Being a Good Host to Children

Our neighbor Oscar enjoys our fountain.

With schools closed during the pandemic, parents and children are spending a lot more time together, and so I thought this entry from my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy, might be helpful.

Children carry a promise with them, a hidden treasure that has to be led into the open through education (e=out; ducere=to lead) in a hospitable home. It takes much time and patience to make the little stranger feel at home, and it is realistic to say that parents have to learn to love their children. –Reaching Out by Henri Nouwen, 56-57.

Both experience and science suggest that there is a parental inclination to nurture and protect offspring. But love is also a matter of choice. Parental love and especially maternal love is likely to want to hold on to the child; but it is the parent’s will that recognizes and values the child as an independent soul, not an extension of the parental self.

I truly wonder at my parents’ extraordinary ability in the midst of life’s demands and stresses to make my sister, brother, and me feel “at home,” as well as “to lead us out” into our own unique self-expressions. True, stereotypically, my father was more distant and my mother held on more tightly. And, like all people who love each other deeply, we wounded one another in various ways. Yet I am grateful for the comparatively safe environment my parents provided even as they worried about paying bills, the state of the world, as well as what we were up to. I don’t mean just safe from abandonment, neglect, or abuse. I mean also safe for us to cultivate identities, embrace values, and pursue goals different from their own.

With similar awe, I have watched my sister raise three sons, largely on her own, and serve as proud matriarch of an extended family that now includes three daughters-in-law and seven grandchildren—all while pursuing two different professions.

In my view, parenting is the most important task an adult may do, yet it is the one for which most receive the least training. To understand parenting as a spiritual movement, as Henri does in Reaching Out, is a beginning. He places it in the context of the movement from hostility to hospitality, transforming enemy (hostis) to guest (hospes), in this case, stranger to friend. Parents act as hosts and children as guests.

A host has not only the right but the responsibility to set the boundaries of a guest in the host’s home. We are not to welcome another with an “ambiguous presence,” Henri says. We are to be clear about who we are and what are our limits. At the same time, to be good hosts, we are to welcome the guest and the promise or gift inherent in every guest, encouraging the fulfillment of the promise they hold deep within themselves, enabling the development of the gifts every guest brings into the home. As such a movement toward hospitality, then, parenting is as delicate and vital and as fraught with danger as welcoming any guest into one’s home.

Just as we learn through experience to become good hosts in relation to other guests, we learn through experience to become good parents, uncles, and aunts. By the time I came along, I believe my parents were more experienced, relaxed, and secure in their avocation than when rearing my older siblings. And grandparents may be the most experienced of all, especially when they grasp that now their own guests, their children, are hosts in their own homes.

+Help me to be a good host to all children, welcoming their promise, encouraging their gifts, reminding them they are beloved by God.

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Copyright © 2002 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

Creating Space

Fashion for social distancing?

When I first heard of social distancing to limit the spread of COVID-19, I thought we could bring back hoop skirts to keep others at a six-foot distance!  😉

“Creating space” was a common phrase among therapists and pastors alike when I was in seminary in the mid-70’s. Creating a welcoming environment for another was the intent of the metaphor. A form of this is what is now called “safe space,” and in olden days called “sanctuary.”

Our counseling professor illustrated this with a juvenile court assignment of a child who resisted any verbal interaction with him. The boy would simply wander around the office looking at things, playing with various items. Finally, Dr. Brown told him that he would be assigning him to another therapist. Upset, the boy insisted, “But I like coming here.” Asked why, the boy explained, “Because you’re the only grownup that leaves me alone!”

In the present pandemic of easy contamination, when we can’t “kiss it and make it better” nor offer “warm hugs” of comfort, creating space becomes all the more vital, as in “life-giving” or “life-preserving.”

A couple of years ago I wrote a blogpost about the hugs exchanged within our former congregation in greeting and departing and passing the peace.  What I’ve since discovered in our new church start is that younger people are less so inclined. There are still huggers, of course, but I’ve learned the discomfort of some who prefer another form of greeting, and rather than appear a sort of old vampire grasping for youth, I restrain my touchy impulses. Since then we have also learned a lot about avoiding touch from the “Me Too” movement.

Now the coronavirus has taught us, as the song by The Police goes, “don’t stand so close to me.”

Continuing my re-read of Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life in preparation for what may become an online spiritual formation course, I read this sentence of Henri’s on Monday as an example of such hospitality: “It is like the task of a patrolman trying to create some space in the middle of a mob of panic-driven people for an ambulance to reach the center of the accident.” “First responder” could easily be substituted for “patrolman.”

I thought of Henri’s own creation of space in his campus office when he removed shelves of books lest a visiting student feel overwhelmed in the belief the student had nothing to offer this well-read professor.

I also thought of my first Presbyterian pastor’s explanation of what constitutes social action. Christian compassion, Dr. Morse said, is expressed when you tend to a person’s wounds as you wait for an ambulance. Social justice is expressed when you subsequently investigate why it took so long for the ambulance to arrive.

Nowadays this would include finding and filling the gaps in our systems of medicine—exactly what’s needed in our present crisis. Obviously this would include examining political and economic solutions.

Henri harmonizes the German word for hospitality, Gastfreundschaft, meaning “friendship for the guest” with his own native Dutch word “gastvrijheid” which means “freedom of the guest”: “Hospitality wants to offer friendship without binding the guest and freedom without leaving him or her alone.”

Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. … It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. Reaching Out, 51.

I stumble over political “dividing lines.” I have a friend who seems to support President Trump no matter what. Yet my friend also once supported President Obama. As the present administration dismantled protections and services that might have helped the U.S. in this pandemic and now stumbles incompetently while blaming everyone else, “dividing lines,” like Trump’s infamous wall, makes me stumble. 

Creating space for the other is far from an easy task. It requires hard concentration and articulate work. It is like the task of a patrolman trying to create some space in the middle of a mob of panic-driven people for an ambulance to reach the center of the accident. Reaching Out, 51.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

A Wedding and a Funeral in Trump Territory

Wade dancing with the bride.

I call it “Trump territory” rather than “Trump country” because I doubt any state wants to be characterized by how it voted in the last presidential election. Nor do its citizens. And “territory” sounds less permanent than “country,” suggesting things may change. And I am writing this post not to diminish Trump voters in Indiana and Louisiana or even my own state of Georgia, but to recognize we may share more values than pundits might admit.

I am writing this because when Wade and I visited Indiana for his mom’s memorial in September and Louisiana for our friend’s wedding in October, both held in picturesque rural chapels, we seemed to find the same welcoming people we enjoy in our own neighborhood and our own spiritual community here in Atlanta.

Now, we weren’t talking politics in either venue, but how people respond to a married gay male couple could be considered a sort of litmus test of values. And we seemed warmly received in our grief in Indiana and our celebration in Louisiana. What that says to me is that death and marriage are universally held as profound and important enough to, as they say in theater, “suspend our disbelief” in one another’s voting records and ideologies and, as they say in the church, “bear one another’s burdens and share each other’s joys.”

In a May visit to family and friends in California, one of my hosts was one of “those” puzzling Obama-Trump voters, but we had enough to talk about without pushing one another’s buttons over politics. As many of us anticipate family gatherings over Thanksgiving and Christmas, it helps to consider what we share than how we differ. Fox News does not need to share a turkey with MSNBC. If ceasefires can sometimes work in the Middle East, then they might work—if briefly—at our dinner tables.

My reading for both trips to Trump territory was Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. As I read the section on the movement from hostility to hospitality, tears came to my eyes. I was about to offer my morning prayers, but I realized my tears were my prayers.

My tears came from my youthful ideals that seem so unrealistic in our present political divisiveness. My first sermon in my home Presbyterian church as a college student was entitled “Conflict and Unity within the Church.” That congregation was so divided politically that the liberals sat on the left side of the sanctuary and the conservatives on the right! My sermon declared that maybe the church could be one place political sides could come together and have meaningful conversation.

Someone in the church sent a copy of my sermon to a newspaper columnist who wrote about it, doubting the possibility of what he called “an umbrella church.”

Off I went to seminary and bumped into Henri Nouwen, whose spirituality course in which I enrolled my first semester became the book Reaching Out. He said and wrote, “If we expect any salvation, redemption, healing and new life, the first thing we need is an open receptive place where something can happen to us. … To convert hostility into hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship.” (p 54)

“An open receptive place” to me is the very definition of sanctuary.

Regular readers know what store I place on the history of how I came by a book. A Roman Catholic priest who has remained a lifelong friend gave me his copy of Reaching Out in the mid-70s. The copy I’ve currently been reading is the one I gave my mother, writing inside the cover, “To Mom, What Henri shared with me I now share with you—with much love, Chris.”

Because it speaks to our current divisiveness, I’ve decided to use Reaching Out as the text for “An Open Receptive Place,” a new course on Henri I’ve been invited to lead for Columbia Seminary’s spiritual formation program September 17-20, 2020.

Life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts, that instead of becoming bitter our lives can yield to the wisdom that only from the heart a creative response can come forth.

If any criticism can be made of the sixties, it is not that protest was meaningless but that it was not deep enough, in the sense that it was not rooted in the solitude of the heart. When only our minds and hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. … It would be paralyzing to proclaim that we, as individuals, are responsible for all human suffering, but it is a liberating message to say that we are called to respond to it. (p 40-41)

Henri then talks about compassion, quoting Thomas Merton alluding to the solitude of the desert of the first Christian contemplatives: “What is my new desert? The name of it is compassion. There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid and so fruitful as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like the lily.” (Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p 323.)

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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.

Where Ladybugs Come to Die

Wade and I have moved back into my house in the Ormewood Park neighborhood of Atlanta, two blocks from where we lived before.

This is the home that received a house blessing from my church, was graced by two visits of my mom from California, witnessed the end of one relationship and the beginning of my present one, was blessed by two loveable and loving golden retriever/Labs, Calvin and Hobbes, and offered hospitality to overnight guests such as John McNeill, Henri Nouwen, Erin Swenson, and Rick Ufford-Chase, then the Presbyterian General Assembly Moderator. This house also hosted parties, including a reception for MCC friends visiting Atlanta for General Conference.

The year I served MCC San Francisco, it sheltered my friend Jim Mitulski whenever he came to Atlanta while serving as MCC’s regional elder, becoming also an office for him and administrative assistant Ritchie Crownfield.

During that time I jokingly called it an MCC “safe house” because of the occasional MCC pastor or denominational leader who stayed here when visiting the city. At MCC gatherings I would sometimes have people tell me with a smile that they had stayed in my “cute little house.”

This house then welcomed my former partner in recovery and subsequently others in transitional periods of their lives. All “loved” the home it provided them.

I longed to return, not so much because of the house itself, but because of its placement overlooking a green ravine and creek with long-lived tall trees, which I see from my home office windows whenever I look up from my laptop as I write this. Sitting on its small deck to do my morning prayers feels like being on retreat.

But I had forgotten about the ladybugs.

As a child, the only bug of which I was neither afraid nor annoyed was the ladybug.* It was small and cute and round and red and landed unthreateningly on me or a plant or surface. It would not be until I was an adult that I learned how beneficial they are to the environment, happily consuming plant-devouring aphids. I also learned that, possibly for that reason, they are considered lucky or a good omen.

Every time a ladybug has landed on me throughout my life, I have smiled.

As I moved some boxes into the attic space off our master bedroom, I remembered about the ladybugs. Just as Tippi Hedren discovered birds in a similarly tight space in Hitchcock’s The Birds, I found dozens of far-less-threatening ladybugs—all dead. I remembered that this was, for some unknown reason, the place where ladybugs come to die.

A few make it inside the house itself. By our bathroom sink I have turned more than one ladybug off its back and onto its feet in a vain attempt to prolong its tiny life. Adjusting the pillows on our bed, I have been careful not to hurt the occasional ladybug crawling on our headboard. But I have given up opening window screens to free ladybugs who find their way inside.

Maybe it’s the sky-blue color of our house that attracts them. Maybe it’s the warmth in colder months and the coolness in hotter months.

Maybe it’s the same thing that attracts us and all who have found hospitality here, a welcome to be what they are and a welcome to become what they will be. Maybe they come here to die because they know they will be left alone; they will not be squished or sprayed or swatted or shooed.

They only make us smile, but not without regard for their passing.

Didn’t Jesus say something about ladybugs? “Not one shall fall to the ground without God knowing”?

*I didn’t realize then that butterflies were “bugs”!

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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. 

Evangelical

As a progressive Christian, I am hesitant to admit how dearly I wanted my college buddy to know Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Clearly it was a desire for intimacy on my part, but I also wanted him to know how dearly loved he was: if he could never be told of my love, at least he would know the love of Jesus.

I recognized the experience decades later upon reading Henri Nouwen’s  Life of the Beloved, written for a young secular Jewish friend requesting generic spiritual guidance. Henri wrote:

All I want to say to you is, “You are the beloved,” and all I hope is that you can hear these words as spoken to you with all the tenderness and force that love can hold. My only desire is to make these words reverberate in every corner of your being. (p 26)

When offered the manuscript to read, Henri explains in the epilogue, the young man responded basically “thanks, but no thanks,” as it was still so Christian. But Henri published the book anyway! I gave the book to a gay friend graduating from seminary, fearing that he might lose his sense of belovedness serving the church from the closet.

What awakens these memories is reading again Paul’s letters to his “beloved,” congregations he founded or shaped for whom he behaved as a mother caring for her children (1 Thes. 2:7), treating “every one of you as a father treats his children” (1 Thes. 2:11). I am in awe of Paul’s passion for the first Christians and their passion for one another, sharing all things in common, giving thanks in all circumstances, as well as their passion for loving and helping their neighbors, what made the faith so attractive in its beginnings (see Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief). Among progressive Christians, such passion is often focused in our pursuit of peace and justice. Obviously, that’s a good thing, but do we welcome spiritual intimacy in this process?

Our fear, of course, is becoming like some of our evangelical brothers and sisters, who, as Jesus said of the Pharisees, “cross sea and land to make a single convert, and you make the new convert twice as much a child of hell as yourselves” (Matt. 23:15).

Seeing even “in the center of an intimate relationship the seeds of violence,” Henri critiqued the passion that may lead from embracing to grasping in his third movement of the spiritual life, a movement significantly named “From Illusion to Prayer” in his book Reaching Out (p 84). Prayer and contemplation may lead us away from illusory power and control, away from idols and our own demons.

Religiously, we see this grasping in the misdirected passion of the self-inflicted martyr and would-be terrorist, the inquisitor and the enforcer, that can be found in every faith historically—even among progressive Christians.

The solution for Henri was hospitality, the ancient spiritual practice, which he explains “is not a method of making our God and our way into the criteria of happiness, but the opening of an opportunity to others to find their God and their way” (Reaching Out, p 51).

This, to me, is the best spiritual path and practice of progressive Christians.

“Last call” for this weekend’s Kirkridge Oct 3-6 retreat: “For All the Saints!” which includes a film and segment on Henri Nouwen.

Upcoming Henri Nouwen events led by Chris Glaser:

October 12 in Pasadena, CA:

From the Heart: The Spirituality of Henri Nouwen

November 9 in Dallas, TX:

The Wounded Healer vs. Getting Hooked in Our Wounds—A Retreat for Clergy and Caregivers

January 12, 2014 in Seattle, WA:

Henri Nouwen: Forgiveness, Fruitfulness, and Fun

January 18, 2014 in Chicago, IL:

            What Community Meant to Henri Nouwen (Sat. aft. TBD)

May 2-4, 2014 at Kirkridge, PA:

            Henri Nouwen’s Road to L’Arche

           

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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.