Everything You Wanted to Know about God but Were Afraid to Ask!

South African sunset, photo by Wade Jones.

My final post on my blog “Progressive Christian Reflections” will occur on June 30, 2021. More than ten years of posts will 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. 

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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, 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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Today’s post appeared on July 20, 2016:

 

Months ago I mentioned on this blog that I had finally picked up Karen Armstrong’s book, A History of God: The 4000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Perhaps reflective of our desire for theological ignorance, I found it discounted on the remainder table at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble. 

I must admit that, at times, I have been slogging through it, sometimes even setting it aside for days at a time. But I read all such books in the context of my morning prayers, hoping for inspiration along the way, so I just read a portion each day. The book is well-written and comprehensive, but overwhelming in its detailing of our fitful attempts to “know” God. Right now I’m flailing in the chapter on the Enlightenment and actually looking forward to next chapter’s “The Death of God?” Whew, what a relief after all this kvetching! (Apparently, making God a product of reason makes him/her/they more easily dispensable or at least optional. Stay tuned.) 

Of course I’ve read other books on the history of religion, but there were many surprises and aha’s for me in this book. 

Armstrong not only writes of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but also of Hinduism and Buddhism, though to a lesser extent. What surprised me is how various religions often paralleled and sometimes informed one another’s trains of thought. Given our contemporary insistence on religious divisions, I found it consoling that there are historically points of agreement and sometimes civil disagreement. 

There are also periods of dysfunctional fighting within and among religions, and though each have suffered their unfair share of persecution and unpopularity, it seems to me that Jews got the worst of it, long before the Shoah, or Holocaust. Made me more sympathetic to the raison d’être of the state of Israel. 

What struck me also is that all religions have had their intelligentsia—their philosophers and academics and scientists—which has helped shape the religions as we know them.  And that those who tried to make religion only “of the heart,” could be among the most dangerous because of their subjectivity that resisted intellectual scrutiny. 

I had the biggest challenge reading about Islam. I was already familiar—if vaguely—with many of the names and general movements in other religions, but there were so many names and movements in Islam—both unfamiliar because of my lack of education as well as sounding exotic—that it reminded me of a classic Russian novel, having so many characters! 

I found the chapter on the Reformers particularly disheartening, especially Armstrong’s treatment of Martin Luther—at this point I reminded myself that Armstrong is a former nun, but that gave me little solace, given her obvious command of religious history. Calvin came off better, I’m happy to say, given my Presbyterian background, though later development of his thoughts on predestination is scary. 

You might have guessed that I would be drawn to the chapter and segments on the mystics and mystical traditions, by which all religions were blessed. I was already familiar with many, but now to read of their experiences and insights in relation to one another and their respective religious traditions made me esteem them yet more highly. To me, they provide a salvific thread to what was often a brutal enterprise of religion and theology. 

Another salvific thread for me was Eastern Orthodox thinking that we can’t possibly know God as he/she/they is in actuality. Also I liked the idea that God is “no thing,” somewhat of a parallel to what I’ve read of Buddhism’s “no thing.” 

By comparison, Armstrong explains how talkative Christianity became in the West, with its emphasis on doctrine and systematic theology. Instead, in Eastern Orthodox understanding, we need silence to understand/experience God, which I believe is central to a spiritual life. Of course, then we might come back to a religion “of the heart” and the subjectivity that is potentially dangerous. But communing with God was to be of the mind as well, and within the context of a spiritual community and a spiritual tradition that can serve as correctives. 

As a progressive Christian, two other things were of particular interest: 

First, literalism was rare and “untraditional”: there was a deep respect for and valuing of the place of myth in all religious traditions. Myth and storytelling reveal something deeper about our human experience than can be explained. To take them “literally” is to do them and us and even God, a disservice. 

And second, those who treated others badly and judgmentally were doing so out of their anxiety and fear of an angry god too demanding to please. 

Once the Bible begins to be interpreted literally instead of symbolically, the idea of its God becomes impossible. To imagine a deity who is literally responsible for everything that happens on earth involves impossible contradictions. The “God” of the Bible ceases to be a symbol of a transcendent reality and becomes a cruel and despotic tyrant. (p 283) 

Could it be that a deliberately imaginative conception of God, based on mythology and mysticism, is more effective as a means of giving his people courage to survive tragedy and distress than a God whose myths are interpreted literally? (p 286) 

Armstrong suggests the benefit of discovering God using “the imaginative disciplines of prayer and contemplation,” and the danger of assuming God as a “fact.” (p 291) 

In one of my earliest books and again, in one of my posts on this blog, I wrote that we can get into trouble when we treat matters of faith as matter-of-fact. 

 

Copyright © 2016 Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

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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.)

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Copyright © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.