Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: John of the Cross

Showing posts with label John of the Cross. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Armchair Contemplatives

Mount Shasta photo by Bill Buchanan.

Bill and Ruth are regular readers of this blog.

At the end of Book One of The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross, I wrote, “I don’t like his God.” What I felt is that his God is incredibly demanding, and I found myself yearning for the homeliness of Evelyn Underhill’s God in her two-level House of the Soul.

But then it occurred to me that Juan de la Cruz’s book could be compared to a manual on how to climb Mt. Everest. To do that requires demanding training, sacrifice and investment. It’s not God who’s “demanding,” any more than it is Mt. Everest that’s demanding. What’s demanding are efforts to scale seeming insurmountable heights.

I’d rather see Mt. Everest from a distance than from the top. I guess the same goes for my preferences of seeing God. Ninety-nine+ percent of the Hebrews saw Mt. Sinai from the plain. Only Moses ascended to commune with Yahweh, sovereign of the universe.* And we have his testimony of what God calls us to be and do, along with the testimonies of all the prophetic mystics of every age, of every faith and culture.

With many of you, I am content to remain an armchair contemplative. I am grateful for the stories and writings of saints, contemplatives, mystics, and spiritual authors. The spiritual horizons they offer inform and inspire our own spiritual quests. “Success” is not my spiritual objective; in fact, I don’t consider success a spiritual objective, period.

I’ve written elsewhere that a sense of “having arrived” is when we may be in the most spiritual danger. John of the Cross understood this; he warns that such folk judge others as the boastful Pharisee contrasting himself with the Publican sinner. John writes that it may be best that God not free such people from their imperfections, despite their petitions, lest they “wax haughtier in their pride.”

So I guess I should thank God for my imperfections!

John of the Cross is the first to admit that the purgation of dark nights, first of the senses and second of the intellect, does not “earn” God’s companionship. Rather it allows God’s ever-present, unyielding love to touch us, to infuse our souls.

As I move into Book Two of Dark Night, however, I resist John’s supposition that he is sufficiently purged as well as his original premise of purging the sensual and the intellectual.

Moses first encountered I AM in a lowly desert shrub that was burning and yet unconsumed. Jacob physically wrestled with God in the middle of the night. Ruth embraced Yahweh in her fidelity to Naomi. Elijah heard God in a “sound of gentle stillness.” Hannah’s fervent prayers to get pregnant were answered. God blessed Solomon with wisdom at his request. Jewish faith has been traditioned in teaching and chavrusa, debating the meaning of sacred texts in small groups or partnerships.

Mary experienced birth pangs to give rise to a refreshing renewal of the faith of Abraham and Sarah. Jesus prayed in lonely places and was sought out for his healing touch and compassionate wisdom. The Christian story is that God has been embodied in Jesus himself, whose Spirit inspires and empowers his followers. And Christians believe themselves to be members of the Body of Christ, which cannot say to the head or the hand, the intellect or the senses, “I have no need of you.”

John of the Cross’s spirituality appears to be, to me at least, more a product of Hellenistic dualism than of the Bible. Though his concept of letting go of all that is not God is admirable, I myself find everything good is of God.

Four decades ago, an elderly gay Roman Catholic priest visited the congregation I was serving and joined us for brunch afterward. He told us he first learned of God as a child on his grandmother’s knee, and though he grew up learning and studying a harsher and more demanding God, he now, in retirement, was welcoming a gentler understanding of a “grandmother God.”

Related Post: My Dark Night of the Soul

*Moses was accompanied part way by others and further by Joshua but only Moses entered Yahweh’s cloud at the summit as described in Exodus 24.

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Wednesday, August 7, 2019

"Hey Kids! Look at the Too-lah! Look at the Too-lah!"

Wade looking at the Indian Ocean along

Plettenberg Bay, South Africa, last summer. (crg)

On a recent visit with my family of origin, I heard the usual stories rolled out by my older siblings, putting me in my proper place as the “baby of the family.” One sibling surprised me by a new take on an old story. Being the youngest, I sat in the front seat of our old Hudson with our parents on a cross-country drive, apparently considered a privileged position by my sister and brother. At one point, given my vantage point, I saw a body of water and turned to them in the back seat, exclaiming excitedly, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!” We long ago decided that “too-lah” must have come from the word “toilet,” then my only frame of reference for a body of water.

On this telling, however, one of my siblings added the word “condescendingly”—that I had “condescendingly” turned to them to announce this wonder. Miffed, I replied, “How can a toddler be condescending?” My other sibling had a different interpretation, that I was simply imitating the tone my parents took to convey something exciting to us kids.

This story came to me as I am currently reading The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. A bookmark not many pages in reminds me I’ve tried to read it before. In the past I’ve made the common mistake of understanding “dark night” as simply a period of suffering externally imposed, but, at the same time, it is a spiritual practice detaching ourselves from anything that is not God (including moving beyond our mental images of God “to the state of the progressives”), while welcoming God’s transforming love of our souls. At least, that’s one way of putting it.

One by one and day by day, as I read the sins or “imperfections” that may come with the spiritual life, I am realizing that I am guilty of each one of them. The first listed is pride, how the contemplative novice may be so excited by what she or he is learning that they prematurely become spiritual teachers rather than doers. That very nearly silenced me as a writer of these “progressive Christian reflections,” much as reading and writing about Zen Masters in recent years almost nudged me to enter their silence.

I realized that my readers may be enduring what my siblings did when I was a child, hearing, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!” I get so excited by what I’m learning, if not always practicing, that I want to write about it.

I overheard a monk acerbically say of spiritual author Henri Nouwen, “I wish he would stop writing about wanting to pray and just pray!” In his book, Reaching Out, Henri offered a kind of defense, which I’ve quoted before:

I found some consolation and encouragement in the words of one of the most stern ascetics, the seventh-century John of the Ladder, who lived for forty years a solitary life at Mount Sinai. In his chapter on discernment, step 26 of his spiritual ladder, he writes: “If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach…For perhaps, being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach.”

A half century ago I visited a progressive Baptist congregation whose pastor offered a good job description of his work. Along with other ministerial responsibilities, he was given time to explore theology and spirituality on behalf of the congregation and share those insights from the pulpit.

So, even if I may not have the exact word for God or the exact words or best practices for the spiritual life, I can still lean over the front seat of the Hudson and shout excitedly to all of you, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!”

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Wednesday, July 31, 2019

An Unfinished Dream

Tunnel on an unfinished portion of the Atlanta Beltline. (crg)

The other morning I was awakened from a dream that I very much wanted to finish. I tried to go back to sleep just to see its outcome, but it was lost to me.

This is no artifice, as Coleridge claimed of his poem “Kubla Khan,” to fit the Romantic Age virtue of being unfinished, when, in truth, the poem about Xanadu’s “pleasure dome” in a “holy and enchanted place” and drinking “the milk of Paradise” is considered complete. It too came to him in a dream that was partly lost when he was interrupted capturing it in words.

In my dream, a young printer, with a magician’s dark moustache and goatee and flair, intended to introduce me to a new book. I explained I loved the excitement of beginning a book I really wanted to read: I told him I like the stiff, virgin feel of cracking a book open, covers resistant and pages clinging to one another. I mentioned that a writer friend would smell the binding of each of his new books, and that I now pay attention, not only to how a new book feels in my hands and looks to my eyes, but what aroma wafts my way from its binding glue.

Smiling in anticipation of his revelation, he showed me a tiny hardbound book, enclosed in plastic, as he delicately reached for the tab that would zip open its packaging, like those found on hard plastic grocery produce containers.

The title of the book was The Cracked Turban, and I understood it exposed the far-right’s mistaken notions about Islam. Obviously “cracked turban” was a metaphor, as a turban is made of cloth, but probably meant to reveal how very far from reality Islamophobia is.

The mysterious printer told me something equivalent to “This is going to knock your socks off!” I expected an extraordinary aroma when the airtight package was opened, not to mention my hope for an intriguing book that would be a pleasure to read and to have.

Then I woke up.

I so wanted to know what was going to happen next!

On my walk that morning and during my morning prayers, I struggled to understand its meaning. Now, I subscribe to the relatively recent theory of dream interpretation that parts of a dream are the result of randomly firing neurons, and its meaning lies less in its parts than in how your brain builds a narrative from them.

Wade and I have had death on our minds as his 83-year-old mother struggles with her health. On my walk I thought how life is an unfinished dream, and how death might be a much anticipated and intriguing book that each of us will open.

I am reading Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross in my morning prayers, and his emphasis on our soul’s need to be free of our senses to unite with God immensely bothers me. Obviously, my sense-ability about wanting to smell, see, and handle the mysterious book in the dream demonstrates I still embrace my Zorba-esque “pagan” desires as a necessary part of my spirituality. With many body theologians, I believe God and/or the sacred is to be found in our bodily experiences. Judaism and Christianity are both, in different senses and in my view, incarnational.

But I believe that incarnational theology might lend itself too readily toward materialism and even idolatry, both societal demons Muhammad wanted to drive out in establishing Islam.

Clearly the dream represents my political bias and political passion: to welcome the very people the alt-right wants to purge.

And also clearly, the magician-like appearance of the book’s printer and mysterious nature of the book’s packaging, size, and promise shows my reverence for books, no matter how “small.” Note it was a printer, not a publisher, who wanted to show me the book. Having once worked in a print shop, I respect the craft and toil of producing printed material.

Producing, handling, and honoring “hard copy” could be another example of incarnational theology. Islam respects Jews and Christians for being “people of The Book.”

An afterthought comes to me. Before I encountered the printer, eager to show me an exciting new book, a female archivist came to me in my dream and offered to help me organize my papers (and this has happened in real life—someone in our church). It’s telling that my narrative jumps eagerly onward to the introduction of a new book to enjoy.

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