Altars in the World

Nature's baptismal font, Hawai'i

When you’ve finished reading this, I invite you to click on “comments” at the end of the post and share your favorite/most meaningful “altar in the world.” Click on “comment as” and if you do not have an account with one of the services listed, choose “anonymous” and enter your comment followed by your name, if desired. I will be publishing your comment later in the day. Thanks!

A seminary friend, Barbara Brown Taylor, has a book titled something like the title of this post. I haven’t read it yet, but having read three other books of hers, including Leaving Church, I have a sense that its theme parallels what I write here.

The contemplative life is about finding altars everywhere. Celtic “thin places” where heaven shows itself on earth. Creatures who, much like Meister Eckhart’s caterpillar, are so full of God a sermon is unnecessary. Leonard Cohen’s broken places that let the light shine in. Strangers who are angels unawares. The “least of these” who are Christ himself. People who, as in Thomas Merton’s epiphany at a city intersection, do not realize they are walking around “shining like the sun.” Maya Angelou’s “caged bird,” Ruben Alves’s dates, Rumi’s beloved guide Shams, Mother Teresa’s “Christ in a distressing disguise.” 

For a contemplative like Hildegard of Bingen, music is another altar: “a person often sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of the celestial harmony.”

Etty Hillesum, who was to die at Auschwitz, might smile to be considered a contemplative, but who but a contemplative could observe the following in Nazi-occupied Holland, when Jews were forced to wear yellow stars of David? 

That man in Beethovenstraat this afternoon won’t get a mention in [the history books]. I looked at him as one might at the first crocus in spring, with pure enchantment. He was wearing a huge golden star, wearing it triumphantly on his chest. He was a procession and a demonstration all by himself as he cycled along so happily. And all that yellow—I suddenly had a poetic vision of the sun rising above him, so radiant and smiling did he look. 

In her “Spiritual Autobiography,” Simone Weil saw herself forever standing on the threshold of the church, because so much that she loved and that God loves is outside the church.

“The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” Gerard Manley Hopkins declared, as so many poets, artists, visionaries, and mystics have witnessed through the ages.

The contemplative knows no bounds, no walls, no restrictive or exclusive way of experiencing the sacred. Altars are everywhere for those with fingers to touch or noses to smell or tongues to taste or ears to hear or eyes to see or bodies to be held or minds to imagine or love to be made or justice to be done. Anyone with any sense may know the altars of God’s presence and pleasure.

That’s why contemplatives often find more in common with mystics of other faiths than their fellow “believers,” why they find kindred spirits in so-called “primitive” religions that are more down to earth, or why, even among “godless” sciences they find a cause for awe and praise and—reverence.

Contemplatives do not have an exclusive view of their vocation: they learn from everyone, for, just as it is sometimes said “we are all theologians,” we are all contemplatives who do it more or less. The trick is to do more, to find ways to open ourselves to the altars in the world, to the sacred ways of other cultures, to the guidance and wisdom of other spiritual communities, to the diversity of spiritual experiences and practices even within our own faith traditions.

Listening is key. Self-Realization Fellowship founder and contemplative Paramahansa Yogananda wrote a song I use in leading retreats: 

Listen, listen, listen to my heart song;

Listen, listen, listen to my heart song:

I will never forget you, I will never forsake you;

I will never forget you, I will never forsake you—

Listen, listen, listen to my heart song.

“In this tempestuous, havoc-ridden world of ours, all real communication comes from the heart,” Etty Hillesum also wrote. Hearts may be altars as well, and listening is something we best do with our hearts.

Attending, attention, mindfulness, presence—these are our teachers, these are our guides, and these are the ways we bring healing to one another and to the world—one person at a time. “Ninety percent of life is just showing up,” Woody Allen famously quipped--and yes, comics may also be contemplatives. We need more of them!

So many places to find God; so little time!

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

The Sound of Eden

I look forward to seeing some of you at the Georgia Winter Institute next week.

These thoughts may not be ripe enough for picking for a post, but several encounters prompt this. Sunday I preached at St. Paul UCC in Barrington near Chicago during their lively monthly praise service. At the O’Hare Hilton that afternoon just before my flight home, I delightedly met two longtime friends who are gifted church musicians, Jan Graves and Mark Bowman, both of whom I worked alongside on the magazine Open Hands, and we talked about many things, including music in worship. I shared some of Hildegard of Bingen’s thoughts on the subject, which I had just read about on the flight to Chicago in preparation for a weekend course in February.

As many of you know, Hildegard was a visionary abbess of a Benedictine community of women in the 12^th century who composed music and verse for worship. While I personally stumble on her visions, I am taken with her attitudes toward music.

Hildegard scholar and editor Barbara Newman writes, “For Hildegard, not only inspired canticles but all music was associated with prophecy and the nostalgia for Eden. That is why, she says, ‘a person often sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of the celestial harmony’” before human beings were, in Hildegard’s words from another context, “lured…away from the celestial harmony and the delights of paradise.”

Newman explains Hildegard’s view that “Music could not only express the prophetic spirit; it might even awaken that spirit,” offering the example of Elisha calling for a musician and, upon hearing the music, “the Spirit suddenly descended upon him and he prophesied” (2 Kings 3:15).

Newman observes that Augustine found the sensual nature of music problematic, but for Hildegard, “liturgical song was a medium that perfectly united soul and body.” Personally, I have thought of church music as an integration of word and sacrament, because it’s verbal as well as embodied.  Thus how appropriate that my sermon about “Discerning the Body of Christ” in one another enjoyed the context of a praise service led by four outstanding female singers, one of whom is the pastor. Hildegard viewed Christ as a second Adam, weaving the broken body of humanity into the one body which God shaped “in the primal dawn / before all creation.”

What also strikes me as I study Hildegard is that her theology of music was developed during a period when she and her community were forbidden by the church hierarchy to sing, a punishment for their refusal to exhume an “unworthy” body from their churchyard. Newman summarizes Hildegard’s adamant defense to church leaders in this way: “To silence music in the Church is to create an artificial rift between earth and heaven, to put asunder that which God has joined together.” Want often makes us more keenly aware of the meaning of what we’re denied.

Those of us who have been denied by the church because of our own embodied praise—women, LGBT, racial minorities, those with disabilities, those with reasoning brains, and so on—have our own theologies that the church needs to hear.  May we be as adamant as Hildegard opposing “an artificial rift between earth and heaven.”

Related post:

In Praise of Praise

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