Remember the Gift

Resting in God, temple in India, 1983.

My sleep was interrupted very early the morning I write this as I struggled with a request to co-lead a several-day contemplative retreat, doubting my qualifications. Suddenly my mind began structuring the course, bringing order to chaos. I continued organizing in a dream as I drifted off to sleep again. Waking, I felt more confident.  

I have yet to share it with my co-leader, so there will be changes to come, but I thought it would also be a helpful way to write posts that might speak to those of you who follow the spiritual season of Lent and Holy Week as well as those of you who don’t! So eager was I about this that here I am, up at 5:19 a.m., writing.

For the next six Wednesdays I plan to reflect on themes that could be used in such a retreat, in an order that roughly parallels the evolution of contemplation in the Christian tradition. Today I write of memory.

I have been told that studies indicate personal memory is unreliable. But I could not do my work or “do” my faith were it not for such a faulty instrument! My present self may easily be reshaping my personal narrative to suit myself. Lillian Hellman, believed to have reshaped her own personal narrative in her memoirs, famously wrote that the longest sentence in the world begins with, “I remember…”

One of the things I remember but have never been able to document is a line from W. H. Auden: 

Remember the gift,

The one from the manger,

It means only this:

You can dance with a stranger.

When I used to send Christmas cards, I created a card with that verse one year. It is in “remembering the gift” that contemplation begins. The first followers of Jesus told stories about him, recounted and amplified his teachings and parables, and remembered, re-enacted, and sometimes re-shaped his deeds and life events. Lent is simply remembering his 40-day sojourn in the wilderness after his baptism.

If personal memory is faulty, collective memory can be fanciful, and as it passes through time, evolves into myth. Myth, for me, offers a deeper spiritual truth. Jesus came to represent to those who followed him and those who followed them what the world needs.

Teilhard de Chardin (yes, I’m still reading him) writes, “However personal and incommunicable it may be at its root and origin, Reflection can only be developed in communion with others. It is essentially a social phenomenon.” I would add, a social phenomenon over time, a communion of saints over the ages. In another context, he writes, “Coherence and fecundity, the two criteria of truth.”*

This is what separates mythological truth from “alternative facts.” There is both coherence and fecundity in mythology: it makes sense to our inner selves and is fruitful in its outcome. The sacrificial love that Jesus taught and practiced and lived bears fruit in our transformation and in the transformation of the world.

Zen Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield tells the story of a woman attending the trial of her son’s murderer. Overwhelmed with grief, at one point, she cries out, “I’m going to kill you!” After he was imprisoned, to his surprise, she came to visit him. “Is there anything you need?” she asked casually, and she began providing little things here and there whenever she came to visit.

When he approached release, she asked, “Do you have a place to go?” He said, “No, ma’am, I don’t.” So she offered him her son’s room. She also found him work with a relative. After living together for a while, she asked him if he remembered when she shouted, “I’m going to kill you!” “Yes ma’am,” he said, “I could never forget that.” The mother replied, “You see, I did ‘kill’ you. You are no longer the man who killed my son.”

Sacrificial love transforms. That’s why early followers of Jesus gathered to relive his sacrifice in the Eucharist in which all attending, not just the spiritual leader, spoke the Words of Institution that rendered bread and wine into body and blood.  The Eucharist was preceded and prepared for by the Service of the Word, the reading of scripture and a contemporary interpretation. Liturgy too is a way of remembering, spoken or sung or choreographed. And early on, art and architecture served the Christian memory, especially in a largely illiterate world.

In Jesus and the Eucharist, Jesuit Tad Guzie wrote that the meal was “above all, a natural way for Jesus to express the meaning of his impending death, a death which he knew lay at the heart of Yahweh’s promise of life and a kingdom for his people.”**

This, to me, is not a sacrifice to an angry God, but a sacrifice to show us a greater love.

*The Future of Man, 133, 182.

**Jesus and the Eucharist, 57.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

"It Is Finished"

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.

Not to demean the abject nature of Jesus’ final words, according to John—but how nice to be able to say, “It is finished.”

I have often written that, in the spiritual life, there is no finish line. And that believing you’re done or that you’ve arrived is spiritually dangerous. Lillian Hellman’s memoir title, An Unfinished Woman, is more realistic. (Though given the way Hellman apparently tended to fictionalize her own life, she may have been referring to a future version of her life events!)

Personally I fantasize about being able to say “I’m done” and go off to lie on a beach of a tropical island with a full library and an open bar.

You might say, “in your dreams!” but even my dreams will not let me rest in peace. In one speech I gave during what author and friend Mary Ann Woodruff has humorously christened my “legacy tour,” I said: 

If my dreams are any indication, I have much unfinished business with the church as well as with my colleagues in the LGBT movement; also with the organizations and congregations I have served. I’m hoping this opportunity to talk about the meaning of the movement might be an occasion to exorcise some of the demons and heal some of the wounds inflicted by the friction between what I consider a movement of the Holy Spirit—perhaps even an uprising of the Holy Spirit—and the inertia inherent in any longstanding institution, such as the church. 

More than sixty longtime Presbyterian catalysts of change on LGBT inclusion will gather next month at Stony Point, New York, to compare such notes at “Rock Stars and Prophets” following the recent denominational approval of same-gender marriage.

In recent months I have revisited almost every significant venue of my “uncommon calling” in my dreams. Sometimes I am welcomed back with grace and gratitude, more often with reservations and resistance. I’ve also revisited every place I’ve lived and all my significant relationships with people, partners, and relatives—again, with mixed results. It reminds me of those cartoon images of a character’s life passing before his/her eyes while falling off a cliff. I’m not dying, at least not in any way we aren’t all “dying.” I’m aging, and looking back on a life sometimes well-lived and sometimes not so well-lived. Many of you either share that experience or will share that experience.

If we can claim Jesus as a “Christian,” which may be a stretch, he was the first Christian interim or transitional minister. In three short years he revolutionized the way we view power, privilege, tradition, government, religion, spirituality, ourselves, and God. In the Gospels’ telling of the story, he lived and breathed and taught the common spiritual wealth we have from God. But he also sacrificed for it: he risked his well-being, his family, his religion, his very life, and he did so with grace, forgiveness, generosity, resistance, and love—above all else, love.

And that love has never finished.

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

My book, The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life was mentioned in a current column by Kay Campbell.

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. 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.  

Pentimento and Palimpsest

We watched the film Julia this past weekend. Vanessa Redgrave as Julia is at her most beautiful, I think, in this film. It’s a film about writers and lovers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, and Hellman’s adventure, after her play The Children’s Hour opened  on Broadway, smuggling Julia’s money into Berlin to save Jews during the Nazi madness. The authenticity of the story has been questioned, but it’s a high-minded tale worthy of truth or fiction, much like scripture.

Released in 1977, it brought back a flood of memories of my own past. “The longest sentence in the world,” Hellman once wrote, “begins with ‘I remember…’” I graduated from Yale Divinity School that year, was midway through serving on the two-year Presbyterian Task Force on Homosexuality, and began as founding director of The Lazarus Project, a first-of-its-kind ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. I was also one of a handful of openly gay candidates for ordination in the Presbyterian church. Both the support of colleagues and the interest of the media seemed to assure me of a promising outcome of my activism and ministry.

Monday was my day off, which of course was virtually nobody else’s day off, so I “recreated” alone, running on the beach, reading in a park, and sometimes going to the movies. That is how I came to be sitting in an almost empty Westwood movie theatre to see Julia by myself. But before the movie started, someone behind me leaned over a row of seats and tentatively called, “Chris?”  It was Troy Perry, founder of MCC, seated next to a friend and sometime bodyguard, and he invited me to join them, which I did. At the end of the movie, just like my mother, I was crying. Troy turned to me supportively but chided with a smile, “Oh Chris, you’re so sentimental!”

I recalled this as I cried once again at the end of Julia. Wade is used to me by now, so was unsurprised. But I was crying not just for the lost innocence depicted in the film, but for that moment that Troy and I shared in a Westwood movie theatre, just as our dreams were taking off—his founding an LGBT-affirming denomination and me hoping to help change the Presbyterian church.  So much seemed possible then!

This week I took Hellman’s paperback Pentimento from my bookshelves, the memoir of which “Julia” is one chapter. By the bookstore receipt that I obviously used as a bookmark, I purchased it on Halloween (Oct 31), 1974, for $1.95. The other book on the receipt, I imagine, was her memoir An Unfinished Woman, which has gone missing. I know I didn’t read these for any class, and I’m not sure what prompted my purchase. But I remember how much I enjoyed these memoirs.

“Pentimento” is the term for a painting that fades, revealing another painting behind, of which the artist is said to have “repented.” Hellman uses it as a metaphor for memory and memoir, explaining, “Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.”

Another favorite writer, Gore Vidal, entitled a memoir Palimpsest, which he thought of as an architectural term, but discovered its original use had to do with paper or parchment “which has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out.” Vidal observes, “This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text.”

That’s what I find myself doing these days, remembering and re-membering. And that, to me, is what scripture (and scriptural interpretation) is. It’s a remembering and a re-membering. In Hellman’s words, “an old conception, replaced by a later choice…a way of seeing and then seeing again.” And in Vidal’s words, “Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought.”

That’s also the process of the spiritual life.

Related posts:

Better to Follow than to Arrive

“I Love to Tell the Story”

Mark your calendars, L.A!  I will be offering a lot of “I remember’s” speaking during the 11 a.m. Sunday service October 13, 2013 of the West Hollywood United Church of Christ, formerly known as West Hollywood Presbyterian, as part of its year-long celebration of its 100^th anniversary! This is where I served a decade as founding director of the Lazarus Project.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in your congregation’s or group’s newsletter, including the blog address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations are its only means of support. Thank you!