Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: Jesuit

Showing posts with label Jesuit. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

What Is Your Golden Record?

Equinox full moon rising behind the haze in New Mexico.

Photo by my friend Trudie Barreras. Used by permisson.

On this week’s 50^th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, I invite us to consider, what are we—you and I—putting “out there” in the universe?

Week before last Wade and I were fascinated watching The Farthest, a documentary about Voyager I and II, still travelling through interstellar space with a “golden record” intended to depict earth and its inhabitants to extraterrestrial sentient beings. It’s amazingly diverse—amazing given the seeming narrowness of our vision these days. It includes audio greetings in more than 50 languages, a variety of musical offerings, and pictures of numerous plants, animals, places and actions to give the recipient a sense of life on Earth.

And I thought of each of us, what would our golden records be? What would we put out into the universe to represent our individual and communal lives? How would we summarize our life experience in images and words, tastes and aromas, touches and sounds, thoughts and feelings?

I considered St. Ignatius’s self Examen as a possible process to choose what best represents our individual experiences and choices, particularly Jesuit Anthony de Mello’s accessible Testament. Briefer still is my adaptation of his effort for a contemplative retreat, which I share with you in hopes you find these prompts useful in articulating what might be on your golden record:

1.These experiences I have cherished:

2.These ideas have brought me liberation:

3.These beliefs I have outgrown:

4.These convictions I have lived by:

5.These are the things I have lived for:

Numbers 1 and 5 could include images as well as words, though, with a little imagination, images could be included in any category. For example, liberation could have been felt hang-gliding, and conviction could have been the result of a baby’s smile. Outgrown beliefs could be pictured in a stack of books.

Another thought that came to me is that personally, my whole life could be summed up in the mantra that Jesus spoke to Lazarus: “Come out!” Come out of the closet, come to life, come out of your fear, come out of other’s expectations and even your own, come out of shame, come out of “resting in peace,” come out of isolationism, come out of narrow concepts and beliefs, come out and join the party, help the neighbor, enjoy abundant life!

So what is your life’s mantra(s)? And what are the contents of your golden record that you are putting out to the universe?

Only a handful of us may land on the moon. More vitally, all of us have landed on this oasis named Earth. So the question is, to what purpose, to what pleasure, to what hope, to what love?

The link on The Farthest is to the original trailer on PBS. For info on its present venue on Netflix, go to: https://www.netflix.com/title/80204377. It is also available on Amazon Prime. (I receive no remuneration for these links!)

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Wednesday, February 1, 2017

You Can Walk through a Storm

There’s a wonderful biblical story about the disciples seeing Jesus strolling on a stormy Sea of Galilee. Peter decides to join him, only to falter, frightened by the strong wind, and begins to sink. He cries to Jesus, “Lord, save me!” Jesus comes to the rescue, chiding him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

I was helping with a spiritual formation course on discernment the week of the U.S. election. The morning after, sensing the downcast feelings of many if not most of us, instructor Marjorie Thompson (Soul Feast) began the class with a rhetorical question, “Does God still reign?” As I recall, she repeated it a couple of times for emphasis, smiling. “Does God still reign?” To the participants, however we felt about the election results, the answer was obvious. Yes, of course, God still reigns.

It reminded me of a visit to the Capitol Hill office of Mary Jane Patterson, the Presbyterian Church lobbyist in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan presidency. An African American longtime activist on behalf of all kinds of progressive causes, the plaque prominently displayed on her desk grabbed my attention, “This too shall pass.” My inquiry about it brought a mischievous smile and a twinkle of an eye to her face, and without a word, she communicated her hope about future administrations.

Teilhard de Chardin, whose essay “A Note on Progress” was the subject of my post last week, did not come to his faith in the future in a storm-free place, but rather, as a stretcher bearer in the trenches of World War I. In Christ of the Celts, J. Philip Newell reminded me of that:

As Teilhard wrote after the harrowing Battle of Ypres in 1915, “More than ever I believe that life is beautiful.” … As he agonized over what was happening between the nations and personally despaired about the direction of the world, he heard himself being addressed by Christ, “Ego sum, noli timere (It is I, be not afraid).”

These were the words the disciples heard when they witnessed Jesus walking on the waters of the storm on Galilee, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Fellow Jesuit scholar John McNeill (The Church and the Homosexual) experienced Christ also in the battlefields, that of World War II. As I wrote on this blog on the occasion of his death:

Being silenced by the church and then ousted from the Jesuits gave him the opportunity to fulfill a greater calling than he originally anticipated when, as a starving prisoner of war during WW II, a slave laborer, at risk of death from a vigilant SS guard, tossed him a potato, making the sign of the cross. John dated his priesthood from the moment of that courageous and compassionate act.

During the spiritual formation course on discernment, a participant came to me, her fear palpable, wondering what the election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence could mean for her and her partner. I had met this couple when they attended my course on Henri Nouwen earlier in the fall. I tried to assure her, but I’ve found similar apprehension among all kinds of people, even among likely Trump voters, who fear what this administration bodes for us.

It deeply troubles me how my hopes and so many others’ hopes in the future have been dashed.

“You’ll Never Walk Alone,” was my high school principal’s favorite song, and, with the school choir, The Chanters, I would sing it with passion and pride whenever we performed it for him. James B. Taylor, an African American, was very popular with students, faculty, and parents, but had been prevented from buying a home for his family in the neighborhoods surrounding the school, and this was in “liberal” California in the 1960s!

“When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein song from Carousel begins, and “though your dreams be tossed and blown,” concludes with the assurance, “You’ll never walk alone.”

“Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

“Does God still reign?”

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Wednesday, November 25, 2015

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.

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