I Can't Say It Better

My title is a confession that there are times when scripture needs direct absorption without the filter or interpretation of a writer or speaker or “official” biblical scholar, let alone a blogger like me. I don’t think readers of this blog will believe I’m shirking my duties if I share directly with you a psalm that has grabbed my attention and contemplation this week as I, like you, cope with the challenges of a pandemic and a charged political atmosphere.

Those who know me directly or through my work will not need me to point out how and to whom I believe the following verses may apply. You know my mind and my heart and my passion and compassion well enough without need of explicit comparisons to current events and public figures. And both those who don’t know me and those who do have their own counsel at hand to find the following verses comforting and encouraging and applicable to our current situation.

Carl Jung’s synchronicity or the Holy Spirit or both would have it that when I turned to my NRSV last week for solace, I found stuck in its pages a slip from a notepad from St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital whose very name welcomes the blessings of both faith and science. Saint Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes and is often depicted with a flame around his head, reflecting his presence at Pentecost to receive the Holy Spirit.

As I write this, I glance at Ganesha sitting on the bookshelf beside my desk. Ganesha is the Hindu god of arts and sciences and fresh beginnings, one who removes obstacles (one of the reasons I keep it close to my computer!) and so strikes me as a complement to Saint Jude’s desire to help the hopeless.  

On the side of the slip of paper that bears the logo and name of St. Jude Hospital, I long ago wrote down the lectionary readings for a particular Sunday, but on the back I wrote Psalm 37:1-11, 39-40. So last week I turned to Psalm 37 and ruminated on it during my morning prayers on the days since. I encourage you to read the entire psalm, but here are some of its verses with few and minor inclusive language changes. If the title “Lord” troubles you, feel free to substitute another metaphor, such as “Holy One.”

Do not fret because of the wicked;

  do not be envious of wrongdoers,

for they will soon fade like the grass,

  and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

  so you will live in the land, and enjoy security.

Take delight in the Lord,

  and you will be given the desires of your hearts.

Commit your way to the Lord;

  trust in God, and God will act.

Yahweh will make your vindication shine like the light,

  and the justice of your cause like the noonday.

Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for God;

   do not fret over those who prosper in their way,

   over those who carry out evil devices.

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath.

  Do not fret—it leads only to evil.

For the wicked shall be cut off,

  but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.

The wicked plot against the righteous,

  and gnash their teeth at them;

but the Lord laughs at the wicked,

  knowing that their day is coming.

The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows

  to bring down the poor and needy,

  to kill those who walk uprightly;

their sword shall enter their own heart,

  and their bows shall be broken.

Better is a little that the righteous person has

  than the abundance of many wicked.

The wicked borrow, and do not pay back,

  but the righteous are generous and keep giving.

Though we stumble, we shall not fall headlong,

  for the Lord holds us by the hand.

For the Lord loves justice

  and will not forsake God’s faithful ones.

The salvation of the righteous is from the Lord,

  who is their refuge in time of trouble.

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Scripture copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Near Death Experiences

Morris Chapel, Oaktown, Indiana, where Wade's mom was baptized at three months of age.

Yes, that's a cornfield on the left.

I have put off writing this post for several weeks, using the excuse of describing my workshop on self-care and then explaining my guilty pleasure watching old episodes of Frasier and Murder, She Wrote and finally, using photos of signs I’ve taken in recent years.

But this picks up where I left off with “A Mother’s Work Is Never Done” about my mother-in-law’s death. I had thought to save you any more reflections on death, lest you roll your eyes or click “delete” or find something more pleasant on the internet. But, like death itself, writing about it is inescapable.

I wrote a whole book about death, The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life, describing many experiences finding myself in proximity to someone’s death, so you might think I’d be used to death by now. But, while more experienced, I still am at a loss when someone dies, especially as I come closer to my own final passing or “transitioning,” as a hospice worker referred to dying.

As I write this, I look out at our backyard lawn dying from prolonged lack of rain and unrelenting summer heat despite my best efforts at watering. At least it can look forward to being aerated and reseeded this fall when cooler temperatures prevail.

I am interrupted by Wade explaining he’s taking his mom’s Christmas ornaments to our nearby Habitat for Humanity ReStore, and my mood lightens as the question crosses my mind if that’s where I’ll end up!  ( ;  

When we talked about afterlife, a neighbor who looks every bit the part of a Hindu sage with long greying dark hair and beard and flowing attire and sandals, suggested humbly that expecting life to be eternal is “a bit greedy, don’t you think?” His comment made me smile appreciatively. Maybe this desire for everlasting life is simply a reflection of our acquisitive, self-indulgent culture.

In my book I wrote that belief in an afterlife is more important for me when it comes to other people I care about, especially those whose lives have been cut short or ended before fulfilling their life dreams.

In seminary I read an essay that explained early Christians weren’t thinking of life that extended forever, but rather, life that has eternal significance and thus, an eternal “view,” perspective, and effect. Earlier, in college, I became enamored of process theology, in which we live on eternally in God’s memory. This hardly seems satisfactory to those of generations past who spent their lives enslaved, marginalized, or closeted or of their descendants who become the victims of violence.

Nearer to home, I wondered what life would be like without Wade or he without me, the more likely scenario.

Wade and I spent a week in Indiana that included another memorial service for his mom and scattering of her ashes in their hometown of Oaktown. We spent part of our time finding and visiting and, in two cases, adorning the graves of his relatives.

Cemetery next to the chapel.

That’s also how I spent part of my May visit to California, but this time, not just visiting graves of my relatives, but finding and visiting the graves of two friends.  One died as a child when I was a child after initially surviving one of the earliest open-heart surgeries. The other became one of my best friends in high school and later in college after the untimely death of his nineteen-year-old brother. I discovered to my surprise that the latter friend, who died in 2009, is buried in the same grave as his brother, and has no marker of his own.

I thought of my maternal grandfather, who lived to be 95, wryly saying to me on a cemetery visit, “When you get to be my age, you have to come here to visit some of your friends.”

I also visited the grave of a friend’s brother. A promising songwriter, his life was cut short by gun violence at 29. On his grave marker are these words:

Always documenting my discoveries through music…

The music is a part of me that I received from God.

I acted as an instrument and God as the musician.

For many years I was lost…

looking the wrong way for the wrong things.

“The end justifies the means”—No, I don’t think so.

It is the journey, not the destination that is vital.

Life is meant as a gift to enjoy,

to experience, to give and to receive.

The simplest, smallest gestures can be of greatest essence.

So don’t hold back. Make life whole and complete.

Seek not material things but fulfillment of the soul and spirit.

A reminder that "God Loves Us."

Here is the Amazon link to my book: The Final Deadline

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2019 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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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Adventures of a Gay Red-headed Boy in His Search for God

Washing my first puppy, Taffy.

Last week I referenced “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search of God,” a George Bernard Shaw story about a young woman who takes the search for God literally, encountering various forms of the deity that require confrontation, sometimes with a knobkierre, a kind of club used primarily in southern and eastern Africa. At age 18, I was intrigued by gay icon Christopher Isherwood’s stage adaptation of the story for L.A.’s frequently experimental theater, the Mark Taper Forum.

In context, I mentioned that all my writings could be said to be “the adventures of a gay red-headed boy in his search for God.”

The adventure continues as I am (finally) reading Karen Armstrong’s 1993 tome, The History of God, which I found on sale on the remainder table of our nearby Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago. As I read, I discover that many of the questions I have asked in my books and my blog have been asked before in the multi-millennia search for God!  As I have suggested on this blog, such books remind me of how little I know!

But reading about the fourth century Cappadocian theologians of Eastern Turkey puzzling over the essence and manifestations of God, I realized what I missed dropping a church patristics course my first semester of seminary.  I recognized the names of Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and his friend, Gregory of Nazianzus. Having their wisdom summarized by Armstrong reminded me that this is what I missed when I summarily dropped the course because it conflicted with a class on spirituality I happened into, Henri Nouwen’s “Discipline and Discipleship.”

At the same time, these theologians may very well have understood my need for spiritual experience over church doctrine. As Armstrong puts it: 

Plato had contrasted philosophy (which was expressed in terms of reason and was thus capable of proof) with the equally important teaching handed down by means of mythology, which eluded scientific demonstration. … Aristotle had made a similar distinction when he had noted that people attended the mystery religions not to learn anything but to experience something.

Basil expressed the same insight in a Christian sense when he distinguished between dogma and kerygma. Both kinds of Christian teaching were essential to religion. Kerygma was the public teaching of the Church, based on the scriptures. Dogma, however, represented the deeper meaning of biblical truth, which could only be apprehended through religious experience and expressed in symbolic form. …

Some religious insights had an inner resonance that could only be apprehended by each individual in his own time during what Plato had called theoria, contemplation. … As Basil said, these elusive religious realities could only be suggested in the symbolic gestures of the liturgy or, better still, by silence.

Western Christianity would become a much more talkative religion and would concentrate on the kerygma: this would be one of its chief problems with God. In the Greek Orthodox Church, however, all good theology would be silent or apophatic.*  …

[Quoting Basil:] “We know our God only by his operations (energeiai) but we do not undertake to approach his essence.” 

Paradoxically, I mistook church patristics with dogma as in doctrines, when I was looking for spiritual experience as in contemplation, which was how Eastern theologians understood true dogma. So I was drawn to a class whose notes would become Nouwen’s Reaching Out: Three Movements of the Spiritual Life, the movements from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, from illusion to prayer.

“The adventures of a gay red-headed boy in his search for God” has been full of meandering such as this. When I wrote an occasional column for the progressive periodical Christianity and Crisis, my then pastor observed that, in my writing, I went hither and yon, letting everything from events to conversations shape my thinking, till I came to some conclusion reflective of the whole.

Etymologists dispute the following theory of the origin of the term “saunter” (which means “to muse, be in reverie” or “to walk with a leisurely gait”) but I like the myth that the word described the meanderings of those who went on pilgrimages. Though the OED thinks it unlikely, the Anglo-French sauntrer may have been derived from the French word s’aventurer, “to take risks.”

This to me describes the spiritual life. Like the black girl in search of God, this gay red-headed boy’s search has been convoluted and risky.

One more twist. I briefly dated a gay porn star, though I was unfamiliar with his work, even his genre! He was very well-read, devouring everything from novels to philosophy. And he introduced me to Christopher Isherwood and his partner, the artist Don Bachardy. The gay red-headed boy, in his search for God, now encountered a gay pioneer, who was also, as it turns out, a Hindu scholar.

God is good—and full of surprises.

*The best way I could illustrate the term apophatic would be with my post, Spiritual Picassos.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“I Thirst.” (The water crisis of Flint, Michigan, has given new relevance to this post.)

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.  

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.  

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. 

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

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.