You're Gonna Need a Bigger God!

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat!” Actor Roy Scheider’s ad-libbed advice in the 1975 film Jaws came when its human protagonists first saw the size of the shark they were up against.

I waited till the end of the summer of its release before seeing the movie; I didn’t want to be afraid to go to the beach! That August I watched it in a crowded Philadelphia theater with two friends, both Roman Catholic priests. When a severed head popped into view through a gash in the underwater hull of a boat, one of my friends let out a scream that sent waves of screams and shouts in the rows in front of us and behind us. One of those behind us popped the head of my other friend with his finger, saying, “Don’t do that, man!” I caused a similar stir when I greeted fellow seminarians watching it in a New Haven theater a few weeks later: they leapt in their seats.

Perversely, perhaps, I thought of this as I finished reading Julian of Norwich’s mystical writings. Her God is so much bigger than most, with a love that preexisted all that is loved and flows to all eternity. No wonder she approaches her visions with “reverent fear,” what we might call “awe.”

“You’re gonna need a bigger God!”

My big “ah-hah,” my own revelation as I finished contemplating Julian’s Revelations is that we cannot know God. The whole of the Bible and church tradition is but a glimpse or glimmer or even a shadow of divinity. Using pronouns and metaphors or equating God with Jesus limits our ability to recognize our profound ignorance.

“Duh,” you might say, “But of course!” I might have said exactly that had I not felt our unknowing so deeply.

Paradoxically, that’s what the Bible is all about: our infinitesimal, limited view of God.

Jacob wrestling with the mysterious Stranger. Sarah laughing at her Guest’s promise of a child. The Voice from the burning bush, refusing to be named, declaring “I will be what I will be.”

On Mt. Sinai, Yahweh holding a hand over Moses’s eyes while passing by, with Moses glimpsing only the afterglow. Elijah hearing simply “the sound of a gentle stillness” or “a still, small voice.”

The Dove at Jesus’ baptism. Jesus proclaiming an invisible Reign of God through homely, puzzling parables and countercultural beatitudes and teachings. The enigmatic Cross. Jesus’ Easter message to Mary, “Do not hold on to me.” Seeing in a mirror dimly.

How, then, can we know, in the words of 1 John, that “God is love”?

It really is a matter of faith to affirm cosmic or divine benevolence. Yet life and love, pleasure and joy, wisdom and compassion have come to be, surely clues to the yearning of the universe or of divinity. Small wonder that Julian concludes that our part is “thanking, trusting, rejoicing,” three dimensions of a contemplative life.

Earlier that week I had read an article about the science of all this that pointed out: 

If a number called alpha, which governs the strength of electromagnetism, were infinitesimally larger or smaller, stars could not have formed, leaving a lifeless void. … Other values, like the mass of the Higgs [boson], or the strength of the force that binds together the cores of atoms, appear to be just as finely tuned. Bump the dials just barely, and nothing like our universe could exist. 

If that doesn’t give rise to reverent fear, doesn’t send you to your knees or to a house of worship, I’m not sure what will.

My June sermon for New York’s Fort Washington Collegiate Church is now available at this link: “When God’s Will and Human Will Coincide.”

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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.  

Something Divinely Providential about Our Deaths

I think we got off on the wrong foot, believing that death came into the world because of sin. If there is something divinely providential about our lives, there must be something divinely providential about our deaths. In the language of the previous post, “The Universe in Your Soul,” the cosmos that begat life must have also begat death.

This insight, this revelation, came to me as clear as day while reading Julian of Norwich’s Revelations one morning. And it gave me great peace, and dare I say, bliss. I felt as I imagine C. S. Lewis’s wife did when she was “surprised by joy.”

Was it something Julian said? Probably, but not directly. The idea welled up in me as she described our yearning to see the face of God, though I don’t assume as she does that death provides that experience. Neither do I reject that hope. After all, if we can imagine an infinite multiverse, who knows what death may bring?

I believe that whatever death means, it is intended as providentially as our lives.  It is part of the natural order of things or the divine order of things, however one chooses to view it.

“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done” in death as in life. “In life and in death we belong to God.”

Because we resist death, and our deaths in particular, as part of life, we view death as a kind of failure rather than an accomplishment or completion. It is not only the medical profession that suffers this. Because long ago death was associated with sin, even those who don’t think much about sin may search obituaries for self-inflicted causes, even if it’s simply to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I wrote a sonnet to a friend in college that rather romantically compared our life cycle with that of alpine wildflowers, ending with the couplet:

And then someday we’ll lose compose

While out of us, another grows.

Even then I wanted to be buried straight into the ground, recycled, as it were, into the earth, and into other forms of life.

But recycling has other expressions. 

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit,” Jesus said.

Having sold only two paintings in his lifetime, Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, “Life is only a kind of sowing time; the harvest is not here.”

Echoing this, Henri Nouwen spoke of the “fruitfulness of our lives” that may only be realized after our brief lifespans.

In one of her letters of spiritual direction, Evelyn Underhill wrote, “No one, not even the greatest saint, is irreplaceable. It is a greater act of trust and love to give your work into fresh hands…”

Finally, it takes an artist like Van Gogh seeing death as if for the first time to observe: 

It certainly is a strange phenomenon that all the artists, poets, musicians, painters, are unfortunate in material things…  That brings up again the eternal question: is the whole of life visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side [of] death we see one hemisphere only? 

Painters—to take them only—dead and buried, speak to the next generation or to several succeeding generations through their work.

Is that all, or is there more besides? In a painter’s life death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is.

For my own part, I declare I know nothing whatever about it, but to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this, that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train. 

So it seems to me possible that cholera, gravel, phthisis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion, just as steamboats, omnibuses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. 

My preference would be to go there on foot, but regardless of how I get there, I hope to trust the benevolent providence of God and the universe. They’ve been doing life and death much, much longer and better than I have.

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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.  

The Universe in Your Soul

With a title like “The Universe in Your Soul” you might think I’ve gone New Age or motivational, but this idea came to me while reading the medieval Christian recluse Julian of Norwich, whose “Showings” or “Revelations” (the first book written in English by a woman) I’ve been contemplating for several months during my morning prayers. She writes: 

And then our Lord opened my spiritual eye and showed me my soul in the midst of my inner self. I saw my soul as large as if it were an endless world… 

Translator Father John-Julian, OJN offers other versions and translations of her Middle English as possibilities for “endless world,” but concludes that “Julian is trying to convey the idea of limitless space within her soul.” Julian views the soul as both body and spirit, much as the ancient Hebrews and first Christians did, and that God is “the means by which our sensuality and our essence are held together.”

When she speaks of her soul, she means our souls as well. That captures my imagination. It occurs to me that our souls are the progeny of a universe expanding not only beyond itself, but also within ourselves—not only outwardly, but inwardly.

Being, life itself, is how the universe is reaching beyond matter and gasses, energy and dark matter, to comprehend itself, to communicate, and to contemplate the wonder of it all. (Scientific contemplation is helping us also understand how “lively” matter is, even before life emerges.)

For Julian, this is not just humanity, but all living things. And, she observes, it’s in this “being” that God is to be found, making me think of Paul Tillich’s notion of God as “the Ground of Being.”

She has a high view of human beings, in sharp contrast to “the typical medieval stance (or the Puritan and Calvinist attitudes),” to quote her translator. She observes: 

For I saw in the same showing that if the blessed Trinity could have made [humanity’s] soul any better, any more beautiful, any nobler than it was made, [God] would not have been wholly pleased with the creation of [the human] soul. 

And that’s why God chooses to dwell in our souls. I flash on Etty Hillesum’s understanding of God as her “deepest and richest” self—in the words of 12-Step, our “higher power.”

For Julian, “the Fall” is a human stumbling into a hole, requiring compassion and help getting out. As I’ve written in a previous post, she doesn’t believe that God blames us for sin, but feels empathy for the trouble and suffering it causes us. Sin is “nothing” and “unnatural” for us, making me think of Karl Barth’s notion of sin as “the impossible possibility.”

And she embraces the “felix culpa,” the “fortunate sin” that makes possible the Incarnation as well as our individual realizations of vulnerability, though I prefer Hildegard of Bingen’s notion that the Incarnation was intended from the beginning; indeed, I would say the Incarnation is a teaching moment to reveal God’s incarnation in all life.

And our “dearworthy Mother” Jesus, “if we fall, quickly…raises us by [a] loving embracing and merciful touching.”

God knows we could all use more “merciful touching”! Julian writes: 

As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother. 

And what [God] showed in all the showings… particularly in those sweet words where [God] says: … 

“I am the supreme goodness of all manner of things.

I am what causes thee to love.

I am what cause thee to yearn.

It is I: the endless fulfilling of all true desires.”

We do not invite so much as observe the presence of God, Jesus, and the Spirit in our souls, central to our interior “endless world and…blessed kingdom.”

And, as if all of this were not enough, Julian asserts: 

It is God’s will that I see myself just as much bound to [God] in love as if [God] had done all that [God] has done just for me. 

And thus should every soul think in regard to [God’s] Love: that is to say, the love of God creates in us such a unity that when it is truly understood, no [one] can separate [oneself] from any other. 

As I contemplate this insight of an “endless world,” this universe inside me, I am struck with awe and a sense of tremendous responsibility. A recent study indicates that awe is directly related to an ability to care for others. A current book, The Spiritual Child by Lisa Miller, argues “that spiritual awareness is innate and that it is an important component in human development,” in the words of columnist David Brooks.

This further insight from Julian I find transforming the more I consider it: 

And thus I understand truly that our soul can never have rest in things that are beneath itself. 

Reminiscent, as John-Julian observes, of Augustine’s famous saying that “our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you, O God.” It makes me consider all the things with which I occupy my life that are “beneath” my soul. 

And the soul that thus contemplates [this delightful sight] makes itself to be like [God] who is contemplated, and ones itself in rest and peace by [God’s] grace. 

Even for those who may not believe in God, contemplating the universe within that is the culmination of a billions-year-old universe may inspire awe and make us sensible to the value of our lives and the lives of others. 

Click here for other posts about Julian of Norwich.

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

Readers are this blog’s only means of support. To donate, please click here or mail to Metropolitan Community Churches, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. 

Thank you!

Misplaced Devotion?

Our nearly sixteen-year-old dog, Hobbes, has been going through a rough patch of aging for the past two months. I know she will die, just as I will, but the process is fraught with stress and uncertainty, save the final outcome. She refuses her normal food, prompting Wade and me to improvise meals that are inviting yet bland enough not to upset her system. Her intestinal discomfort and its manifestations have led to disruption of our daytime schedules and our night’s sleep, as well as requiring energy in cleaning up everything from bedding to floors, so all three of us are very fatigued.

We have become practicing if not exactly believing Buddhists: Hobbes moves very slowly these days, mindfully taking each step, as in a walking meditation. Wade and I mindfully attend every morsel of food she either takes or rejects, as well as being mindful of her other bodily functions or lack thereof.

An ultrasound has revealed a mass on the liver, probably cancer, but she is too old to safely survive surgery (assuming we could afford it). The morning I write this, she steadfastly refuses even to taste her freshly cooked morning meal.

That’s the background of sitting down for our morning prayers (Hobbes likes to join me on the deck.) and reading more of Julian of Norwich’s contemplation of Jesus and God.  I will soon have a post finished that does Julian justice, but today I became the rebellious reformer. Today it felt like her devotion is misplaced: Jesus does not need us to contemplate him, nor does God or the Trinity. There are people and species and ecosystems in my New York Times who are the ones in real need of our devotion. Them and our poor dog, which I immediately feel guilty comparing.

So I pulled out my John Leith, Introduction to the Reformed Tradition. I know, he  wasn’t exactly a progressive in most people’s eyes, but he seems more progressive than most conservatives these days. I wanted to remind myself of the Reformers’ reservations about contemplation.

Thomas Aquinas asserted, “[A human being's] ultimate felicity consists only in the contemplation of God.”

But Calvinist theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote: 

To call the vision [a human being’s] greatest good is to make contemplation, however prepared for by activity and however issuing in action, the final end of life; to put the sovereignty of God in the first place is to make obedient activity superior to contemplation, however much of theoria is necessary to action. The principle of vision suggests that the perfection of the object seen is loved above all else; the principle of the kingdom indicates that the reality and power of the being commanding obedience are primarily regarded. 

In other words, “Faith without works is dead.” Or, more bluntly, do we contemplate our navels and do nothing to help the world?

Julian, however, might take issue with this view of contemplation. Her idea seems to be that we become what we contemplate, that we are “oned” with God, a transformation that leads us to compassionate action. Such action then is not mere obedience; rather, it comes as a heartfelt expression of who we are, oned with God. Talk about at-one-ment!

I can’t see how compassion comes from obedience; it must come from transformation in the presence of absolute, all-embracing love.

Hobbes and Wade and I are cases in point: we have tamed and transformed the beast in one another by our love, loyalty, and actions. That’s what spiritual community is all about.

“What the world needs now…” is contemplation of the God of love.

I’ll be in New York City this weekend, June 5-7 at Fort Washington Collegiate Church leading two Saturday workshops, “Sex & the Body of Christ,” and “Coming Out as Sacrament,” and preaching on “Your Will Be Done” from the Lord’s Prayer during the 10:45 Sunday morning worship. For details, click here.

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

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or mailing to Metropolitan Community Churches, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

"Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise"

Jesus’ Seven Last Words, sayings offered from the cross, may serve as guidance for the spiritual life. You are invited to contemplate each saying during the seven Wednesdays of Lent and Holy Week.

“Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom,” sings the Taizé chant. I often sing it as I drive to events in which this introvert is called upon to be an extrovert, this writer expected to speak or lead or counsel. It calms me, but it also reminds me who and what my work is all about. I believe I’m better at “selling” Jesus than myself. And God knows I have more inspiration to do so.

Of course “Jesus, remember me etc.” are the words of the “good” criminal who challenges the one who mocks Jesus as all three are crucified together. Jesus responds, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” What a comfort to hear this straight from Jesus!

But none of us have to be on a cross to hear these words. We could just be having a bad day. We could even be having a good day. Paradise is available in the here and now, not just the sky by and by.

“I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me,” the writer of Revelation  hears Jesus saying. This is a mystic’s vision. This was also the experience of everyday disciples on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion.

Theologian Karl Rahner famously said that the Christian of the future will need to be a mystic. Being a mystic, then, is not “above our pay grade.”

To see beyond Jesus’ suffering, just as to see beyond our own, a hopeful vision is required. For the early Christians, that hopeful vision was to view Jesus’ sacrifice replacing the need for animal sacrifice, just as child sacrifice was replaced by animal sacrifice in the story of Abraham and Isaac.

Though these visions may not inspire us today, both could be considered theological advances of their eras. I explained this in detail in Coming Out as Sacrament. I also explained that both Roman and Jewish legal cultures of Jesus’ time expected a transgressor to offer some kind of expiation or sacrifice to make things right. This is the context for the understanding that Jesus served as that expiation.

Julian of Norwich believed that sin and evil had no “essence,” and that, rather than blaming us for sin, God pitied us for the pain it causes us.

Several times on this blog I’ve mentioned the crucifixion arousing in us that which at-ones us with God: compassion. Reading Julian I realize that the cross is equally an emblem of God’s compassion.

Contemplating a crucifix, she observes, “Thus I saw how Christ has compassion for us because of sin.” Translator Father John-Julian paraphrases Julian, “Christ en-joys the Passion, that is, submerges it in and converts it into joy.”

The cross represents a God who is sacrificially forgiving in reconciling the world.

Last week this blog reflected on Jesus’ first words from the cross, according to tradition, “forgive them for they know not what they do.”

In the case of the one crucified alongside Jesus asking to be remembered, Jesus goes beyond forgiveness to welcome him into his kingdom. That can happen for each of us in this moment. And how differently we will live, now that we are in paradise.

For those who would like daily readings for this week of Lent, click here and scroll down to the end of “Spiritual Stretching.”

I will be speaking this coming Sunday, Mar. 1, at the Georgia Mountains Unitarian Universalist Church 11 a.m. service in Dahlonega, GA, followed by a free workshop on the mystic Evelyn Underhill, “Becoming What We Behold.”

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

This 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 2015.

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

"All that Is Less than God Is Not Enough for Us"

The morning I write this, religion is all over the morning paper, and not in a good way. Muslim extremists cast a shadow over Islam and the world, French Jews feel unsafe and are considering emigrating to Israel, Mormons are threatening to excommunicate yet another church member who supports ordaining women and same-sex marriage, Scientology has a full page ad decrying an upcoming HBO documentary with a story in the business section describing the controversy, and Duke University withdraws support for Islamic calls to prayer from their chapel tower due to threats. The only positive religious story is Pope Francis visiting the Philippines.

I felt so overwhelmed I couldn’t imagine writing another post for this blog as I intended. My work here seems so inconsequential.

But then I continued reading The Complete Julian of Norwich, a new book and translation by Father John-Julian, OJN, and specifically the 14^th century Dame Julian’s “showings,” the Middle English word for “revelations.” She lived and wrote confined by choice in a one-room anchor-hold which was about the size of my office, and yet she speaks to me and countless others seven centuries later. Her era like our own looked for a personal experience of the sacred.

The past few days I’ve been dawdling over a couple of sections, each about the length of a blogpost, which have profoundly moved me, prompting me to read them again and again. Though I could never hope to write with such authority, I can unapologetically offer readers the insights of this contemplative and mystic.

In one of her “showings,” God holds up something about the size of a hazel nut, explaining, “It is all that is made.” You may grimace at the stretch, but my mind went immediately to the cosmic marble that exploded into the multiverse; in others words, the Big Bang.

She continues, “In this little thing I saw three characteristics: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third, that God keeps it. But what did I observe in that? Truly the Maker, the Lover, and the Keeper, for, until I am in essence one-ed to [God], I can never have full rest nor true joy.”

About the world’s distractions, she writes,“For this is the reason why we are not fully at ease in heart and soul: because here we seek rest in these things that are so little…” She concludes, “All that is less than [God] is not enough for us.”

Wow, I thought, this is not only the spiritual quest, but the scientific quest as well. “All that is less than God is not enough for us.” We can’t be satisfied with insufficient metaphors for God, as we have in religion; we can’t be satisfied with incomplete explanations of all that is, as we have in science. Our lifelong quest is for the hidden God, the unknowable, the mystery from whence all that is, is.

According to Father John-Julian, she follows the insight of Thomas Aquinas “that the soul naturally seeks the Good, but is diverted by not perceiving the true good, and settling for less.”

In the section that follows, Julian explains that intermediaries—whether saints, sacraments, even Christ himself—are only efficacious because their source is “the goodness of God,” which is what makes us, loves us, and keeps us. Even so, religion is only efficacious when sourced by God’s goodness.

Some might think it presumptuous to assume benevolence of God or if not God, the cosmos, but giving us life, time, and place, as well as a magnificent outer space to glimpse, is surely not anything less than good.

I doubt she knew the teachings of the fourth century Desert Fathers and Mothers, yet she also understands prayer as changing us, not God, “for the goodness of God is the highest prayer, and it comes down to the lowest part of our need.” It is in this context she describes God as our “Lover.”

To think how I winced when I first heard LGBT Christians pray to God as “Our Lover”!

Because we cannot fully comprehend God, we “remain in spiritual contemplation, with everlasting wonder at this high, surpassing inestimable love which Almighty God has for us...”

She offers a prayer: 

God, of Thy goodness, give me Thyself;

for Thou art enough to me,

and I can ask nothing that is less

that can be full honor to Thee.

And if I ask anything that is less,

ever shall I be in want,

for only in Thee have I all.

When leaving a comment on this blog, a URL is requested but not required to submit your response.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

Literalism vs. Spirituality

I will be preaching during the 11 a.m. worship of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church in Atlanta this coming Sunday. And please “like” my recent Huffington Post column. Thanks!

The trend of people identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is sometimes a rejection of biblical literalism, religious fundamentalism and orthodoxy. To me that can be a good thing, and, in my reading of a recent translation from Middle English by Bernard Bangley of the book, The Cloud of Unknowing, very traditional.

The anonymous author encourages readers to discard what’s not helpful in the book, and so I freely disagree with the writer’s rejection of physical and sensual experience as unspiritual, even ungodly.  This 14^th century English monk must not have met the 14^th century English nun, Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “In our sensuality, God is…”

The beliefs of the church regarding creation, incarnation, and resurrection all support a hallowing of bodily experience. As James B. Nelson and a diverse group of other contemporary Christian body theologians have affirmed, we know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all. Nelson goes so far as to add, “Pleasure is the strongest argument for the existence of God.”

Yet I wholeheartedly embrace The Cloud author’s understanding that literalism interferes with our spirituality, and he offers many examples. I once wrote that we do a disservice to religion when we treat matters of faith as matters of fact.

For example, the writer cautions against taking the ascension of Jesus literally. As a college professor of mine once said, “If Jesus had ascended at the speed of light, he still would not be outside the known universe.”

The Cloud of Unknowing asserts that “the spatial references are only symbolic. … The spiritual realm is always near, enveloping us on every side. Whoever has a strong desire to be in heaven is already in heaven, spiritually. Measure the highway to heaven in terms of desire rather than miles. … Love determines a soul’s location.”

Earlier the writer explained, “Similar in nature to heavenly bliss, divine contemplation already participates in eternity.” I once wrote that people we recognize as living saints are those who experience God’s commonwealth here and now. Spiritually they have found heaven in their desire to love and serve others. Heaven for me is where God’s and human will coincide. Saying the Lord’s Prayer (“on earth as it is in heaven”) is a way of aligning ourselves to that greater purpose. That’s why Jesus could say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” or “among us.”

There are many pearls of wisdom about the spiritual life in The Cloud of Unknowing. Here are a few quotes I underlined in my copy:

+ Remember your spiritual needs rather than your spiritual achievements.

+ Continue until your prayer life becomes enjoyable.

+ You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.

+ Loving contemplation destroys our tendency to sin more effectively than any other practice.

+ The essence of contemplation is a simple and direct reaching out to God.

+ Judging others, pronouncing them good or bad, is God’s business. We may evaluate behavior, but not the person.

+ Christ taught us in Matthew’s Gospel that spoken prayers are best when they are not too long.

+ A little prayer of one syllable pierces heaven because we concentrate our entire spiritual energy into it.

+ The person in great distress will continue calling for help until someone hears and responds.

+ The little word “God” can flood your spirit with spiritual meaning without giving attention to particular activities of God.

+ I desire to help you tighten the spiritual knot of warm love that is between you and God, to lead you to spiritual unity with God.

+ Love functions as your guide in this world, and it will bring you to grace in the next.

+ [After meeting our physical needs,] sensuality urges us to take more than we need, encouraging lust.

+ The important consideration is not what you are, or what you have been, but what you want to be.

Finally, this anonymous monk seems to echo the axiom that spiritual guides remind us of what we already know: 

Writers used to think that humility required them to say nothing out of their own heads, but to corroborate every idea with quotations from Scripture or the [Church] fathers [and mothers]. Today this practice demonstrates nothing but cleverness and education. … If God moves you to believe what I say, then accept my ideas on their own merits. 

Given its encouragement to surrender certain knowledge of God for intimacy with God, I can’t help but think The Cloud of Unknowing would be a great text for the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. As they say in recovery programs, religion is for people afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for people who have already been there.

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Copyright © 2014 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

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Our neighbors have a tall, silver, windowless van in which they transport merchandise for their antique business. When I first saw it, I kidded them about whether it contained aliens, or perhaps alien pods to replace people in the complex. Then I clarified that I didn’t mean illegal aliens, but extraterrestrial ones, like the coneheads of Saturday Night Live.

The pods reference was to the 1950s sci-fi classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which extraterrestrial aliens use pods to grow exact duplicates of human beings, but without emotions or individuality. I had always thought it was a metaphor for the conformity of McCarthyism, the anti-communist hysteria I referred to in last week’s post.  But I discovered on the internet that others think it a metaphor for communism itself or any totalitarian state or rigid ideology, such as fundamentalism or even orthodoxy.

Yet what it makes me think of are the body snatchers that found their way into Christian thinking—you know, those who introduced the Greek notion of body-spirit duality that contradicted the Hebrew and early Christian concept of the soul, an indivisible unity of body and spirit. To separate spirit and body meant that the spiritual was higher, eternal, and closer to God in the heavens and the body was lower, temporal, and separated from God, being closer to earth.

Despite four central theological affirmations to the contrary—Creation, Incarnation, Resurrection, and the church as the Body of Christ—Christians got it in their heads that the body was not a locus for divinity. But, as I wrote long before I read it in one of James B. Nelson’s books, we know God through our body or we don’t know God at all.  That I thought my words original suggests how much the work of Nelson and other body theologians had permeated contemporary Christian consciousness.

I thought I had to go outside of Christian tradition to find affirmation of my bodily and earthly experience. That’s why Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek became my second Bible in college: Zorba’s sensual zest filled a gap in my theology. That’s why Romantic Age poets and Process philosophy and Native American spirituality helped me see the sacred in nature’s every turn. And that’s why science from biology to astronomy now inspires me.

Little did I think that God evolving earth and bodies was a cosmic laying on of hands imparting holiness. Little did I consider the metaphor of God putting on human flesh as an incredible affirmation of the body, especially a body willing to touch other bodies with affection and healing. Little did I know that resurrection reclaims bodily experience as having eternal significance. Little did I understand that the concept Body of Christ meant that “the anointed one” transcended being a first century Palestinian Jewish male, becoming a body of every age, race, condition, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

If only I had known of Celtic Christianity then—the notion that Christ walks among us in two shoes—the Bible and Creation, and that sin can be removed by the grace encountered in nature, love, or Christ. If only I had read the Benedictine nun Julian of Norwich (1342-1420), that “Our sensuality is grounded in Nature, in Compassion, in Grace… In our sensuality, God is… God is the means by which our Substance and our Sensuality are kept together so as never to be apart.” In other words, in God our essence and our embodiment are one—the integrity sought in the spiritual life. And if only I had been taught Teresa of Avila’s (1515-1582) insight that now on earth God’s body is our own!

I believe more people could comprehend the spiritual life if they understood that spirituality is not an out-of-body experience, not an other-worldly encounter. Rather, our bodies participate in the divine life, the cosmos is God’s body. “In God we live and move and have our being.”

Beware of the body snatchers!

"Our Mother..."

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use in public gatherings with attribution of author and venue.

Before it became common to avoid its gender specificity, I long ago changed the “Our Father” to “God, Mother and Father of us all…” in my daily recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. “Father” as a metaphor did not contain all of God’s attributes, in my experience. And, I must confess, the metaphor of “Mother” contained the divine attributes I found most positive.

I realized recently that’s because I believe that spirituality is our Mother. We are shaped in her womb, nourished at her breast, dandled on her knees, loved unconditionally, pleased in her presence, nurtured by her wisdom. That is what draws us to her, what makes us yearn for her.

In Hebrew wisdom literature, she is Sophia, who, with God, created the universe.  In John, our own Christian wisdom literature, I believe she is Logos who becomes flesh in an androgynous Christ. The fourteenth-century nun, Julian of Norwich, (called by Thomas Merton one of the greatest of English theologians) declared “Jesus is our true Mother.” And the body of Jesus becomes the Body of Christ, Mother Church.

So the current attack by church officials on the freedom of nuns to influence Catholic thought dismays me, because throughout my life, nuns have often proven to be the best face of the Roman Catholic Church. And I say this as a Protestant, one whose spiritual ancestors gave God a shot of testosterone, emphasizing “his” masculinity!

When I despaired at Vatican pronouncements, at the misuse of power and privilege of an all-male hierarchy, I saw the progressive witness of Sisters Margaret Farley, Jeannine Grammick, Joan Chittister, Sue Mosteller, Helen Prejean, the oblate Dorothy Day, and others whose names are less well known but whose personal witness lifted my spirit.

There was a reason Mary, the mother of Jesus, caught the spiritual imagination of the church. She was needed to give a mother’s face to divinity.

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Metropolitan Community Churches last week officially affirmed Progressive Christian Reflections as an Emerging Ministry! You may know that this blog receives no funding and realizes no income. It’s not been “monetized,” so readers are not distracted by ads. Now, however, you may make tax-deductible donations by sending checks to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota, FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Thank you for your support! Thanks too to Rev. Elder Darlene Garner’s gracious oversight of Emerging Ministries. –Rev. Chris Glaser, Atlanta.