Reform or Revolution?

An 80-year-old Nicaraguan told us this was her first 

opportunity to vote for the candidate of her choice. 

Her red-inked thumb shows she has been to the polls.

Pat Hoffman, a spiritual guide for me, turned to me during a particularly dry presbytery meeting in the 80’s and asked, “Chris, would you like to go to Nicaragua?” Without missing a beat, I replied, “Sure! Can we go now?!” Anything to escape an ecclesiastical wilderness.

A word about Pat. We wrote our first books together, mine being Uncommon Calling, about LGBT efforts to reform the Presbyterian Church, and hers being Ministry of the Dispossessed, about ministry among the farmworkers of California. We met for lunch every couple of weeks, exchanging and reviewing each other’s books, chapter by chapter. Sometimes we met for tea at Trump’s (yeah, really!) in Beverly Hills; we couldn’t afford their formal tea, but we found we could share a pot of tea and two scones in its stylish bar for a total of $10.

Pat was helping organize a group of twenty Presbyterians, Disciples, and United Methodists under the auspices of Church World Service to witness Nicaragua’s first free and fair election after deposing the despot Somoza, occurring the same week as Reagan was seeking re-election while illegally funding the contras—the counter-revolutionaries who opposed the Sandinista government. A U.S. warship sailed menacingly off Nicaragua’s coast while we were there, and we heard two sonic booms each day as U.S. spy planes flew low overhead.

A Maryknoll sister (left) briefed us on what 

was happening. Pat Hoffman is in yellow.

There are many stories to be told about that trip, including the one when we decided to “crash” the American election party at the U.S. Embassy, where we had earlier met with a diplomat explaining what we considered misguided U.S. policy—after which Pat, with a mischievous smile, asked me, “Is he one of yours?” I laughed, realizing her “gaydar” was as astute as mine.

Anyway, about ten of us crammed into two tiny taxis and showed up election night outside the gate of the highly fortressed U.S. Embassy.  The taxi I was in arrived first, so I jumped out of the car and ran up to the gate. As quickly, I was met with bayonetted rifles of several soldiers running out of the waterless moat that surrounded the embassy! To the soldier at the gate, I explained why we were there. He put me on the phone to his commander inside, who politely explained that the party was not at the embassy itself, rather at a hotel, and that it was “by invitation only.”

A few days before we had been welcomed at the Nicaraguan election festivities, which required no such invitation. There we joined hundreds of Nicaraguans in an open soccer field listening to American music as election results began to trickle in—but only after walking through unlighted downtown areas of Managua destroyed by a devastating earthquake years before, never restored because Somoza drained the economic aid that came from other countries. In the darkness, we had to avoid manholes missing their covers.

Me, sitting beneath Che Guevara.

The reason I bring this up is all the talk about “revolution” in this current election. A history professor with us explained that Nicaragua had experienced a true revolution, but by contrast, she shared many historians’ view that the so-called “American Revolution,” was actually a rebellion, because it did not turn upside down the class system, putting “lower” classes, however defined, in charge. It was still largely governed by wealthy, educated, propertied white men.

I was a little peeved at her for disillusioning me about our seminal American event, but I saw her point. Still, our Founding Fathers and Mothers did set in place a system potentially “of the people” that would radically transform the government, society, and culture. Yet we are a representative democracy, not an absolute democracy.

So it gives me pause whenever the word “revolution” is tossed about so loosely as it has been this year. I had felt uncomfortable when activists in my own LGBT movement claimed ours was a “revolution.”  I thought it was too audacious and unrealistic to believe our activities could turn things upside down, as it was said of the first Christians (see Acts 17:6).

Others of us viewed our efforts more modestly and humbly as reformers. The system, both church and government, provided opportunities for reform, and look what the LGBT movement has accomplished in a generation!

Of course, self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” get the lion’s share of press, but in so many cases, the reformers deliberately sculpting our institutions accomplish more in the long run. Self-proclaimed “messiahs” lead to disillusionment because too many followers don’t have the patience to do the hard work—including voting in midterm elections, campaigning for down-ballot candidates and issues, paying attention to so-called “lowly” offices like school boards and town councils, networking with other movements.

Even revolutions require reformers, as we have witnessed in Nicaragua since that election day in 1984. In my journal on the trip, I wrote: 

Election Day

Sunday, Nov. 4 

It’s like watching the birth of a child, the blossoming of a fruit tree, the first green after winter. It’s one of the most exciting experiences I’ve witnessed. Not just history. Not mere accomplishment. It is hope in action—not a fait accompli, not an ultimate answer, not the promised land—but a signpost along the way. And that’s just it—along the way. Nicaragua is moving—its people are moving. I am grateful to watch from along the way, instead of being in the way or far away.

 Where people are on the way, God’s Spirit is at work.

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 and photos Copyright © 1984 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, photographer, and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Nobody Doesn't Like Janie Spahr

Jane Adams Spahr

I resume a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that is continuing each Wednesday of June, Pride Month, extended to the first week of July, given my post on Orlando last week. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next month!

Rev. Jane Adams Spahr goes back to the earliest days of the LGBT Christian movement, but her influence will be felt for generations to come.

When she faced multiple church trials for her activism, it was apparent to me that the church could only embarrass itself by her prosecution, because, re-purposing a then current Sara Lee pastries ad (“Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”): “Nobody doesn’t like Janie Spahr.”

Her genius, I believe, was encouraging EVERYONE to tell their own stories, in her words, “personing the issue.” And as it has turned out, that was the saving grace of the whole LGBT movement, that we were everywhere, telling our stories to our families, friends, coworkers, congregations, communities, congressional districts, and political parties. I believe that’s why our congregations and culture were so readily transformed.

My earliest recollection of her was during a party in the San Francisco Bay area. She was faux flirting with my host, a Presbyterian minister and closeted gay man, who returned the innocent flirtation. I knew both were gay, but they did not know that of one another. I found myself later saying to my host, “I think Janie would be supportive if you came out to her.” And to her, “I think Bill would be supportive if you came out to him.”

Janie was blessed by a truly loving husband, Jim Spahr, whom she credits with facilitating her being/becoming herself. We should all be so lucky, to have a partner who supports our emergence even if it means divorce. They and his wife Jackie are still friends, and when I served as the interim pastor for MCC San Francisco, this “trinity” was the first to welcome me over dinner and the last to say farewell to me just before I returned to Atlanta, again, over dinner.

In the early days, she brought me to the Bay Area to consult me about the founding of the Lazarus Project, even as she was initiating her Ministry of Light.

We each had our own spheres of influence and our own way of doing things, but I was surprised to learn that some fellow travelers in the movement imagined there was great dissonance between us. Once, after a devastating defeat at a Presbyterian General Assembly, we came out of the hall, grief-stricken. As an introvert, I could find no words to speak, but as an extrovert, Janie found just the right words to comfort us, something I later wrote about, commending her.

Yet afterward a mutual friend told me that the tension was so great between us that “you could cut it with a knife”—but I felt no such animus, and had no idea where that notion came from.

There was a moment that dismayed me, however, but it was not Janie’s fault. It came from the fact that she was “grandfathered” in as a minister, having been ordained prior to May, 1978, when the denominational ban on LGBT ordination was enacted, preventing my own ordination.

And it came because Downtown United Presbyterian Church of Rochester, NY, hired her as an associate minister. I was stunned by that piece of “good news” in a phone conversation with one of my other heroines, Virginia Ramey Mollencott, and I honestly say that I felt a twinge of envy, for it was a position to which I could never have applied, not being ordained. Yet I was furious when the denomination would not allow her to fulfill that call.

Because of her charisma and inclusive and generous spirit, as well as the generosity of the Downtown church, which then hired her as a “lesbian evangelist” to travel the country on our behalf, Janie Spahr became for many the face of our movement in the Presbyterian Church. Yet she and the church founded That All May Freely Serve, a ministry intent on representing the many faces of our movement.  Wherever I travel for speaking engagements, I encounter someone whose life has been touched or transformed by her ministry.

And usually I find it was simply because she listened to them, and offered them words of assurance, affirmation, and encouragement.

Nobody doesn’t like Janie Spahr!

That All May Freely Serve recently made available a video of my personal account of the movement (11 minutes).

Earlier posts in this series:

Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom

Don’t You Want Me?

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

Love between Women

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 and encouraged for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Guess Who Came to Dinner?

John Boswell in front of my West Hollywood apartment in 1983.

Photo by Chris R. Glaser.

The last two posts of May unconsciously began a series of personal reflections on the LGBT Christian movement that will continue each Wednesday of June, Pride Month. For those unfamiliar with this blog, be assured that I will return to other topics next month!

When I was serving a national Presbyterian task force on homosexuality as its only openly gay member, one of my Yale Divinity School professors, Henri Nouwen, suggested I would benefit from the scholarship of a new young professor in Yale’s history department, John Boswell.

But it was other mutual friends who brought us together for dinner, and by the end of the evening I was smitten, not only by how brilliant his mind and revolutionary his research, but by his good looks and boyish charm. I persuaded my task force to invite him to share some of his handwritten manuscript, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, at our next meeting in Philadelphia.

We had sought the expertise of scholars like situation ethicist Joseph Fletcher and scientists like sex researcher William Masters of Masters and Johnson, but none of the experts we consulted wowed the task force like John, and some of his as yet unpublished work filtered into our background paper and certainly influenced the recommendation of the committee’s 1978 majority report that homosexuality should not bar someone from ordination.

When I served as founding director of the Lazarus Project, the first ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community funded by a mainstream denomination, Boswell lectured many times for us over the years about his work discovering the hidden history of LGBT Christians, from saints to same-sex unions in the church.

He happily stayed in my modest, shoe-box-shaped West Hollywood apartment on those visits, and his unique request each time was that we go to Disneyland.

As far as I know, I was the only friend who called him John because of my affection for the name. Other friends knew him as “Jeb,” the acronym of his initials.

On the occasion of his first visit in the fall of 1983, I invited several people to have dinner with him: Rev. Troy Perry, founder of MCC, Malcolm Boyd, openly gay author and priest (who did not use “Rev.” as a title), and Steve Schulte, executive director of L.A.’s LGBT Community Services Center and one-time Colt model. 

Meanwhile my friend George Lynch was en route from South Carolina. We had met at the beginning of the summer during the Atlanta General Assembly reuniting the southern and northern Presbyterian churches, and we joked that we took reunion seriously by bonding as a couple. He was scheduled to arrive the next day, so I urged him to get there in time to enjoy this dinner.

I probably served my signature lasagna, as it was something I could prepare beforehand  and bake while I visited with guests. The salad, however, was in process when I received a phone call from George that he had broken down on the nearby Hollywood Freeway, and the tow company would only take cash, no credit card. So I left Boswell with the task of finishing the salad and greeting our arriving guests while I drove to assist poor George.

As I was going out, a feverish Troy Perry made a brief appearance to meet Boswell, and excused himself before dinner because he had returned from Mexico with a severe case of—in his own words—“Montezuma’s revenge.”  Upon my return, Boyd, with his date, a writer from the L.A. Times, and I enjoyed chatting with Boswell over dinner, while awaiting the arrivals of George after tending to his car, and Steve Schulte, who was delayed at the airport returning home.

George and Steve arrived at the same time, and after introductions and servings, the initial focus was on George’s long distance drive and his harrowing experience breaking down in the middle of Los Angeles rush hour traffic. We all welcomed him to California!

Given the cast of characters, I am certain that we had some important conversations about church, politics, and the LGBT community. But the memorable thing for me was our good humor as we adjusted to the evening as it was, a bit chaotic, very homely—yet a rare opportunity for an intimate gathering of early history-makers in the LGBT community.

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 and photo copyright © 1983 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, photographer, and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom

Forty years ago this coming fall I wrote a paper for liberation theologian and feminist Dr. Letty Russell, for her course “Issues in Liberation Theology.” I had forgotten its title until decades after, when I returned to speak on the campus of Yale Divinity School and Letty introduced me.

She proudly held up the paper, still in her files, “Out of the Closets and into the Kingdom: The Call of the Kingdom for Gay Christians within Liberation Theology.” Some of you will know the title is a play on a rallying cry for the nascent LGBT movement, “out of the closets and into the streets!”

What follows is the introduction to my paper. I’ve only changed spacing, bolded some sentences, and included references in text rather than as footnotes. At the end I’ve also added a sentence from the paper’s concluding paragraph, quoting Letty.

There is a knock at the door of my closet. I tremble with fear. It is the persistent Jesus again, asking that the door be opened, asking to be given hospitality, asking me to remove the walls between us and between me and the rest of the Kingdom.

“I don’t want any!” I shout, in my desire to live in peace. But the possible joy, despite my initial denial, eventually overcomes my fear, as it has in the past and will again in the future, and I open the door. Jesus comes in, smiling, hugs me. He sometimes chastens me for taking so long to answer the door. As we drink the new wine which he brings, in my ecstasy I see the walls of another closet disappear. And I inevitably think with surprise, “He’s done it again,” and smile at my lack of faith.

For gay people and indeed for everyone, the Kingdom of God is somewhere outside the closet.  A closet is a cramped place in which to hide, with little room to breathe and the inevitable storeroom for unwanted items and unsightly clutter which one also wishes to hide.

It has similarities to a box, and for some, a box belonging to one Pandora, which has been forbidden to be opened. Humans prefer boxes in which to live, travel, file, categorize, love, find entertainment, worship, pray, etc. At their worst these boxes symbolize death (coffins); at their best they symbolize the Kingdom which is yet to come (churches), though they are never to be confused with that Kingdom.

As Letty Russell speaks of the constantly changing horizon of freedom, in the same way it is possible to speak of the constant opening of each of our successive closet doors. Sometimes we who are inside open the door to the Kingdom outside (conversion); sometimes the Kingdom “breaks in” (incarnation); and sometimes the door rots and simply falls off its hinges (novelty, chance, serendipity, time).

But the nature of the Kingdom, from this perspective, is that it is always outside of the closet, waiting to enter or waiting to be entered. It is the Kingdom which inspires movement or moves itself; it is above all a moving event. It is “the driving force of salvific history,” and as such is “the very key to understanding the Christian faith.” [Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 162.]

As a fundamentalist I identified the Kingdom with a literal understanding of God setting up the Kingdom on earth at the end of time—sort of a heaven on earth. As James Cone, however, aptly points out, to the oppressed with whom I began to identify, the “eschatological promise of heaven is insufficient.” [James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 44.]

As a social activist I identified the Kingdom with a kingdom on earth which we “liberals” were going to bring into existence—the old social gospel. Here Gustavo Gutierrez’s differentiation between promises and the Promise proves helpful. [Gutierrez, 162.] Though the in-breakings of the Kingdom may occur in the process of social activism, they cannot be understood as the Kingdom itself, or the fullness of the Promise, but rather only as promises of the future fulfillment of God’s Promise of the Kingdom.

As Günther Bornkamm puts it, “the Kingdom of God cannot be described as can an earthly thing or distant wonderland—every attempt to ‘define’ it can thus only come to grief—for it is a happening, an event, the gracious action of God.” [Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, 77.]

The Kingdom of God is not a static reality, but a movement. Bornkamm also states “all the beatitudes are directed towards the coming Kingdom of God and are embraced in one idea, that God wills to be present with us and will be with us all, in as manifold and individual a way as our needs are manifold and individual.” [Bornkamm, 77.]

God wills to be present with gay persons and all who wish to be free in their movement from their closets of humiliation, despair, loneliness, isolation and secrecy to the kingdom of exaltation, exultation, companionship, community and openness (which includes freedom and responsibility).

As the experience of many gay persons will testify, “coming out” is not a once-and-for-all experience, but a continuing process. So the movement towards the Kingdom, somewhere outside the closet, or the Kingdom’s movement toward the closeted, is one which continues until the final Promise is fulfilled: God’s gift of God’s own future, the Kingdom.

As the Church, as people who wish to be free in the Body of Christ, whether female, male, black, brown, red, yellow, white, gay, straight, and so on, we must respond to our “calling to be a community that lives, not by the standards of the world, nor of the past, but by the memory of hope.” [Letty Russell, Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective, 162.]

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 © 1976 and 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Youthful Exceptionalism

When working with young tigers...

We speak of American exceptionalism, a belief that we are special, uniquely able to bring peace and progress to the world. In this view, we are smarter than, better than, more prosperous than, more blessed than all the peoples of the world. These are sometimes experienced as gifts, but often, as entitlements.

Maybe we got this from our spiritual forebears, primarily from Christians who believed themselves especially called by God to inhabit this Promised Land, this new Eden of America, echoing the Jewish concept of being the chosen people to witness the one true God as well as inherit their Promised Land.

Maybe we got this from our struggle for independence and our form of government, shaped by enlightened Enlightenment values, a shining “city on a hill.” We were not going to make the same mistakes our Anglo-European ancestors did. 

In last week’s post, I used the phrase “youthful exceptionalism.” From my youth to old age, I have recognized youthful exceptionalism in myself and in others.

In my first book, Uncommon Calling, I wrote that my opposition to the Vietnam War may have been fueled in part by youthful arrogance, but I couldn’t let that keep me quiet. No doubt that also played a role in my early efforts to see the church reformed when it came to race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity.

At the same time I tried to discover, as the saying goes, “the shoulders on which I stood,” those who had gone before me in the church and in each justice movement. The scene that troubles me most in a favorite film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, is when the son, played by Sidney Poitier, berates his mail carrier father’s generation. In contrast, my 80+ year old mother was delighted when Tom Brokaw heralded The Greatest Generation. “I’m glad our generation is finally getting the recognition it deserves,” she said.

A longtime political activist told me that he works alongside young people who are experiencing “white male fatigue,” entertaining little interest in those who have gone before.  I myself have been accused of quoting too many dead white men on this blog. I kidded the critic by saying “some of my best friends” are dead white men, and I will soon be one myself!

Many of us in the early LGBT movement used our white male privilege, risking our lives and our livelihoods, to speak out for many who could not speak for themselves, those who were similarly privileged but afraid and closeted, and those who were already severely marginalized because of race, gender, or disability. We did not speak for them, but we spoke out for all of us.

I think I offended a young LGBT activist unintentionally by commending him for following in the footsteps of (and here I named earlier prominent activists in his religious tradition). I meant it as a compliment, but I haven’t heard from him since. Did he think his efforts were original?

Youthful exceptionalism can be as spiritually dangerous as American exceptionalism. To believe your generation has the answers or will solve our problems may be as narrow as believing that of your country.

At the same time, spiritual peril may also be a spiritual opportunity. I have often said approvingly that movements are led by their youngest members. Not having the baggage of us old-timers in the movement, all that held us back or prompted us to compromise too much, all our blind spots and missteps and mistakes—all provide an opportunity for a fresh start.

After all, we didn’t have all the answers either.

“Only with the calmness of Buddhist monks is breakfast with young tigers possible.” What sounds like a Zen saying about generational differences is actually a line intended literally from The Tiger & the Monk, a documentary I recently watched free on Netflix about a Buddhist monastery west of Bangkok that serves as a refuge for tigers.

But it may serve as spiritual guidance for the longer lived within any movement.

A reading for Advent: The Right Word

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

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

Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair

As the first Jesuit pope visited the United States, the first openly gay Jesuit priest went to heaven. As John McNeill passed through the pearly gates, Saint Peter asked, “Where’s your partner, Charlie?” “Oh,” John said, a little absent-mindedly, “He’ll be along. He just didn’t think he should leave the country while Pope Francis might stop by.”

John tried to begin his talks with a bit of humor, sometimes as offbeat or puzzling as that. “Let me have too deep a sense of humor ever to be proud,” his fellow Jesuit, Daniel Lord, wrote in a “Prayer for Humility.”

And it is with that glee that he insisted his publisher keep his chosen title of his autobiography, Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair. Both his editor and I tried to dissuade him from the title, lest it be misinterpreted, but he loved that that’s how a former professor characterized him: “There’s goes John J. McNeill, both feet firmly planted in midair.”

John McNeill, SJ, not only wrote but published a book with the Roman Catholic Church’s imprimatur in 1976 that changed many of our lives in the LGBT Christian community, The Church and the Homosexual. 

It was the first such tome since Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition two decades earlier, and appeared more than a decade before John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, though McNeill credits Boswell’s as-yet-unpublished work as contributing to his own.

Soon McNeill’s book would be joined by Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (1978) as prompters for the church to reconsider its views.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual seminarians of the 70s were beside ourselves with hope that these books portended a change that would permit our ordinations and ministries in the church. Having just purchased McNeill’s book, a friend of mine set it down with her school books on a table in Yale Divinity School’s refectory en route to the lunch line. She turned it face down so no one would see the title, then had second thoughts, and boldly turned it face up.

When she returned to the table, a classmate, observing the title, said, “So, is John McNeill a homosexual?” “Why would you ask that?” she inquired, guessing more than she let on. “Well, if he’s homosexual, he’ll be biased.” I can’t recall if she said it or thought it, “Don’t you think a heterosexual would also be biased?”

I had the privilege and honor to get to know John as we shared leadership of a number of retreats at Kirkridge, inhabiting rooms across the hall from one another. On many occasions there and elsewhere, I came to know his steadfast, lifelong partner Charlie Chiarelli. So I was saddened for both to hear of his death last week in Ft. Lauderdale, where they retired some years ago. They have been and will be in my prayers.

It so happens I am reading and using in my morning prayers The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, along with a companion text, Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits. I am doing so in preparation for helping with a spiritual formation course on Ignatian Spirituality the week of November 9-13.

Despite an accessible translation, I confess I have had to work hard at translating The Spiritual Exercises to meet my own spiritual needs. Reared a Baptist, I have regularly and often immediately observed and confessed personal sins, and as a Presbyterian and MCCer I learned also to confess corporate and systemic sins, and I don’t think rehearsing these would be spiritually helpful, except for the most obsessive-compulsive among us!

And some of the recommended objects of devotion and reflection don’t match my progressive theology. But I do get Ignatius’s point, that there’s work to be done to eliminate all that gets in the way of God’s presence.

The prayers in Hearts on Fire have been more helpful—for example, I am eager to do a personal retreat focusing on “Testament,” a guided meditation by the well-known Jesuit from India, the late Anthony de Mello, which is, as the book describes, “a creative alternative to examining one’s conscience.”

So, as I prepared to write this, I looked for things I had underlined in my reading thus far that might speak to John’s life, and that’s how the quote about humor above came to be included. But the quotes I want to use now are my own responses written in the margins!

After reading a contemporary paraphrase of the Anima Christi by David Fleming, SJ, I wrote, 

Death is the final praise,

            the final ecstasy

            giving up one’s spirit

            unto the Spirit.

And after being challenged by Ignatius to contemplate hell, something I cannot believe except metaphorically, I wrote: 

Hell is the place of not feeling love.

It can be anywhere and everywhere.

Love gives rise to purpose, meaning, hope, fulfillment—heaven.

Sin is being unloving, unkind—to myself, to others.

And then I added: 

Grief is hell. 

John has now offered “the final praise.” He saved LGBT Christians from hell, and reminded us of God’s love, giving rise to the “purpose, meaning, hope, and fulfillment” of our movement, a taste of heaven, reminding us what sin truly is: “being unloving, unkind” to ourselves and to others. Our grief may be hell, especially for one as close as Charlie, but we pray with Joseph Tetlow, SJ’s version of the Anima Christi, “make my pain pregnant with power.”

There were many times that John’s pain was “pregnant with power.” 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.

Thanks, John, in turn, for tossing me a saving “potato”!

There will be a gathering at Kirkridge to celebrate John McNeill’s legacy, January 15-17, 2016.

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here, and scrolling down to the donate link beneath the description. Thank you!

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

A Crowd of Witnesses

Rock Stars and Prophets "Ordain" Chris Glaser

From the outside, and our need to simplify, especially in the media, key figures seem to be responsible for movements. Sometimes they are suffering scapegoats and sacrificial lambs, sometimes charismatic leaders and compassionate saints.

But from my vantage perspective of more than four decades devoted to the LGBT movement, I repeatedly realized that our movement is a collective and mutual inspiration. Perhaps that is why we have achieved relatively so much so quickly—plus the fact that we and our allies are in every family and neighborhood, every race and culture, condition and class, every vocation, business, and organization, of every political and religious stripe.

That realization was confirmed once again by last week’s ingathering of some eighty souls of the LGBT movement in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. at the church’s conference center in Stony Point, New York. The denomination’s presbyteries have recently approved a constitutional change permitting same-gender marriage, and we had every reason to celebrate.

Thanks to the organizational skills of That All May Freely Serve’s current evangelist, Rev. Ray Bagnuolo, and a host of volunteers, a major contribution from a pastor as well as donations from others, and the enthusiastic hospitality of Rick and Kitty Ufford-Chase and their staff as well as the volunteers of the center’s multi-faith community (which included a three-tiered wedding cake and the tastiest and healthiest food I’ve enjoyed at any retreat or hotel facility), Rock Stars and Prophets: Generations of Justice and Love will be remembered not only as a historic event, but one that was healing and hopeful and just plain fun. Of course TAMFS’s founding evangelist, the Rev. Janie Spahr, and its former Regional Partnership Coordinator and later Minister Coordinator, the should-be-Rev. Lisa Larges, were also responsible for the event’s success.

And I will remember it as the place of my fourth ordination, thanks to the Rev. Katie Morrison, who, along with Ray, were the first openly lesbian/gay persons to be ordained by their respective presbyteries years before the prohibition on LGBT ordination was lifted.

Rev. Laurene Lafontaine, who recently reclaimed her calling as a pastor in the Presbyterian Church, passed to Katie a beautiful, needlepoint stole created in 1993 by the late Louise Thompson for the first openly LGBT person to be ordained in the denomination. Spontaneously, Katie decided it should go to me, and she led the gathering in a blessing of my ministry with the laying on of hands.

I had approached the four-day gathering eagerly but with reservations, fearing what feelings might arise. During the planning, I urged that everyone who attended should hear from everyone there. I spoke on a panel of activists from the early days of our movement, and the next morning took my turn for a brief videotaped interview conducted by Warren Cooper, a gentle and kindly videographer. As I left the taping, involuntary tears came to my eyes.

Now, as I stumbled toward Katie, those tears returned, and I had a sense of unreality. At a time when I might feel vindication, I instead felt stunned and unworthy. I looked in Katie’s smiling face as people gathered around and laid hands on me. She then led us in a blessing. 

My first ordination was as an elder of the First Presbyterian Church of Van Nuys, California, in 1972. I had almost walked out, because the interim pastor mistakenly used the old questions for ordination that included the “infallibility” of scriptures. But I stayed, privately assenting only that the Bible served as God’s word to me, the newer version of the ordination vows.

My second ordination was a surprise, at the hands of the annual LGBT retreatants at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in Pennsylvania, led by the Rev. Darlene Garner, a fellow speaker, and now, three decades later, the Elder who oversees MCC’s Emerging Ministries that includes this blog! They did so because I had been dropped as a candidate for ordination by the Presbyterian Church in 1978 when its policy prohibiting the ordination of openly gay and lesbian ministers was instituted.

My third ordination came in 2005 when I served as interim pastor of Christ Covenant MCC of Decatur, Georgia. The MCC Moderator, my friend, the Rev. Nancy Wilson, gave the sermon and led the ceremony, and several of the people at last week’s gathering came from afar to participate. In giving me the charge, the Rev. Erin Swenson had encouraged me to “dance with the one who brung you,” in other words, serve faithfully within MCC, whose polity allows my dual affiliation as a Presbyterian. I was taken by surprise when the gathering offered a prolonged ovation.

As I look at the photo Believe Out Loud’s James Rowe took of my fourth ordination, I am pleased to see very little of me in the picture. Instead you see all the people around me, reaching out their hands in blessing, representing all those who have shaped my soul throughout my life, including those who have passed on.

I am grateful for such a crowd of witnesses!

Reading this New York Times article made me think of the “incandescent souls” who  help make us who we are: “A Moral Bucket List—What Kind of Adventures Produce Goodness, Rather than Build Résumés?”

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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. 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.

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

Communion of Sweet Rolls and Coffee

I first recorded the experience that follows in a letter to the late Bill Silver during the summer following our (with many others) successful lobbying efforts to persuade the 1976 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church to set up a task force on homosexuality and ordination. Bill and I had become great friends in the process.

This became my favorite passage in my first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church, which is not just my story but the story of many, as well as the story of the Presbyterian Church dealing with the issues involved. Published in 1988, the book had four printings with Harper & Row, and an updated 1996 version with photos had two printings through Westminster John Knox Press, totaling more than 20,000 copies.

It was Bill Silver’s candidacy for ordination that prompted New York City Presbytery’s request for “definitive guidance” on the ordination of “avowed, practicing homosexuals.” I too was an openly gay candidate for ordination in another presbytery, and had just completed a year’s internship in campus ministry, working with LGBT people for the Christian Association of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In July 1976, before moving from Philadelphia, I took my car for servicing and, as usual, waited for it in a nearby café. During a prolonged breakfast, I wrote of my experience to that point as a gay minister. At this relatively early time in my ministry, I already found myself describing a feeling that a primal scream lay buried within me—a scream that expressed the cumulative pain and birth as described to me by hundreds of gay sisters and brothers. I felt like their vessel, a vessel of their feelings, their stories, their hopes and fears entrusted to my care; and I felt as if I would burst if I did not write out their feelings.

The café waitress was unusually gregarious and solicitous, equally generous with coffee and conversation. She picked up an ongoing conversation with a regular customer, evidently begun when he was last in, about methods to avoid crib death.  She had a new grandson to worry about.

Now they turned to discussing an article in the paper about women as priests: she said “Why not?” but he was opposed. She spoke her mind plainly, without fear, as one might in a friendship of trust, in which the parties agree to disagree. She had already learned my intended profession, so she shouted over to me, “Hey Rev, what do you think of women priests?” I said I agreed with her, that women should be priests.

She brought me more coffee as a reward and whispered about her other customer, “He don’t like women, that’s his problem. Two divorces and can’t find anyone to marry him. Not surprising!” She said this matter-of-factly, not meanly.

Even more compassionately she added, “Y’know, the other girls warned me he didn’t tip when I started to work here, but I decided to be just real friendly with him, take some time to talk with him. I figured he was lonely. That’s what’s wrong with most people today—just plain lonely, just need somebody to talk to. Well, I’ve worked him up to a 50 cent tip! D’you know, he’s a shrink? People pay to talk to him, and he comes in and talks to me for free! Ain’t it funny?” The coffee fell a little over the brim of my full cup.

Noticing I was writing, and with my left hand, she exclaimed, “I was left-handed too, growing up. But the nuns made me write with my right hand. I’m sure that’s why I’ve been a nervous person ever since! When my kids were old enough to go to school, I went down and told those nuns that if any of them were left-handed, to leave ‘em be. I wasn’t gonna let the same thing happen to my kids as happened to me! Honestly, I think you got to be a genius to be left-handed in a right-handed world.” With that she returned to her post behind the counter.

I was stunned. I believed she was speaking about much more than which hand I wrote with. I looked down at what I had written about others who had been forced “to write with their right hand” in a sense, the anxiety and suffering church and society’s coercion had caused countless gay people. I believe the waitress intuited far more about me than I had disclosed.

I felt deeply moved by her unqualified affirmation. I smiled in gratitude toward this minister who dispensed wisdom and insight as readily as coffee and sweet rolls. Her counter was at once pulpit and communion table, an integration of word and sacrament. The church needed ministers like her. The commonwealth of God had come near.

Copyright © 1988 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit distribution with attribution of author and book title. Other rights reserved.

For more on the LGBT movement in five mainstream Protestant denominations, check out R. W. Holmen’s comprehensive Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestantism. For Holmen’s account of some of my personal involvement, please click here.

Those concerned for Israelis and Palestinians in the current crisis might want to read my earlier post: Peace in Jerusalem. Despite what I wrote then, I have resumed following Israel and Palestine’s struggles with dismay and grief.

On today’s anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Saturday’s anniversary of Nagasaki, you may want to read my post: Acts of God and Acts of War.

Please make a tax-deductible donation to my blog ministry by clicking here. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

Wounded Healers

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for use in gatherings with attribution of author and blog site.

A month or so ago on the internet, I happened onto a recent review of my first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church. While giving credit to my activism of forty years, the review took me to task for being “self-obsessed” and, while insisting homophobic people change their ways, failing to confess things I needed to change in myself other than my shame and lack of pride.

I understand that people do not read as carefully as they used to, but the book listing under the genre “biography” as well as the subtitle should warn readers that the book is intended to be autobiographical. I completed it 25 years ago this summer, and it came as a result of being asked to tell my story so many times that I thought I’d save everyone’s time and trouble by telling it in print.

It appeared at a time in the LGBT movement when many of us thought personal narrative was the best way to overcome heterosexism. And I was persuaded by Carl Roger’s dictum that "what is most personal is most universal," as practiced by my spiritual mentor Henri J. M. Nouwen. Nouwen believed the minister (every Christian) was, according to a rabbinic story, the wounded healer who unbinds and binds her or his wounds one at a time, so as to be ready to help others unbind and bind theirs. It could be said that each of his books on the spiritual life revealed some personal wound being dressed and addressed in the hopes of helping others with similar wounds. 

Henri once wrote that the “J. M.” in the middle of his name could stand for “Just Me.” He believed that the minister (again, every Christian) was called to live a life offered to others. The autobiography or memoir is said to have first appeared in The Confessions of Saint Augustine, and spiritual autobiography has long had a place as a means of doing theology. I lead workshops and retreats on spiritual autobiographical writing, encouraging participants to tell their stories.

But I also wanted to tell the story of one denomination (the Presbyterians) struggling with the issue of openly gay and lesbian Christians in their pews and pulpits. Recently preparing my letters from Henri for donation to his archives, I ran across his advice on an earlier version of the manuscript that I focus on myself rather than the church—that that’s what readers would want. I chose to tell both stories, because for me, I was only an example of what LGBT people were experiencing in every denomination. I dedicated the book “To gays and lesbians who struggle to keep faith,” by which I meant religious faith as well as faith in ourselves. The most frequent response I’ve gotten to the book is, “You told my story,” which is exactly why I wrote it.

As to the dismissive tone in the review about my need for conversion from shame to appropriate pride: most LGBT Christians of the era and even today will tell you that this was the most important transformation we had to make. “Out of the Closets and Into the Kingdom” was my final paper for professor Letty Russell’s Liberation Theology course.  It meant giving up self-denigrating, LGBT-denigrating, even suicidal behaviors to embrace who we are as beloved children of God, citizens of God’s commonwealth.

Throughout the book, I explain that homophobia is something we all are working on, gay and straight alike. And when I talk about the need for the church to change, I tried to put it in “we” language, as I am part of that church and its needed reformation. That I didn’t feel the need to use the book as a private little confessional was to save the reader from “too much information,” as well as to reinforce the purpose of the book: to gain acceptance for LGBT people who should not be rejected because we also sin. Toward the end of the book, I wrote, “How can I reject the church for a lack of integrity when I also struggle to more fully realize this goal? … I’ve abandoned perfection as a spiritually desirable goal. How can I then require perfection of the church?”

I am not providing the link to the review because I understand that snarky commentary is used to draw people to blogs. I notice this when I post something edgy on this blog, and I try to avoid playing to this. The comments on the review reinforced this notion—an internet lynch mob was forming, as one wrote that I must be a young person, part of the “me” generation, and another, noticing my longevity in the movement, said I was probably one of those self-absorbed boomers of the 60s. Perhaps that’s most disturbing of all, that people who have not read the book or any of my work feel entitled to form an opinion about it.

Nouwen, whose reputation grew from his early book, The Wounded Healer, came toward the end of his life to understand how people can hook us in our wounds, as he describes in The Inner Voice of Love: “People will constantly try to hook your wounded self. They will point out your needs, your character defects, your limitations and sins. That is how they attempt to dismiss what God, through you, is saying to them.”

Consider me hooked. But don’t dismiss what we might learn from all this.

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Chris will be leading a seminar, Henri Nouwen: The Wounded Healer, February 28-March 3, 2013 for the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. The public is welcome!

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