In his autobiography, Paramahansa Yogananda tells of his childhood and adolescent attempts to escape from Calcutta to the Himalayas to find a guru in a cave and pursue a spiritual path. Even after he has found his primary guru years later, he leaves him and his hermitage near Calcutta to seek out another guru in the mountains, one who humorously chides, “Masters are under no cosmic compulsion to live on mountains only.”

This guru asks, “Are you able to have a little room where you can close the door and be alone?” When Yogananda affirms, “Yes,” the guru says, “That is your cave. That is your sacred mountain. That is where you will find the kingdom of God.”

It reminded me of the psalm that begins “I lift up my eyes to the hills—from where will my help come?” (Ps 121) One of my earliest encounters with biblical scholarship was discovering that there should be a period, dash, or semicolon after hills, because the psalmist is not affirming mountains as God’s habitat, but rather, rejecting hills where other gods were worshiped. The psalmist instead affirms in the verse that follows, “my help comes from Yahweh who made heaven and earth.”

Elijah heard God speak in a cave’s sheer silence on Mount Horeb, and Mohammad had his divine revelations in a cave. Jesus preferred “lonely places” to pray, sometimes mountains, and encouraged us to find an innermost room, or pantry, to pray. A Bodhi tree was sufficient for the Buddha. We all need our “caves,” our “set apart” places to be “close to the mystery, [while] never solving it,” in words from Deepak Chopra’s novel Muhammad.

In all the places I have lived or visited, I have found a “cave,” often outside and usually with a view of the outside, to pray. In addition, two places to which I have longed to return each served as a cave away from home, Mt. Calvary Retreat House above Santa Barbara, destroyed in the Montecito fire a few years back, and the shoreline, which I rarely get to these days living in Atlanta. (I was once astounded to visit a church on a perch with a beautiful view of the sea purposely constructed with no clear windows so as not to distract worshipers!)

I’ve written before of Etty Hillesum, who, facing transport to Nazi concentration camps, wrote in her diary (published as An Interrupted Life), “There will always be a small patch of sky above, and there will always be enough space to fold two hands in prayer.”

“Somewhere inside me,” she wrote, “the jasmine continues to blossom undisturbed, just as profusely and delicately as ever it did. And it spreads its scent round the House in which You dwell, oh God.”

Kirkridge is a welcoming “cave” which hosts an annual retreat for gay and bisexual men (scroll down to date after clicking), which I will be co-leading Oct 3-6 this year with Roman Catholic activist and filmmaker Brendan Fay. Register by Aug 31 and subtract a $50 discount, no code required!

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!

More on Etty Hillesum:

Interrupted Lives

Where Is God?

Books that line the walls of my working cave:

Sacred, Saving Texts

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.