Held by God

Following last week’s reprise of A Healing Touch, this September 28, 2016 post reminds us that we are ultimately held by God. Given the verdict yesterday, you may want to read, "I Can't Breathe!"

Okay, so now you’re gonna think I’ve gone off the deep end. 

I’ve had a lot going on lately, and when I wake at night, I start thinking of all those things I need to do, should have done, am anxious about. I don’t mind when I use such nocturnal musings constructively, as when a post or talk or retreat comes to me and I develop it, lying still. But when my thoughts serve no purpose, I am bothered that I’m losing sleep over them. The worry gene runs in my family, so I’m not alone. 

Lately my usual way of simply blocking thoughts, or using a mantra, verse, short prayer, or Psalm 23 has not been working, so I’ve discovered a new strategy. 

I imagine I’m being held by God: the soft bedding, the warmth of Wade, the firmness of the mattress, the caress of the ceiling fan, the enveloping darkness become God holding me. And lest you think I am centering God on me, I believe this is true for everyone. 

Process theology talks of the cosmos as God’s “body.” God is not separate from the world—what is material is God’s incarnation, God’s embodiment. And body theologians try to recover the body as a locus of divinity. So I do have theological legs to stand on. 

And Christianity’s premise is the Incarnation, that God became one of us, and offers God’s body and blood that we may become the Body of Christ, an agent of redemption in the world. So I also have a Christian leg to stand on. 

Jesus said the kingdom or commonwealth of God was coming into the world and already in our midst. The trajectory of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that of God coming into the world, not abandoning it. And Paul remarked that the whole creation was groaning in birthpangs to bring something new into the world, and that in God “we live and move and have our being.” So I have a biblical leg to stand on. 

I also believe that I’m a part of God as well, so I think of cuddling with Wade as having divine inspiration. Teresa of Avila said that on earth, God’s body, Christ’s body is our own. And Augustine’s spiritual goal was resting in God. So I have church tradition behind me. 

My “ah-hah” is how good it feels to be held by God and to hold as God. It awakens a new kind of eroticism, if you will, that feeling of bliss one experiences in the unity of lovemaking or prayermaking. I’ve written elsewhere that “eros” is our “urge to merge,” what inspires the lover as well as the mystic. 

I’ve also spoken and written about the Beloved Disciple, who lay his head on Jesus’ chest during the Last Supper, “listening for the heartbeat of God,” as Celtic Christianity would have it. I’ve poked fun at recent English translations of that passage that seem to keep distancing the beloved disciple until I fear the next translation will have the beloved disciple in another room entirely! 

The NRSV translates simply that the beloved disciple is “reclining next” to Jesus. But it also translates John 1:18  as Jesus being “close to the Father’s heart” rather than the actual meaning, that Jesus is “close to the Father’s bosom.” 

What I believe is that we fear such intimacy with God, one of the earliest themes of my writing on spirituality, a cover article for Presbyterian Survey in the 1980s. 

Jesus experienced or was experienced as being a child of God, the essence of Yahweh, and the mystical gospel writer John declared that Jesus came so that we might all be children of God. So I have a mystic’s reason for my experience. 

I encourage you—no, I urge you—imagine yourself being held and touched and cuddled by God. Imagine God dwelling in you, your breath, your body, your touch. 

It feels good because it is good. 

 

FYI-I considered retiring from my blog on its tenth anniversary in February but didn’t want to “abandon” readers during the pandemic! My brother suggested I run “the best of” posts, and I decided to run past posts that speak to our current experience. This will also give me the opportunity to write a new post occasionally. Thanks for your continued interest! 

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

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

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Thank You for the Body that Loves Me

Folsom Street Fair Communion, 2006

when I served MCC San Francisco as interim pastor.

Both my sexuality and my spirituality conspired to persuade me that embodiment is good, a sacred trust, a holy way of being.

My sexuality impelled me to love another intimately, physically, even worshipfully at its better moments. My spirituality, being incarnational, inspired me to love others personally and politically, wishing them shalom: health, well-being, justice, equality, peace.

Out of this context came this prayer in my book Coming Out to God, Day 4, which may be used individually or collectively, using its refrain as a unison assent.  Saint Ignatius counseled imagination in the spiritual life, and so I invite you to imagine, while using this prayer, your body as a temple; who your “lover” may be, whether a past or present or hoped-for simple healing touch or full-bodied lovemaking; who truly serves as your spiritual community; and finally, contemplating the cosmos as our ultimate sanctuary.

Day 4

Thank you for the body that loves me.

My own body:

It tingles me with pleasure

and sends pain as a warning;

it takes in food and air

and transforms them to life;

it reaches orgasmic bliss

and reveals depths of peace.

Thank you for the body that loves me.

My lover’s body:

it surrounds me with safe arms,

and senses my needs and joys;

it allows me vulnerability,

and enables my ecstasy;

it teaches me how to love

and touches me with love.

Thank you for the body that loves me.

My spiritual community’s body:

it embodies your presence

by embracing mine;

it incarnates your hope

by empowering prophets;

it inspires me with stories

and enchants me with mystery.

Thank you for the body that loves me.

The cosmic and mystical body:

it calls me to communion

with creatures and creation;

it manifests your glory

and mine as its child;

it upholds my feet

and heals my body.

Thank you for the body that loves me.

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Copyright © 2019 and Coming Out to God copyright © 1991 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

A Healing Touch

With Mom on her 84th birthday in 1999.

As I get older, I have fewer opportunities to be touched. I knew that about old age even before I got there, and that’s why I’m sitting so close to my mother in the above photograph, my arm around her. I had noticed the need particularly among the older women of our neighborhood church. The passing of the peace was an opportunity for older folk to receive and give full-on hugs. Now I am grateful for such hugs in greeting or in parting worship.

Perhaps it’s because we regard older people as fragile. Perhaps because of due respect for the aging process, a reverential aspect. Perhaps because we older people are less attractive or no longer “breeding material.”

I have written of an experience of lovemaking that restored my sense of lovability in my book, Come Home! The “healer” in that case visited Atlanta last year and I was able to give him a copy of the book, marking the passage and expressing my gratitude.

But those opportunities are rarer as one ages, even when in a relationship.

In an email exchange with a friend and reader of this blog concerned about losing the gay parts of himself as he enters an assisted living program, I waxed philosophic about my own situation:

As a youth I had fantasies. As an adult I had experiences. As a senior I have memories. I need to hold on to my memories even though they don’t have the anticipatory ecstasy of fantasies or the existential bliss of experiences.

So, simple touch becomes all the more important.

When I was a kid, I used to love sitting in the car as a gas station attendant cleaned our windshield, enjoying the gentle rocking of the car—oh, the olden days of full service stations! I also enjoyed getting my hair cut, and my initiation rite into manhood was when, after many years, the barber finally honed a straight razor to trim my sideburns. These were gentle and safe ways to have a man touch me, and I found them healing.

My father enjoyed telling the story of rocking me as a baby while I steadfastly refused to go to sleep. I no doubt simply enjoyed my father or mother’s touch, being held close to their hearts. (As late as my teens, my joke with Mom was that I could still sit on her lap!) No doubt my body remembers and that’s why I enjoy cuddling so much.

All of this comes to mind because of a transforming incident during my recent contemplative retreat. Though our Roman Catholic hosts were welcoming beyond mere hospitality, their church does not allow offering Communion to Protestants. I do not like this, as you might guess, and I had decided not to go forward to merely receive a blessing. But in moving out of the way to let others in my pew pass by, a smiling sister gently urged me to go forward for a blessing. So I did, crossing my arms to indicate my heresy of being a Protestant.

I expected the tall and very aged priest to simply make the sign of the cross in the air and say a blessing. Instead, he gently touched my forehead while saying a blessing. The power of his touch jolted me. I immediately felt good inside, and the bliss remained with me for an hour. I could not help but think his power was deeply spiritual.

The next time I went forward for Communion, another aged priest made the sign of the cross on my forehead with oil, and I did not experience the same jolt of spiritual power. And I realized I couldn’t even remember if the earlier priest had made the sign of the cross on my forehead; I just felt power from the palm of his hand on my head.

With all the conversation these days about inappropriate touching, by priests and other professionals, I sorrow that this may lead to less healing touch. I remember how my mother’s first graders used to hang on her, begging to be touched and hugged, even after they went on to higher grades.

Being old, I have during this same time had to go to a dentist, an orthodontist, and an oral surgeon to repair or remove two “virgin” teeth which broke. My dentist praised me as one of his best patients, I think because I have a high tolerance for discomfort and pain, no doubt learned in part as a gay activist in the church! (Smile)

But their healing touch also made it possible for me to sit still for some difficult procedures. After two root canals, I explained that the orthodontist’s abdomen pressed against my head during the procedure was somehow comforting. I asked if he did that intentionally to calm his patients, but he explained it was just ergonomically sound, otherwise his reach over me would tire his shoulders as he worked on my teeth with the help of the lens of a microscope over my head.

I thought of Temple Grandin, the autistic expert in animal science who discovered she could calm herself by a device of her own invention that held her and later applied that to an invention to calm cattle on the way to slaughter. There is something calming about being held and touched, whether facing life or death.

As a progressive Christian, one of my reservations about Jesus being known as a physical and mental healer is that such magical qualities do not fit my desire for him to be known rather as a spiritual mentor and healer.

But maybe his touch was like that of the priest’s, or that of the orthodontist’s, or that of a hugger, or that of a lover—especially when visited upon so many people who were “untouchables”: lepers, epileptics, the sick, the dying and dead, those with physical or developmental disabilities. Women of his time were considered untouchable during menstruation. Children were assumed unclean, one of the reasons his disciples tried to send them away.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me” could as easily mean “Suffer those who are untouchable to come unto me.”

Related Post: Held by God

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Let God Rub Your Belly

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. 

Okay, so I’ve put off writing this particular reflection because I know you’re going to say its opening illustration is way too cute. So be it.  

Our dog Hobbes likes to join me on the deck for morning prayers. She sits at my feet as I read, but when I put the books down to pray—which for me is lifting people, the world, and the day’s agenda prayerfully, closing with the Lord’s Prayer—she rolls on her back, expecting me to rub her belly. After I rub one side, she flops over so I can rub the other side. 

For nearly a year now, that’s what I’ve been encouraging progressive Christians to do through this blog: let God rub your belly. That’s one of the reasons I do my morning prayers—to bask in God’s unconditional love. It helps me get through the day, willing to “rub the bellies” of others by acknowledging with cheer and regard all those I encounter, whether strangers, opponents, or friends. And it keeps me aware that I too deserve respect as a child of God. 

I am reminded of my father’s experience when he used “belly” in a headline while serving as editor of his high school newspaper in small town Kansas in the early 1930s. To characterize a particular football game, he used the term “belly flopper.” The powers that be found it unseemly that he had referred to a body part with a “vulgar” term.  

I have been teaching an online course entitled, “Christianity and Sexuality.” One of its purposes is to overcome the erotophobia of the church that would inhibit our understanding of literal belly-rubbing as a deeply spiritual exercise. Just as God rubs our spirituality in prayer-making, we may roll over and allow God to rub our sexuality in lovemaking. 

Creation, incarnation, and resurrection all affirm the sacred nature of our bodies. Lovemaking, like prayer-making, is an opportunity to let God rub your belly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to exclaim at the conclusion of lovemaking what we say at the end of hearing God’s word of love, “Thanks be to God!” or at the end of prayer-making, “Amen!”?