The Crisis of Racism

Part of a nearby Baptist church memorial to multiple African Americans 

whose lives have been taken in recent years.

In preparation for leading an online course on respected spiritual author Henri Nouwen, I am reading my own 2002 book of 100 meditations on his life and writings to remind myself of things I might say and stories I might tell. I found “Day Seventy-Two: The Crisis of Racism” particularly pertinent to today’s happenings and offer it in support of Black Lives Matter.

Henri wrote in a posthumously published book of his participation in a well-known Alabama protest march:

It seemed as if nobody could party better than these oppressed people. The flush of victory seemed to have them in its grasp, combined with the certainty that they would lose. … [Alabama Governor] George Wallace cannot be converted.

-Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Road to Peace, p 82.

Why does racism have such a grip on us? Why do its relentless talons press into our culture’s mind and heart so deep that we hardly recognize its power even now, almost forty years* after Henri wrote these words about the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965? Forty years—we should be at the Promised Land by now. Did our grumbling en route bring us yet another forty years as punishment?

What strikes me as I finally read Henri’s previously unavailable essays about the Selma march and King’s death in 1968 in The Road to Peace is the unambivalent clarity with which he describes good and evil, what is just and what is unjust. It’s like the realism of his writings about Central and South America: there’s a hardness and a leanness to his writing that is less enchanting than gripping.

If he had “swung” that way, he would have made a strong politically prophetic figure. This book’s editor John Dear points out that Henri did not want to be arrested in U.S. protests because, in doing so, he risked being deported as an “alien.” But I think it was something deeper in his nature that shunned political drama for spiritual drama, the larger playing field in his mind.

“Fixing” something politically was important; but addressing it spiritually was even more so. And he realized that “being right” politically did not mean “being right” spiritually; that, as we try to take the beam out of the world’s eye we must be watchful of a myriad of splinters in our own, to reverse Jesus’ metaphor.

Which brings us back to the talons of racism that grip our culture. At heart it is a spiritual crisis underlying the political crisis. That’s why the Reverend King could draw Henri from his studies at the Menninger Clinic in Kansas into a march by calling the religious community for support after marchers earlier suffered violence on the Edmund Pettus bridge just outside Selma.

Henri wrestled long and hard about whether or not to go. That, to me, suggests Henri was not meeting the demands of ego or self-righteousness but meeting the demands of humility and justice. When you’d rather not, but you’re there anyway, you know it’s not about you.

His recognition that “nobody could party better than these oppressed people” foreshadowed similar experiences with the poor in Latin America and the severely disabled of L’Arche. Feeling momentarily powerful and victorious while facing certain defeat is a dynamic understood by any who have advocated “lost” causes.

And yet, ironically, the “defeat” that “George Wallace cannot be converted,” is controverted as early as five years later in an essay Henri wrote about Dr. King’s assassination, quoting the Alabama governor declaring it “a senseless and useless act.” Since then, of course, Wallace asked forgiveness for his support of segregation, probably not unrelated to his own crippling wound in an attempt on his life.

Though [truth’s] portion be the scaffold

And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future…

From the hymn, “Once to Every One and Nation” by James Russell Lowell.

* Remember, my book was published in 2002.

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Copyright © 2002 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author, blogsite and book title, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy. 

Pride and Shame

We obtained this rainbow flag in Italy when our LGBT symbol became a rallying flag to oppose whatever war the U.S. was waging in the Middle East at the time. 

"Pace" means "peace" in Italian.

How can I write about pride when there is so much shame about racism, reactionary politics and policing, confederate symbols and namesakes, as well as our failure to contain a deadly pandemic that disproportionately punishes people of color and/or poverty?

That thought crossed my mind as I hung our rainbow Pride flag on our front porch in honor of LGBTQIA Pride month and anticipated writing this post. And, after writing this, the U.S. Supreme Court recognition of LGBT employment rights makes this post all the more relevant.

Pride was what I needed when I began to affirm myself in my 20’s a half-century ago, pride of who God created me to be as a gay man. And a healthy dose of pride is what we all need to confirm who God has created and called us to be and confront the truly shameful parts of ourselves and our nation’s history that led to slavery, Jim Crow, and brutal murders of black men, women, and children.

Some refer to slavery as our original sin, but I think our displacement and murder of Native/Indigenous peoples preceded and anticipated the enslavement of Africans, borne also of our racism and cultural superiority complex.

I once wondered how descendants of slaves could ever overcome the generational PTSD inflicted by our nation. Now I wonder if and when white Americans will ever get over our sense of privilege and entitlement at the expense of people of color and of other nationalities.

Jesus would not be happy.

Jesus told the parable of the Good mixed-race Samaritan as an example of loving one’s neighbor and revealed his Messianic identity to the mixed-race Samaritan woman at the well who became his first evangelist. Jesus was moved by the wisdom of a Syrophoenician woman, healing her daughter after initially resisting her request. Jesus healed ten lepers, but only the mixed-race Samaritan returned to give him thanks. And Jesus remarked in wonder at the faith of a centurion, part of the occupying force of the Roman empire, healing his país, a word which could mean slave or lover.

Jesus is the original disruptor-in-chief by demonstrating values that lift us all.

Atlanta is majority African American. And our Pride, now celebrated in October around International Coming Out Day, does not focus on LGBT people alone but encourages all to take pride in who God created them to be. Atlanta also hosts the annual Black Pride festival for LGBT people, the largest gathering of its kind. Atlanta, said to be “the city too busy to hate” is becoming “the city too busy to shame.”

“Pride is faith in the idea that God had when God made you,” Isak Dinesen (nee Karen Blixen) wrote in Out of Africa. She added, “Love the pride of God above all else and the pride of your neighbor as your own.”  (I’ve quoted this many times!)

When we celebrate our neighbor’s worth, we offer gratitude, praise, and honor to the God who created all the peoples of the earth, even as “the arc of the moral universe… bends toward justice,”* as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. anticipated the “Beloved Community,” the Commonwealth of God.

*This is King’s briefer and more memorable allusion to a longer quote of abolitionist Theodore Parker, a Unitarian pastor of the 1800s.

A different post also entitled: “Pride and Shame”

With his wit, wisdom and word-play, poet, pastor, and friend J. Barrie Shepherd has been a good companion in this epidemic through a new chapbook entitled A Pandemic Portfolio: From BC – (Before Corona) to AD – (After Distancing) – Poems Composed in a Season of Pestilence. Proceeds go to Barrie’s local charities that include two food banks and may be obtained by a donation of $5+$2 postage to J. Barrie Shepherd, 56 East Shore Drive, Chebeague Island, ME 04017 or email barrieshep@aol.com.

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

Glimpses of Glory

This week in our neighborhood, a ceremony on Martin Luther King Day officially celebrated the renaming of Confederate Avenue as United Avenue. 

My photo of that ceremony follows this post.

This is an excerpt of the talk I gave this past Sunday to the First Existentialist Congregation (UU) of Atlanta.

In August of 1973 I drove my ’63 Volkswagen through Washington, D.C. on my way to seminary in New Haven, Connecticut. I walked the capitol mall, and as I summitted a rise near the Washington monument, I caught a glimpse of the Lincoln memorial at the other end of the mall just as the sun was setting, and my imagination glimpsed the glory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on its steps intoning “I have a dream…”

Later I would learn that he had begun a very different speech, but the poet Maya Angelou shouted to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin,” and he wisely switched gears and gave a speech he had used to inspire and uplift others on an earlier occasion.

That summer day in 1973, I realized it was the tenth anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, and I literally had goosebumps at the thought, tears coming to my eyes.

I was a twelve-year-old boy in Southern California when that march was held. I knew little of the struggle for Civil Rights that culminated in that march. On that day, I was at a very different kind of mall, Topanga Plaza, one of the first grand shopping malls built in a trend that would sweep the United States. A large store window had multi-level shelves stacked with TV’s facing toward the mall’s interior, and every one of them was tuned to the news coverage of the March on Washington. I knew something very important was happening.

Weeks later, in our doctor’s office, I saw Life Magazine’s coverage of the march with its supersized photos and captions. Soon the film and book To Kill a Mockingbird would tell the story of racial segregation and injustice in the South from a child’s view in a way that could help a young boy like me understand and empathize. In public high school, teachers taught me more—not just about racial injustice in the South, but the de facto segregation in my own hometown of Los Angeles, and apartheid in South Africa.

Exchanges with inner city schools and the Watts riots furthered my education. Our high school principal, an African American, spoke so eloquently, it prompted my desire to write and speak as well as he did. Yet the real estate market practices of the time prevented him and his family from buying a house in our neighborhood—and this in supposedly “liberal” California!

One of the reasons I left the fundamentalist Christian tradition in which I was reared was because, when three black women visited our Baptist Church, I overheard one of our members say to another white woman, “I bet they were here to try that integratin’ stuff, but we showed them they were welcome even if they are Negroes.”

I remember exactly where I was when I learned Martin Luther King had been shot. I was 17, and not yet fully aware of all that he had done and all that had been done to advance racial equality, but, like seeing the multiple television screens broadcasting the 1963 Civil Rights March, I knew something important had happened. My brother had just heard it on the radio and came in the kitchen to tell my mom and me. My first thought was to pray for him, which I did. Then the news came that he had died.

I had been attending a more progressive church, and the following Sunday night, the youth pastor took his turn in the pulpit and read one of Dr. King’s sermons, “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” The first dimension King described was length of days that allowed a full flowering of a human’s potential. The second dimension was breadth, in King’s words, “breadth by which individuals concern themselves in the welfare of others.” The third dimension, King preached, was often ignored: that of height—in King’s words, “that upward reach toward something distinctly greater than humanity.” We often fail to reach for the spiritual dimension of life. He said of those who fail to reach for that spiritual dimension, “They seek to live without a sky.”

Like all good preachers of the time, King brought his observations together in a homely story:

A wise old preacher went to a college to deliver a baccalaureate sermon. After finishing his message, he lingered on the campus to talk with members of the graduating class. He spoke with a brilliant young graduate named Robert. His first question to Robert was: “What are your plans for the future?” “I plan to go immediately to law school,” said Robert. “What then, Robert?” continued the preacher. Robert retorted, “I must frankly say that I plan to make lots of money from my law practice and thereby I hope to retire rather early and spend a great deal of time traveling to various parts of the world—something that I have always wanted to do.”

“What then, Robert?” added the preacher with an almost annoying inquisitiveness. “Well,” said Robert, “these are all of my plans.” Looking at Robert with a countenance expressing pity and fatherly concern, the preacher said, “Young man, your plans are far too small. They can expend only seventy-five or a hundred years at the most. You must make your plans big enough to include God and large enough to include eternity.”

In my own words, I would echo King’s sentiment in this way: this is our moment to live and shape eternity, to live and shape the divine life of this universe.

That is what I wanted to do when I grew up, in my own small way, as a gay activist in the church and beyond.

Providentially, high school friends invited me to visit a Presbyterian Church whose liberal views they thought I’d like. The first sermon I heard there, the first Sunday of the year 1970, was a recounting of the previous ten years of the Civil Rights movement. Come to find out, the largely white congregation was participating in a program to overcome racism called Project Understanding. Through weekly forums and community outreach, the church hoped to be awakened to social justice concerns, including race, the Vietnam war, Native American issues, the needs of the adjacent Latino barrio, and eventually, even gay and lesbian concerns. It was a “woke” church before its time. The denomination to which it belonged had written a new Confession of Faith in 1967 that called for the reconciliation of races, religions, and nationalities.

It was part of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., the northern stream of Presbyterianism in America, broken from its southern stream since the abolition of slavery and the Civil War, finally to be united as the Presbyterian Church (USA) here in this very city of Atlanta in 1983. The two denominations literally marched to the Atlanta City Hall as a physical representation of our new-found unity, and there Mayor Andrew Young, himself a United Church of Christ minister, welcomed us.

That’s probably more than you care to know about Presbyterian history, but I tell it to explain how I came to be at the 1983 March on Washington commemorating that first March in 1963. I was there as part of the Presbyterian contingent.

The first congregation I served after seminary closed its worship service joining hands and singing “We Shall Overcome.” This dated back to its days supporting the Civil Rights movement. When I tried to edit this song out of the service, thinking of it as a dated relic, the congregation rebelled because it had become about more than black and white, it was about gay and straight, women and men and transgender, it was about every religious perspective, about every category of humanity by which we try to separate ourselves from one another.

In response to my talk, First Existentialist stood in a circle, joined hands, and sang the many verses of “We Shall Overcome.” In the talk, I also included the words of Bayard Rustin, the gay African American who organized the 1963 March on Washington, that I published in an earlier post, “Bayard Rustin Speaks.”

In thanksgiving for the life of poet Mary Oliver, who died last week, I invite you to read my many posts that referenced her.

Without controversy, residents removed "Confederate" from our street signs.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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

What Is the Chief End of Humanity?

Something that surprised and delighted me when I became a Presbyterian in 1970 while in college was the first question and answer of the Shorter Westminster Catechism, adopted as part of the Westminster Standards by the Scottish General Assembly for use in the kirk (church) in 1647 and by the first Presbyterian synod of the American colonies in 1729.

Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?

A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and enjoy him forever.

I had earlier been enthralled with the denomination’s then most recent confession of faith, The Confession of 1967, that confirmed my own beliefs in its call for reconciliation of all regardless of race, religion, or nationality.

But that such an early church document from the seemingly somber and sober Presbyterians and their Scottish heritage could use such words as “glorify” and “enjoy” in relation to God and the practice of their faith pleased me no end!

My Yale Divinity professor and subsequent friend, Henri Nouwen, would write of his stay in a Trappist monastery in The Genesee Diary that his spiritual director, John Eudes Bamberger, challenged him to take as his koan, “I am the glory of God.” He clarified, “In your meditation you can ask yourself, “Where is the glory of God? If the glory of God is not there where I am, where else can it be?” Interpreting the second creation story of Genesis in which God breathed life into the first human being, he told Henri, “We live because we share God’s breath, God’s life, God’s glory.”

The early church teacher, Irenaeus, declared, “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

Two of my prayers in Coming Out to God, ably edited and encouraged by Alexa Smith, took as their starting point this question about the chief end of humanity. The first may be used collectively with the italicized unison response; the second as a personal prayer.

Day 33

O Creator,

we glorify your name

and enjoy you forever.

You have immersed us in your world

and baptized us with your Spirit.

We see your beauty reflected

in our community and in your creation:

We enjoy you forever.

We feel your love in the warmth of sun,

the smiles of strangers,

the hugs of friends,

the bodies of lovers:

We enjoy you forever.

We taste your refreshment

of sleep, of breath,

of food and drink:

We enjoy you forever.

We smell your fragrance

of flower and field,

of flesh and flavor:

We enjoy you forever.

We hear your voice

from the winds of nature

to the winds of spirit:

We enjoy you forever.

O Creator, open our eyes

so we may see your goodness.

Sensitize our numbed senses

so we may feel your goodness.

Overcome our blandness

so we may taste your goodness.

Break into our vacuum

so we may smell your goodness.

Unstop our ears

so we may hear your goodness.

O Creator, our Creator,

we glorify your name

and enjoy you forever.

Alleluia!

Day 43

“What is the chief end of [humanity]?

To glorify God, and to enjoy [God] forever.”

And what is your chief end, O God?

To glorify us, and enjoy us forever?

Isn’t this heretical? At least presumptuous?

Forgive me, God, if I’ve wrongly described your agenda.

But, from the day you made us cocreators in Adam and Eve

to the day you made us heirs with Christ,

it seems you’ve been sharing your glory

and enjoying our participation in it.

Our courtship was rocky:

we kept running from you,

dating others less worthy,

pursuing our selfish desires

and our greedy lusts.*

Finally, you moved in with us in Jesus,

became our lover,

saved us from destruction

and gave up your life for us.

Now we’re haunted by your Ghost,

who brings us together,

different as we are,

reconciling us one with another

and with you.

“The world is charged with the glory of God”

(to slightly modify Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line).

So are we, because you have visited us,

and our faces shine with the Shekinah, your glory,

that lit up Moses’ face and made him veil himself.

Why are we afraid to lift the veil

and show ourselves and the world

the glorious riches of our spiritual inheritance?

God, help us lift the veil,

removing all that obscures your glory graciously given

in our creation, redemption, and inspiration.

By so doing, may we glorify you,

our glorifier in heaven,

and enjoy you forever.

Amen.

*In Christian tradition, “lusts” applies to every manner of greediness: money, power, possessions, etc.

On this upcoming Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, I’ll be reflecting on how King and the Civil Rights Movement helped inspire and shape my own ministry during Sunday’s 11:00 a.m. “Celebration of Life” for the First Existentialist Congregation (UU), 470 Candler Park Drive, Atlanta, GA 30307. You are welcome to attend!

A few of my posts related to Martin Luther King Jr. and Racial Justice:

Keep the Dream Alive

“Colored on TV!”

Bayard Rustin Speaks

Wounding God

Black Lives Matter

Woke and Awakening

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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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.

"I Am with You"

Our backyard tree coming to life.

“I am with you.” God-with-us. Where two or three are gathered. Always.

This is my “aha” of Holy Week. Not original, but deeply felt. I lost myself in these thoughts and feelings that came to me this morning of Good Friday, on the eve of Passover. The stories of both these observances are meant to assure us that God is with us.

God has heard the people cry. Whatever your cry, God has heard it. God is with you. Always.

That’s really all I have to say. But you know me, I want to tell you how I got there.

I almost did not follow my usual Holy Week practice of reading Will Quinlan’s The Temple of God’s Wounds, a chapter per day. I’ve written before of its mystical power for me, though I am not in sync with all its tenets.

This year I coupled these daily readings with the passages of crucifixion and resurrection in the four Gospels. Each day I read a crucifixion text in chronological order of its writing: Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John. On the days that followed I read the resurrection texts in the opposite order: John, Luke, Matthew, and Mark.

What I didn’t realize is that I unconsciously followed the pattern of The Temple of God’s Wounds. The narrator is instructed to view six paintings, one per day. The first three have to do with the crucifixion, the last three have to do with the resurrection.

On this reading, I once again profoundly embraced the narrator’s need for confession. As regular readers of this blog know, I am not too keen on sin, as it has, in my view, been over-emphasized in Christian tradition, plus many of the things labelled sin do not match my experience of what sin really is. That does not mean I am not aware of how I have failed in my human relationships, my relationship with earth and its creatures, and my relationship with God.

On this reading, I also recognized the narrator’s longing not only for transformation, but for an experience of transcendence that left him, in Charles Wesley’s words, “lost in wonder, love, and praise.” That came for me with the remembrance that the whole of the biblical witness testifies to God’s steadfast presence. God has not left us alone.

The incarnation is less important to me as a doctrine than as an experience that God has somehow joined us in Jesus’ passion and compassion, offering a life refreshed rather than defeated by wilderness and suffering and death.

The differences in how Jesus’ story is told among the Gospels allow our own differences. We don’t have to subscribe to every “jot and tittle” of those stories to “get” the meaning, the inspiration, of the story that God is with us.

And, as I review the first draft of this post, I realize I overlooked two other “texts” or better, “contexts” that enhanced and influenced my “aha” about God’s presence: my body mending after a severe cold and our yard and the ravine beyond coming to life after winter. These “gospels” speak even to those who do not know Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

“I am with you.” God has heard our cry. God-with-us. Where two or three are gathered. Always.

On this 50^th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr: “Keep the Dream Alive!”

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Rediscover Your "Ox Mountain"

Living in China during the fourth and third century BCE, Meng Tzu* (Latinized by the West as “Mencius”), following in the footsteps of his sixth century spiritual ancestor, Kung Tzu (Confucius), represented their shared belief in the essential goodness of human beings and our “basic tendency to love” with the memorable Parable of Ox Mountain.

My paraphrase: 

Once upon a time there was a great forest on Ox Mountain, near an urban area. Residents of the city came and cut down all the trees, and the forest was no more. But nature tried to reclaim the forest, and the stumps sprang green shoots. The people, however, let their flocks loose to graze on the mountain, and they ate all the new growth. Their children and grandchildren never knew there had once been a grand forest on Ox Mountain, because now it appeared barren and desolate. 

In his 1967 book, Mystics and Zen Masters, (an unread copy of which I discovered a few weeks ago in one of those free libraries popping up in neighbors’ yards), Thomas Merton presents Meng Tzu’s conclusion: 

So too with man: he is naturally inclined to virtue, but his actions, in a greedy and grasping society, so completely destroys all evidence of his innate goodness that he appears to be naturally evil. 

This parallels the understanding of sin and human nature in Celtic Christianity, which I’ve written of admiringly.

To me, Meng Tzu’s experience gets magnified in a media culture, and magnified exponentially in our own time of a 24/7 news cycle on a global internet stage (or platform, if you will) in which the worst news gets our attention. Mahatma Gandhi once illustrated the problem with an example of two people locked in a dispute who resolve things peacefully, so do not get the attention they would draw if they fought publically or took the matter to court.  Gandhi suggested that’s why we have a skewed perspective on human nature. The good, the peaceful, the loving, the compassionate is not “news” because it aligns with how we believe things ought to be.

All of this flies in the face of what many of us are feeling these days, as we see fists raised angrily in the air in opposition to many of the values and people we hold dear.

But Meng Tzu, Merton writes, lived also “in an age (like ours) of war and chaos” (Parenthetical observation Merton’s).

Kung Tzu (Confucius) had not, according to Merton, entertained any sort of “sentimental humanitarianism.” Rather, he believed that people “could be good, but that for them to actualize these potentialities they had to live in a society that fully respected their hidden goodness, respected them as persons, with sacred and God-given rights, and educated them in the same respect…”

This sounds like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beloved community.”

Merton explains that Kung Tzu’s understanding of personal development is very different from that of the West: 

Here we come closer to certain modern and pragmatic misconceptions concerning the development of the person: that is, the development of aggressiveness, of astuteness, of attractiveness, of diplomatic skills; in a word, the ability to succeed.  ‘Personality’ in this sense is the power to impose yourself and your wishes on others. For Kung Tzu, wisdom by no means consists in imposing your will or your ‘personality’ on somebody else, and making him serve your own ends by domination or by flattery. It is not that this is ‘wrong’ according to some abstract standard, but before all else it is unhealthy because it is unreal. The man who acts like this is untrue to himself and at the same moment, by the same token, untrue to heaven, whose will is embedded deep in his very heart. He can only act so because he has failed to get to the root of good action. He does not really know himself (p 63). 

Sorry for such a long quote! But I wrote “WOW!” in the margin beside this conclusion, because it opens my eyes to the stark contrast between views about the development of a person. It reminded me of Merton’s critique of the “false” or “inauthentic” self that too often characterizes our personhood. He writes of the feeling in his book Contemplative Prayer: “A sense that one has somehow been untrue not so much to abstract moral or social norms but to one’s own inmost truth” (p 24).

Merton earlier clarified that Kung Tzu does not describe “heaven” as a metaphysical concept but “a transcendent and objective reality,” parallel but more down-to-earth and anthropocentric than what his contemporary, mystic Lao Tzu, referred to as the Tao. Being in line with it brings order to chaos, harmonizing “with the ultimately real.” And it requires both religious community and sacred ritual, Li (“rites’), the way of life that gives “visible expression of the hidden reality of the universe”—in my view, a kind of living sacrament, which gives me new appreciation for the Christian Eucharist, whose central element could be said to be sacrificial love, another organizing principle bringing harmony out of chaos.

The Confucian ethic, Merton writes, “is the fruit of spiritual awareness. Thus, moral action is at the same time contemplative and liturgical.” Wow again!

My post on The Lord’s Prayer explained that it helps me align myself with the universe, so to speak: “Thy will be done in my earth and on this earth as it is in heaven.” For me, heaven is where human will is in sync with God’s will.

Our own “Ox Mountains” may have been deforested by the actions of the world and of ourselves.  Contemplation is an opportunity to let seedlings grow, replenishing our natural state. As the Ox Mountain Parable declares, “The moisture of the dawn spirit / Awakens in us the right loves, the right aversions.” 

*I am using Merton’s spellings of these names. I hope to explain the title “tzu” in a future post.

With colleague Debra Weir, I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat open to all April 30-May 4, 2018, at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama, entitled “Beside Still Waters.” Sacred Heart is a welcoming community and a beautiful place. Please come!

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Or mail 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!

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

"In Earth"

On my way to Petra, 1981.

Thank you, Huston Smith, for widely sharing your lifelong spiritual quest.

The morning that I write this, I completed my re-reading of the Gospel texts of Jesus’ Nativity, a habit of Advent for me. As I have several posts already prepared, this will be published toward the end of Christmastide, a few days before Epiphany. Given that it’s a “Christmas epiphany” of sorts, that feels just about right. Epiphany and its season have come to mean for me a time to celebrate all glimpses of divinity, including spiritual and scientific, and this “glimpse” juxtaposes both categories.

The reading this morning was the Gospel of John’s famous prologue about the Word, the Word that called creation into being, the Word that became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. My blogpost “The Word We Need This Christmas” reflected on this passage, and I had this in mind as I read again John’s very grand interpretation of Jesus’ birth.

But my “a-ha” came when I recited the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, as I do every morning. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth”—and here I stopped, not adding my usual “on earth,” an alternate wording that suggests an alliance of human will. “Thy kingdom come…in earth.” “The Word made flesh.” The connection was obvious and inescapable. From the beginning, God’s “kingdom” and God’s “word” has been embodied, enfleshed, in earth, in matter and energy.

God’s kingdom and God’s will is the spark that began the universe in the eyes of people of faith. “Thy kingdom come in earth as in heaven” is as much about origins as it is about hoped-for destinations. Faith posits that the more we know of our origin—our reason for being who and what and where we are—the better we know our destination, our purpose, our meaning.

The scientific search for the origins of the universe is no less than an attempt to find our place in it, how and why and when we came to be. For most of human history, we have relied on our spiritual imaginations to speculate on our place: myth-making, ritual-performing, story-telling. Now that our scientific imaginations are given a freer reign, we have fact-oriented, experiment-performing, evidence-gathering methods of discerning something like what our spiritual imaginations have sought.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “arc that bends toward justice” may be a way of recognizing that justice (God’s will, God’s kingdom) is built-in. This is a high-view of creation in general and humankind in particular, and would seem to belie the notion of “The Fall,” but to “fall” requires heighth. In my belief, “The Fall” is not built-in, though most Christians probably believe that to be so. As Matthew Fox and others have pointed out, it’s our “original blessing” that is built-in.

Genesis has us created in God’s image, thus in Jesus’ lineage the Gospel of Luke calls Adam “son of God.” The Gospel of John has the Word giving us “power to become children of God,” restoring us to our rightful heritage.

My reasoning will seem sophomoric to some, but the profound sense that matter and energy and we are also incarnations of God’s will and kingdom will not leave me.

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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.  

The intense beauty of colors in the stone of Petra 

brought involuntary tears to my eyes.

Bayard Rustin Speaks

Additional March on Washington related posts:

Keep the Dream Alive

“Colored on TV!”

Love Force

My post today is unique because today is unique: the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington. Its too-long-unsung organizer, Bayard Rustin, was interviewed by my friend Mark Bowman, an interview published in the quarterly Open Hands in 1987, the year of Rustin’s death. As subsequent editor of the magazine, I republished the interview in 1999, and you may find its full text on page ten of the Fall 1999 issue. I publish these excerpts in the belief that his voice needs to be heard. And I also believe his story demonstrates again the integrity of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, and other march leaders.

Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality. Martin set up a committee to discover what he should do. They said that, despite the fact that I had contributed tremendously to the organization (I drew up the plans for the creation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and did most of the planning and fundraising in the early days), they thought that I should separate myself from Dr. King.

This was the time when [Congressman Adam Clayton] Powell threatened to expose my so-called homosexual relationship with Dr. King. There of course was no homosexual relationship with Dr. King. But Martin was so uneasy about it that I decided I did not want Dr. King to have to dismiss me. I had come to the SCLC to help. If I was going to be a burden I would leave—and I did. However, Dr. King was never happy about my leaving. He was deeply torn—although I had left the SCLC, he frequently called me in and asked me to help. While in 1960 he felt real pressure to fire me, in 1963 he agreed that I should organize the March on Washington, of which he was one of the leaders.

In June of 1963, Senator Strom Thurmond stood in the Congress and denounced the March on Washington because I was organizing it. He called me a communist, a sexual pervert, a draft dodger, etc. [Rustin spent two years in Lewisburg Penitentiary as a conscientious objector during WW II, later 30 days on a North Carolina chain gang for his participation in the first Freedom Ride in the South.]

The next day, Mr. A. Phillip Randolph [president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters] called all the black leaders and said, “I want to answer Strom Thurmond’s attack. But I think we ought not to get involved in a big discussion of homosexuality or communism or draft-dodging. What I want to do, with the approval of all the black leaders, is to issue a statement which says: “We, the black leaders of the civil rights movements and the leaders of the trade union movement and the leaders of the Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic church which are organizing this march have absolute confidence in Bayard Rustin’s ability, his integrity, and his commitment to nonviolence as the best way to bring about social change. He will continue to organize the March with our full and undivided support.” He said, “If any of you are called, I do not want any discussion beyond that—Is he a homosexual? Has he been arrested? We simply say we have complete confidence in him and his integrity.” And that’s exactly what happened.

Someone came to Mr. Randolph once and said, “Do you know that Bayard Rustin is a homosexual? Do you know he has been arrested in California? I don’t know how you could have anyone who is a homosexual working for you.” Mr. Randolph said, “Well, well, if Bayard, a homosexual, is that talented—and I know the work he does for me—maybe I should be looking for somebody else homosexual who could be so useful.” Mr. Randolph was such a completely honest person who wanted everyone else also to be honest. Had anyone said to him, “Mr. Randolph, do you think I should openly admit that I am homosexual?” his attitude, I am sure, would have been, “Although such an admission may cause you problems, you will be happier in the long run.” Because his idea was that you have to be what you are.   …

When one is attacked for being gay it sensitizes you to a greater understanding and sympathy for others who face bigotry, and one realizes the damage that being misunderstood can do to people. It’s quite all right when people blast my politics. That’s their obligation. But to attack anyone because he’s Jewish, black, a homosexual, a woman, or any other reason over which that person has no control is quite terrible. But making my peace and adjusting to being attacked has helped me to grow. It’s given me a certain sense of obligation to other people, and it’s given me a maturity as well as a sense of humor.  …

I have learned a very significant lesson from the Jewish prophets. If one really follows the commandments of these prophets, the question of being hopeful or non-hopeful may become secondary or unimportant. Because these prophets taught that God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying.

-Bayard Rustin

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Open Hands © 1999 by the Reconciling Congregation Program. 

"Keep the Dream Alive"

I captured this photo on the Washington Mall during the 1983 March on Washington commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the historic 1963 march at which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famed “I Have a Dream” speech.

One of the good things about coming out of the closet is that I have a lot of closet space in which to store memories like this. I ran across the photo while looking for several items for Ft. Lauderdale’s Stonewall Museum at the request of my longtime friend, activist and author Brian McNaught.

Looking at the photo now, I wonder where this little girl is today. She would be in her thirties and my hope is that she is in some kind of leadership position—professionally,  as a volunteer, or as a parent.  I even fancy she might be part of the Obama administration, a dream come true for the 1963 marchers and all those marchers who followed in commemorations since.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when “religion in the public square”—marching, speaking, writing, and activism for civil rights and justice and peace from a faith perspective—was welcomed even by non-religious progressives.  Nowadays every time I write such a piece for The Huffington Post, I am stunned by the angry responses from people wary of ANY religion in the public square. After decades of reactionary Christians’ wars on women, LGBT people, peace activists, environmentalists, gun control advocates, atheists, and those of other faiths, even I wish Christians would just shut-up.

But Christians helped transform my youthful conservative views into a mature and open liberal understanding of issues and people. The weekend that Rev. King was assassinated, the youth minister of the Free Evangelical church I attended in high school read King’s sermon, “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” during Sunday evening worship. On the first Sunday I visited the Presbyterian church I soon joined while in college, the seminary intern’s sermon recounted the past decade of the Civil Rights Movement. The senior pastor of the church had earlier preached against an initiative that would have repealed a California fair housing act that eliminated racial barriers to purchasing homes in white neighborhoods.  Morning worship was followed every Sunday by a forum on issues of peace and justice, from school bussing and the Vietnam War to the founding of MCC.

In his sermon, “Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” Dr. King spoke of length of days for growth, breadth of human concern and community, and finally, “height or that upward reach toward something distinctly greater than humanity.”  Of those who miss that upward reach, King preached, “They seek to live without a sky.”

“Where there is no vision, the people perish,” Proverbs 29:18 reads in the King James Version. Subsequent translations refer to prophecy rather than vision. I am grateful Rev. King’s prophetic vision gave us the upward reach to “keep the dream alive.”

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Thank you to the many who responded to my questions in last week’s post, “Do You Read My Blog?” You made my day! For those who haven’t yet responded, I welcome additional comments.

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