"Nothing Soft about the Quest for a Significant Life"

 

Why I Write This Blog

[Four years into writing this blog, I posted this on February 11, 2015.]

On this week’s fourth anniversary of the beginning of Progressive Christian Reflections, I am reminded that motivations are myriad for doing anything. “What’s my motivation?” actors ask to play a given scene, as if a single motivation suffices for any human action. We are more complex than that! (Read Dostoyevsky!) The reasons I’ve given in the past for writing these reflections still apply, but every week, actually every day, I find new reasons.

Today’s reason is being stunned and stumped by a cover essay in a recent New York Times Book Review entitled “Among the Disrupted” by Leon Wieseltier, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and recently resigned literary editor of The New Republic, which was “disrupted” by a new boss wanting to go digital.

I am stunned by insights I agree with and stumped by things in it I don’t quite understand. I have read it multiple times, each time underlining phrases and sentences that give me an “aha” moment or that I need to puzzle over. If I read it many more times, the whole essay will be underlined. (I can’t read without a pen in hand, btw!) It stirred controversy, judging by letters in response and an article in the Observer.

If I had to summarize it in 25 words or less, it’s about our contemporary confusion of technology with meaning. As the author suggests, “The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.” [2021 interjection: one of our dearest friends is an engineer! -crg]

Ridiculing “transhumanism,” the notion that computers and the internet “will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity” overcoming distinctions “between human and machine,” Wieseltier instead questions if we are just having another wave of posthumanism:

The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university, where the humanities are disparaged as soft and impractical and insufficiently new.

The late Charles Townes, the Nobel laureate physicist behind the maser and laser who was also awarded the 2005 Templeton Prize for contributing to our understanding of spirituality, “saw science and religion as compatible, saying there was little difference between a scientific revelation, like his maser brainstorm, and a religious one,” according to The New York Times. Quoting from a 1966 essay:

“Understanding the order of the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are not very far apart.”

The parallel in my field are those who study, research, and teach religion “objectively” outside any personal faith. We need such “engineers,” as long as we take what they say with a grain of salt, which, as I mentioned quoting Colossians a few weeks ago, means with “spiritual understanding.” Early Christian catechumens were taught the meaning of baptism and Communion only after they had received those sacraments, because it was believed they could not comprehend what they had not first experienced. Spiritual understanding is an inside job.

Wieseltier asserts, “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different.” 

We live in an internet world “in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. … Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements.” 

Wieseltier’s solution is to “regard the devices as simply new means for old ends. … The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation. … Never mind the platforms. Our solemn responsibility is for the substance.” 

His answer is a welcome of humanism and the humanities, concluding, “There is nothing soft about the quest for a significant life.” 

I would add a welcome of spirituality and religion, also because there is nothing soft about a quest for a significant life. 

Entertaining these concepts and welcoming this conversation are additional reasons I write this blog.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

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. 

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We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands

 

As we approach the tenth anniversary of this weekly blog, I thought current readers would appreciate one of my earliest posts, from April 6, 2011.

During recess in the second grade, my friend Mary and I enjoyed swinging as high as we could on the swing set, singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” It’s a great song of comfort, basically affirming that, no matter what, God is holding us. Note the song doesn’t say God is in control, just that God is there for us. And I still believe that.

These days we have a better grip on what it means for God to hold the whole world because we have the internet and a 24/7 news cycle. Now we too have the whole world in our hands every time we log on.

The narrator in my as-yet-unpublished mystery novel so reveres the internet that, just as many of us only visit God on Sunday mornings, he only visits the internet on Saturday mornings. Comparing it to touching the forbidden Mt. Sinai, he drolly writes: 

The internet is such an awesome god—so extensive we can only glimpse a part of it, so powerful that it has crashed many a computer, so desirous that many humans and their marriages have been sacrificed on its local altars. Okay, I’m a little over the top here, but it’s an amusing analogy, don’t you think? 

My point is, like any powerful and overwhelming god, the internet must be approached guardedly, with respect, on appointed days and at appointed times, lest we take it for granted (as if our computers are always up) or believe we can domesticate it (making it entirely user-friendly). 

Just as the ancient monastics limited human intercourse of all kinds, even so, those of us who practice an ascetic lifestyle must limit our intercourse with the internet, lest it lead us into idolatry or distract us from reality. To switch mythological metaphors, the internet is the Medusa’s head of our time, a face whose tresses are cables rather than snakes, but still able to turn men to stone. 

Demonstrating a similar reverence, only recently has my spell-check stopped correcting me when I fail to capitalize the word “internet,” though it never corrects me when I fail to capitalize “god”! 

A retreat leader once scandalized my progressive theology—you know, the theology that tells you to have the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other during your morning prayers—by observing the omnipresent news cycle hooks us in other people’s stories before we know our own story for the day. And, during a retreat I was leading on finding space in our busy lives to rest in God, a woman had the “aha” moment that she was busy even in her prayers, listing the world’s concerns, as if the whole world were not already in God’s hands! 

Now more than ever, we have the whole world in our hands. And more than ever, we need to step back, take a breath, take moments of Sabbath rest, and resist the temptation to use Eden’s apple or the Silicon Valley’s Apple to be like the gods. 

Yet we are not absolved of responsibility. Now, also more than ever, the internet gives what we do and say the power to transform the world for good or for ill. 

We’ve got the whole world in our hands. If we are God’s, then that should be a comfort rather than a concern.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

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Domestic Baggage Claim

View from our hotel room balcony.

Returning to Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport from a brief holiday, the sign directing us to “Domestic Baggage Claim” prompted me thinking about how difficult it is to claim our “domestic baggage.”

Traveling with Wade kept us mindful of the “domestic baggage” we carry even when on a somewhat “carefree” vacation, away from home responsibilities and routines. We know each other so well: I know not to rush Wade off the plane, as is my wont; he knows my propensity for chatter with him and almost everyone we encounter. (He’s pretty good at that, too, when the fancy strikes him.)

He was attending a business conference in Las Vegas, and I tagged along, cashing in mileage to fly free. While he was attending his meetings and obligatory socials, I hung out with my brother and a friend, who came up from Los Angeles to visit while showing me around yet another city that never sleeps.

I had been to Vegas “accidentally” three times before: driving home to L.A. with fellow seminarians who wanted to stop there for a couple of hours to gamble; on a flight from Hawai’i diverted from a fogged-in LAX to LAS overnight; and finally, there with a group of United Methodists and Presbyterians to protest the nearby nuclear test site—all more than thirty years ago when the city was much less “fa-bu-lous” than it is today.

But this was my first intentional visit to the city, though the draw was traveling with Wade for the first time in years, seeing family, and—I must admit—enjoying the hotel amenities. We also dined at two fine restaurants, and took in one show, Cirque de Soleil’s “Love” featuring Beatles music. We never gambled, not out of principle, just that the slot machines looked too complicated, and we have no particular expertise at card games.

A woman whose language I couldn't even identify

kindly offered to take this photo of Wade and me.

The weather app on my phone said I was in Paradise, but the 110-113 degrees it registered told me I was in quite the other place.

My impression was that Las Vegas is the internet incarnated, with all its distractions, diversions, flashing lights, waving banners, demands for attention, bawdy enticements, noisy promotions. We could watch water fountain shows from our balcony, eat at a Mexican restaurant along the Grand Canal (!) as singing gondoliers guided their gondolas past, witness tourists jump off a 108-story casino or slide in a tube through a shark-infested pool.

I enjoyed nursing a glass of chardonnay in the lobby bar as literally hundreds of passing souls satisfied my appetite for people-watching.

But getting back to my topic of claiming our domestic baggage. Both my brother and sister and I are of an age where we can smile at our separate baggage, our different peccadillos, even sometimes laugh and tease one another about them. Birth order, diverse vocational paths, unique personality traits, disappointments, and achievements, even who we might have voted for in the last election. We may still roll our eyes or take exceptions, but we know we are not going to change the other, nor are we going to change the love we have for one another.

We have been one another’s most penetrating critics and strongest defenders, we have suffered and celebrated at each other’s hands, but we are family. The one thing we can agree on is our love for our parents and their love for us, though we recognize their own limitations and vulnerabilities even as they did ours. (The poet W.H. Auden once wrote of the value of viewing God as parent [“father” in his words], because it suggests our bond with God is indissoluble.)

Awaiting our departure at the Vegas airport, Wade and I started chatting with the restaurant server. As it turned out, she had purposely chosen her son’s name as my mother had, Christopher.  And his middle name is also Roy, as mine is. I told her of another coincidence I had experienced with a Delta rep on my birthday years ago (see my post about it). Her name was Chris, and we shared the same birthdate.

I have a feeling that if we chatted more with one another, strangers would find more and more such coincidences, more things we have in common, as well as more differences to appreciate. In a world and a time when there are those who would divide us, it’s time we claimed our domestic baggage, sharing our personal “stuff."

A Native American woman once began a workshop I attended, saying of indigenous peoples, “When we meet one another for the first time, we try to find out how we are related.” This is a good model for us all, I think.

Jesus might have said, “Who are my mother and brothers and sisters? Those who know their mother and father God’s love for all God’s children.”

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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.  

"Arrogant Autonomy (or) Loving Excentration"

One of the books on my “intend-to-read shelf” after our move is the paleontologist, philosopher, and Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin’s The Future of Man. I’m not sure where or how I acquired it, probably in a used book sale, as its previous owner’s name appears inside the cover. Its title drew me, given our present bleak time politically, as leaders and electorates in various parts of the world challenge my usual optimism.

I haven’t read Teilhard since my youth, though I was happy to discover his insight well represented (with due credit) in one of J. Philip Newell’s books on Celtic Christian thought. In college I believe I read The Phenomenon of Man and am certain I read The Divine Milieu, because I humorously parodied (and analyzed) it in a paper, “The Divine Mildew.” I also attended a conference of the Teilhard de Chardin Society, which promoted his thinking about a future evolution of the human soul.

I recently read that longer lived people tend to challenge themselves physically or mentally, and reading the first essay, “A Note on Progress,” tells me that this book will surely extend my life by a year. As I read and re-read the chapter, I confess my broken knowledge. Yet Teilhard’s erudition is made tenable by exquisite phrasing and enlarging metaphors. It is from this chapter that I take the title of this post.

Neither my two-volume OED nor searching the internet revealed a definition of “excentration.” “Centration” means a focus on one aspect of a situation that neglects other possibly relevant aspects, so I suppose “excentration” means considering all relevant aspects, and given the context, Teilhard is referring to the need to attend to the larger picture of things as they are. “Loving excentration” must mean a compassionate, even altruistic consideration of all things (a philosophic version of public radio’s “All Things Considered”!). Thus it is inclusive and holistic.

As it turns out, I could’ve saved myself this effort by simply checking again J. Philip Newell’s references to Teilhard in his book, Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation, p 103: 

Teilhard coined the concept of excentration as his way of saying that we find our true selves outside of ourselves or that we find our true center in the heart of one another and at the heart of all life. 

“Autonomy” Thomas Merton considered to be the delusion/idol/sin of the modern human being, so “arrogant autonomy” could mean such delusion/idol/sin that unapologetically focuses on me or the self. I believe this could be expressed in everything from personal aggrandizement and personal success to personal salvation. It could also be extended to a tribe, race, nation, or species.

“A Note on Progress” suggests that our present view of a seemingly static reality belies the inexorable flow of evolution, one that has evolved human consciousness but is evolving still as we, through science, become more acutely aware of our place in history and our place in the universe.

“Plato and Augustine are still expressing, through me, the whole extent of their personalities,” Teilhard writes, later extending that understanding to Christ: “Christ, as we know, fulfills Himself gradually through the sum of our individual endeavors.”

At the same time we have become aware that the choices we make “will have repercussions through countless centuries and upon countless human beings,” not to mention “an entire Universe.” That he wrote this in 1920 makes it ever more prescient and prophetic about our own time of globalization, 24/7 news and communication, the internet, and climate change.

I wish that sentiment about repercussions had been included on the opening screen of U.S. voting machines last November.

The professor who introduced me to the writings of Teilhard de Chardin in a course on Process Theology once wryly commented in another context that major thinkers stopped talking of progress after World War II.

But in “A Note on Progress” Teilhard footnotes that progress is not “necessary or infallible” (emphasis his) but rather, “is offered and awaits us, analogous to that which the individual cannot reject without falling into sin and damnation.” And here I don’t think he means damnation at the hands of an angry god, but rather, at our own hands. 

A more realistic and more Christian view shows us Earth evolving towards a state in which Humanity, having come into the full possession of our sphere of action, our strength, our maturity and our unity, will at last have become an adult being; and having reached this apogee of our responsibility and freedom, holding in our hands all our future and all our past, will make the choice between arrogant autonomy and loving excentration.* 

This will be the final choice: revolt or adoration of a world.  And then, by an act which will summarize the toil of centuries, by this act (finally and for the first time completely human), justice will ensue and all things be renewed. 

In other words, we need to grow up, not just individually, but as a species. This, to me, is not just the Christian task, but more broadly, the spiritual quest.

*I have changed “Man” to “Humanity” and “his” to “ours” in this paragraph.

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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.  

Nightmare of the Presidency

Regular readers of this blog know I often have revealing dreams, but I have never had the audacity to dream of myself in the Oval Office. Yet last night, in one of those waking moments that come around three in the morning for us older members of “the tribe” who were to rise, tend to the campfire, and keep watch for lions and tigers and bears in olden times, I began to consider what a nightmare it would be to find myself elected president.

The occasion was my careful announcement to my Facebook friends of the candidate I support for the presidency. Given Georgia’s and other primaries this week, the timing seemed relevant.  I say “careful,” because I chose a few words to support my candidate without overtly disparaging another’s choice. I was a little apprehensive about doing so, as we all know that the internet and Facebook can be a minefield, especially when sharing political views.

I received over 200 likes and over 50 comments, mostly supportive. A few expressed surprise, offering an alternative candidate. But the harshest comment came not from another political party, but from my own political framework. Someone asked how I could be a Christian and support this candidate, and said I must have been duped by the candidate’s “propaganda.”

Recent studies have suggested that political polarization is caused less by disagreement than by our failure to believe our opponents’ intentions are good, or at least justified or reasonable. This is the beam in my own eye that I stumble over when faced with my differences with the opposing political party. Now, I may be right in doubting their motivations. But it would seem that someone from my own party and bias might give me credit for making a reasoned choice that might not be theirs.

It makes me think of my biological family that never shied away from political arguments. Often political anger arose out of thinking that a family member I love would not be making such a stupid or heartless choice! In a perverse way, our political ire showed our deep respect for the person’s intelligence and moral compass.

Maybe the same thing is happening within the various “tribes” we belong to, whether a church, political party, circle of friends, or a nation as a whole. Maybe we think our better natures should make us all come out on the same page.

All of this is to say that at 3 a.m. I realized that to become president of the United States would be, for me, a nightmare. My tiny Facebook skirmish made me realize how vulnerable, how thin-skinned I can be. This may come as a surprise to those who know my lifetime of struggle for LGBT acceptance in the church, as well as other unpopular justice issues.  But that is a drop in the bucket compared to the struggle of a U.S. President.

If elected, whom could I trust? Could I even trust myself to make the right choices? I can’t imagine being adequately informed about any issue. If blocked, could I confront my challengers? Would I be willing to compromise, and would I compromise too much?

Having never served in the military, what would I do with the imposing and intimidating Joint Chiefs of Staff? And, being a member of a centuries-old marginalized tribe, the LGBT community, how would I or my opponents discern between disagreement and disrespect?

And how would I cope with the outrageous “slings and arrows” that come a president’s way—slights, hurts, attacks, as well as the omnipresent danger of a lunatic wanting to make a life while taking yours.

My inaction as well as my actions could spell catastrophe for huge segments of the world population, let alone the earth’s environment. In some ways, being president is kind of like being God—you can’t really have a day off. And if you’re having a bad day, multitudes may suffer.

Some of you might say, well, this is surprising coming from a minister who speaks for God.  That is the more audacious task, representing God.  But I have never viewed myself “speaking for God.” In my nocturnal reverie, a play I had seen at the tender age of 18 at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum came to mind: the Christopher Isherwood adaptation of the George Bernard Shaw story, “The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search of God.” I have always felt like my writings detail “the adventures of a gay red-headed boy in his search of God.” More on this next week.

It is an awesome task to be “the leader of the free world” or the leader of any nation. That’s why your vote and my vote count so much. We don’t want the presidency to be scarier than it already is.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”

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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.  

iSpirituality

What attracted people to the technology that Steve Jobs fostered through Apple is its seemingly personal nature, from user-friendly “personal” computers such as the iMac, to handheld devices like iPods and iPads and iPhones as well as apps like iTunes —putting “I” first—which stands for both “internet” and “individual.” That could account for the worldwide grief at his death, though books, articles, and films document that he was less than warm and cuddly in person.

I’ve witnessed much wringing of hands, wailing and gnashing of teeth over what this technology will do to us, from our reading habits to our social interactions.

It’s well to remember that once there had been similar angst over the proliferation of books, especially novels! When reading was only for the literate, privileged elite, many were suspicious that widespread and frequent reading made possible by the printing press might be detrimental to readers and social structures alike.

As some today fret over the iHunch, that posture adopted by users of laptops, tablets, and cell phones, I imagine there were similar concerns about those hunched over a book. And what about those hunched over in prayer?

What your mother told you is right, good posture is—well, good! Yoga teaches us that positioning the body in intentional poses is spiritually and physically beneficial. And in meditation, aligning the chakras by sitting or standing up straight is vital for spiritual energy to flow through us.

I’ve written in one of my books on spirituality that Christians have our own “yoga” positions, from kneeling in awe or in penitence to, as the first Christians prayed, arms raised, shoulders back, palms facing out, and head uplifted with eyes opened to the heavens.

Our technological gurus similarly advise an upright posture when using our various internet devices: it makes us more open and receptive, more self-affirming, more gracious.

Of more concern to me is the wrangling over what technology does to our reading habits. When I began my blog, I was warned that most people use the internet for information rather than meditation, but that is also true of how people use books, magazines, newspapers, and other forms of media. Even the Bible has been diminished by those reading it for information rather than inspiration.

For a long time I resisted reading a newspaper in other than in its traditional form, turning its pages as the ink rubbed off on my fingers. But undependable delivery and cheaper costs drove me to a tablet, and frankly, I read much more of the paper this way and a wider breadth of articles than before.

And how I read it is up to me, just as certainly as it is up to you. The “i” in iSpirituality might represent more than “individual” and “internet.” It may stand also for “intentional.”

If I read only for information, without reflection, or read only the “objective” news articles and not the opinion pages and research findings, I am spiritually bereft. If you’ve read this blog for very long, you know how often I reference The New York Times in my posts. News requires as much prayerful thought as scriptures.

That’s true of e-mails, posts, and tweets as well. We’ve probably all had the experience of someone telling us they didn’t receive “that” e-mail, though they have responded to another part of it! They just didn’t spend enough time with it, perhaps failing to scroll down for the complete message.

Henri Nouwen pointed out that the root words of “entertainment” literally mean “to keep between,” that is, in a state of tension. Entertainment is fine, he wrote, but if we live our lives solely for entertainment, we will never be able to rest and reflect. So part of my spiritual discipline is to limit my time on the internet, on Facebook, and on my phone to enjoy uninterrupted silence and have time to pray, meditate, write, and engage with those people and things that are physically present.

And in dealing with a challenging e-mail, I often leave my response in my computer overnight to avoid being reactionary. Nouwen also wrote of the spiritual contrast between heartfelt responding and merely reacting.

Using the “off” switch and the “silent” and “sleep” and “shut down” modes on all our devices can be user-friendly and spiritually beneficial.

Just as the internet and its technology may be made personal, iSpirituality may awaken individuals to the worldwide spiritual internet, helping us see the connection of the personal to the universal, the individual to the international. And by “spiritual” I don’t mean other-worldly, non-physical, or immaterial, for the “i” in iSpirituality could stand for “incarnational” as well.

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.  

"Nothing Soft about the Quest for a Significant Life"

Why I Write This Blog

As we enter this blog’s fifth year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of this year, 2015.

On this week’s fourth anniversary of the beginning of Progressive Christian Reflections, I am reminded that motivations are myriad for doing anything. “What’s my motivation?” actors ask to play a given scene, as if a single motivation suffices for any human action. We are more complex than that! (Read Dostoyevsky!) The reasons I’ve given in the past for writing these reflections still apply, but every week, actually every day, I find new reasons.

Today’s reason is being stunned and stumped by a cover essay in a recent New York Times Book Review entitled “Among the Disrupted” by Leon Wieseltier, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and recently resigned literary editor of The New Republic, which was “disrupted” by a new boss wanting to go digital.

I am stunned by insights I agree with and stumped by things in it I don’t quite understand. I have read it multiple times, each time underlining phrases and sentences that give me an “aha” moment or that I need to puzzle over. If I read it many more times, the whole essay will be underlined. (I can’t read without a pen in hand, btw!) It stirred controversy, judging by letters in response and an article in the Observer.

If I had to summarize it in 25 words or less, it’s about our contemporary confusion of technology with meaning. As the author suggests, “The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.”

Ridiculing “transhumanism,” the notion that computers and the internet “will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity” overcoming distinctions “between human and machine,” Wieseltier instead questions if we are just having another wave of posthumanism: 

The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university, where the humanities are disparaged as soft and impractical and insufficiently new. 

The recently passed Charles Townes, the Nobel laureate physicist behind the maser and laser who was also awarded the 2005 Templeton Prize for contributing to our understanding of spirituality, “saw science and religion as compatible, saying there was little difference between a scientific revelation, like his maser brainstorm, and a religious one,” according to The New York Times. Quoting from a 1966 essay: 

Understanding the order of the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are not very far apart. 

The parallel in my field are those who study, research, and teach religion “objectively” outside any personal faith. We need such “engineers,” as long as we take what they say with a grain of salt, which, as I mentioned quoting Colossians a few weeks ago, means with “spiritual understanding.” Early Christian catechumens were taught the meaning of baptism and the Eucharist only after they had received those sacraments, because it was believed they could not comprehend what they had not first experienced. Spiritual understanding is an inside job.

Wieseltier asserts, “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different.”

We live in an internet world “in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. … Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements.”

Wieseltier’s solution is to “regard the devices as simply new means for old ends. … The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation. … Never mind the platforms. Our solemn responsibility is for the substance.”

His answer is a welcome of humanism and the humanities, concluding, “There is nothing soft about the quest for a significant life.”

I would add a welcome of spirituality and religion, also because there is nothing soft about a quest for a significant life.

Entertaining these concepts and welcoming this conversation are additional reasons I write this blog.

An early post describing initial reasons for writing this blog:

Why Progressive Christians Need Contemplation

Consider visiting the first three blog posts:

Dolphins and Sharks

The Church of Rosacea

The Right Word

Click below for listing of my posts on these additional sites (I am not paid for these, btw.):

Huffington Post

Progressive Christianity.org

BelieveOutLoud

The seven most visited posts on this blog:

(Numbers do not include subscribers and followers, currently nearly 500.)

The Magic Kingdom (1189)

What I Don’t Believe, What I Do Believe (1014)

A Pragmatic Guide to Prayer (957)

Jesus: Introvert or Extrovert? (941)

“Faggot”Jesus (886)

My Loneliness Led Me to God (766)

Put Yourself in the Nativity Story (702)

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Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

During recess in the second grade, my friend Mary and I enjoyed swinging as high as we could on the swing set, singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” It’s a great song of comfort, basically affirming that, no matter what, God is holding us. Note the song doesn’t say God is in control, just that God is there for us. And I still believe that.

These days we have a better grip on what it means for God to hold the whole world because we have the internet and a 24/7 news cycle. Now we too have the whole world in our hands every time we log on.

The narrator in my as-yet-unpublished mystery novel so reveres the internet that, just as many of us only visit God on Sunday mornings, he only visits the internet on Saturday mornings. Comparing it to touching the forbidden Mt. Sinai, he drolly writes:

The internet is such an awesome god—so extensive we can only glimpse a part of it, so powerful that it has crashed many a computer, so desirous that many humans and their marriages have been sacrificed on its local altars. Okay, I’m a little over the top here, but it’s an amusing analogy, don’t you think? My point is, like any powerful and overwhelming god, the internet must be approached guardedly, with respect, on appointed days and at appointed times, lest we take it for granted (as if our computers are always up) or believe we can domesticate it (making it entirely user-friendly). Just as the ancient monastics limited human intercourse of all kinds, even so, those of us who practice an ascetic lifestyle must limit our intercourse with the internet, lest it lead us into idolatry or distract us from reality. To switch mythological metaphors, the internet is the Medusa’s head of our time, a face whose tresses are cables rather than snakes, but still able to turn men to stone.

Demonstrating a similar reverence, only recently has my spell-check stopped correcting me when I fail to capitalize the word “internet,” though it never corrects me when I fail to capitalize “god”!

A retreat leader once scandalized my progressive theology—you know, the theology that tells you to have the Bible in one hand and The New York Times in the other during your morning prayers—by observing that the omnipresent news cycle hooks us in other people’s stories before we know our own story for the day. And, during a retreat I was leading on finding space in our busy lives to rest in God, a woman had the “aha” moment that she was busy even in her prayers, listing the world’s concerns, as if the whole world were not already in God’s hands!

Now more than ever, we have the whole world in our hands. And more than ever, we need to step back, take a breath, take moments of Sabbath rest, and resist the temptation to use Eden’s apple or the Silicon Valley’s Apple to be like the gods.

Yet we are not absolved of responsibility. Now, also more than ever, the internet gives what we do and say the power to transform the world for good or for ill.

We’ve got the whole world in our hands. If we are God’s, then that should be a comfort rather than a concern.