A Christmas Memory

"Tree of the Gods"

In thanksgiving for the life and pastoral and prophetic and priestly ministry of the Rev. Peter Denlea.

Christmas morning [2016] I awoke from an extremely pleasant dream. I was back in the home I grew up in, in Southern California, with my mom and dad, sister and brother. I looked out of our living room windows, and discovered it had begun to snow, a rarity in L.A. The window frames had a white dusting, as did our deodara outside, a tree that had been our Christmas tree one year. Only checking on its spelling for this post did I discover the term deodara’s mystical origin, meaning “tree of the gods” in Sanskrit, a sacred forest for Hindu sages.  And “dara” is related to the words Druid and truth!

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I had read once more Truman Capote’s story, “A Christmas Memory.” Some months ago I rescued it from storage in my crawl space, a bit damp from its place of safekeeping. I allowed the boxed edition to dry, and now it has character: a bit warped, like its author and the true life characters he writes about.

I know the story well. For years I read it at Christmastime to a Wednesday night Bible study. I’ve also viewed two film versions, the most memorable having Geraldine Page as the doting and doughty elderly cousin who befriended the author as a boy, otherwise  abandoned until the age of ten.  

One day, late in the fall, she would announce, “Oh, my, it’s fruitcake weather,” and together they assembled the ingredients and prepared the Christmas fruitcakes that they sent to everyone from President & Mrs. Roosevelt to that nice California couple who spent an afternoon on their porch when their car broke down.

As I read the story once more, I was delighted by Capote’s turns of phrase, painting a portrait of a time long past—yes, harsh in its poverty and sad in its way, but with a kind and gentle lilt to its voice that uplifted my spirit.

What surprised me on this reading, however, was the glimpse of grace toward the end of the book, reminding me of another Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, at the end of her story, “Revelation,” of which I wrote in a post entitled “Tricked by Grace.”

The boy and his cousin fashion kites as their Christmas gifts to one another, as they had done the year before, and the year before that.  They go out to fly them with their terrier Queenie in a neighbor’s meadow, when the old woman has a startling revelation, “like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven”:

“My, how foolish I am! You know what I’ve always thought? I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes that the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—“just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

“As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

I thought back on their sacramental preparation of a communion of fruitcakes, and of the many, often women, who consecrated our kitchens with the incense of baking, the breaking of bread, the squeezing of juice. I thought of my mother baking Christmas cookies, red and green, and giving me the “failures,” the ones that didn’t look as good as they tasted, as she sorted them in tins for relatives and friends.

In her poem “Answers,” Mary Oliver envies her unlearned grandmother picking and canning fruits in the kitchen even as Mary “wakened / To books and music and circling philosophies” at the kitchen table, concluding:

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.

Smiling, in faulty grammar,

She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.

So to please her I studied—but I will remember always

How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled

All the wild sauces of the brimming year.

This poem brings back the aroma of my maternal grandmother’s Swedish pancakes, the colors of my paternal grandmother’s jars of fruits and vegetables at the farm, the salty crunch of the batter on my mother’s fried chicken—and it honors them all as gods bringing order from chaos, as priests and poets and psalmists reminding us to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” even as we are, in Mary Oliver’s words, “sorting through volumes of answers / That could not solve the mystery of the trees.”

We didn’t have a Christmas tree this year, because we are downsizing, packing, and moving. But I had the mystery of home and our deodara in my dream. And, as I fixed breakfast for us, I heard Eugene Peterson (The Message) on the radio program “On Being” say, “Prayer matures into the practice of memory.”

I thought of a spiritual formation program paper I’d read earlier in the week by a minister who works with the elderly, and how those with dementia and Alzheimer’s seem to remember the ritual of Communion, even as they forget so much else.

The Lord has already shown herself.

Though the memorial line is new, I posted this on December 28, 2016 and thought new blog followers might like to read it. Have a meaningful and hopeful  Christmas!

Please make an end-of-the-year tax-deductible contribution to this blog ministry by clicking on or copying and pasting in your web browser:

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The Wildest Places

I promised last week an excerpt from my talk this past Sunday for Atlanta’s First Existentialist Congregation, but the Spirit or a spirit has led me to do otherwise. I had completed writing my talk when I noticed I had overlooked a comma, which changed the meaning of my “scripture,” requiring changes to the talk itself.

Let us risk the wildest places,

Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.

This is from Mary Oliver’s poem “Magellan” about his ambitious sail around the world. Initially I left out the comma between comfort and despair, which suggests “comfort” and “despair” are co-equal results of failing to “risk the wildest places.” Instead, I realized she intended despair as a result of comfort. She is warning that succumbing to mere comfort may lead to despair.

As I made the necessary changes in my talk to interpret my new understanding of the line, I laughed to myself that this would make a good lesson in a high school English class about the importance of proper punctuation!

But the morning after my talk the spiritual nature of my error came to me like a slap on the head from a Zen master. Now reading the mystical poet Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet in my morning prayers, I read the Prophet’s response to a mason’s petition to “Speak to us of Houses”:

Would that I could gather your houses into my hand, and like a sower scatter them in forest and meadow...  In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together.

The Prophet ponders what seduces us in our houses, ending with:

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Then adds:

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

As I age, comfort and security become more attractive than ever. At an ingathering of LGBTQ prophets a couple of years ago, I inquired why a particularly courageous prophet was not there. “She and her partner are in a retirement home,” it was explained, “And she said they really liked it because they ‘didn’t have to go outside.’”

This past weekend a friend with mental health and addiction issues was released after eight months in jail. Though I’m familiar with so-called “institutional personalities,” those who repeat offenses to stay in the comfort and stability of incarceration, I had thought he would be overjoyed with his newfound freedom. But it has apparently deepened his anxiety. I witnessed something similar when he escaped a rigid, religious belief environment.

For me, the most memorable line (paraphrased here) from the old British film Thank You All Very Much featuring Sandy Dennis came when her character finally completed her doctoral dissertation: “So much freedom is so damn inhibiting!” Some of us in retirement experience the same sort of confusion, I guess one of the reasons I keep blogging.

In my talk Sunday, I drew a connection between Oliver’s “wildest places” and the “wilderness” as a frequent setting for spiritual enlightenment and pilgrimage in almost all religions.

Warning “your house shall not hold your secret nor shelter your longing,” the Prophet addresses us as “children of space” and seems to anticipate Oliver’s sailing metaphor:

But you, children of space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. …

For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

“Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast.”

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

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

I Live in a Forest Called Atlanta

My shadow on my morning walk.

(Remember, shadows add a hundred pounds!)

You might not guess that I get tired of reading and writing and saying words. Several weeks ago, I dispensed with words for my morning meditation and simply paid attention, reverently, to the trees that I passed on my morning walk. That’s easy to do in Atlanta, where we live, so full of trees.

Shortly after moving here, I tried to glimpse our house from a plane and realized I couldn’t see the houses for the trees. Arriving in my hometown of Los Angeles on that trip, I realized I couldn’t see the trees for the buildings, concrete and asphalt—an exaggeration, of course, but not much.

I distressed my mother by telling a friend that, by contrast, southern California looked bleak and bare. Mom had come from Kansas, and to her California was a verdant paradise.

Atlanta’s streets curve and wind and go up and down because they follow the old paths through the forest created by native peoples, at least according to a book on the history of Greater Atlanta Presbytery. This is the only thing I remember from reading that book, which may be revealing! Those paths have endured a very long time, in reality and in memory.

Saint Thomas More’s fictional Utopians held “that the careful observation of nature and the reflection on it and the reverence that arises from this is a kind of worship very pleasing to God.” This is one of the reasons why I appreciate Celtic spirituality, its “thin places” where and when we may glimpse heaven in earth.

Enya’s “Memory of Trees,” comes to mind, Joni Mitchell’s famous lyrics “You paved Paradise to put up a parking lot,” and of course, Mary Oliver:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields…

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

In college, a tree on campus became my “axis mundi,” center of the world, as I sat beneath it reading texts for my religious studies courses.

As I write this, Wade is at a paper mill in Oregon in his role as an IT product manager for the paper products division of Georgia Pacific. He long ago reminded me that trees are a “renewable resource.” Companies like his go to great lengths to plant new trees where others have given up their lives for human products, otherwise they couldn’t remain in business.

This is true spiritually as well. We can’t spiritually “remain in business” if we forget the gifts of the rain forest as well as the tree outside my window.

As school children we learned the devout Catholic poet Joyce Kilmer’s famed lines, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”

Blogs are written by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

Today, go find a tree to hug.

I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat April 27-May 1, 2020 to which you are welcome: https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://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.

In the Shadow of the Moon

Solar eclipse at your feet!

The coming solar eclipse on August 21 prompts me to tell a story on myself from a partial eclipse some years back, here in Atlanta. I believe I wrote about this in one of my books, but I can’t tell you which one!

I was out running toward the middle of the day when it seemed a little darker than it should be with a cloudless sky.  Then I remembered that the moon was going to be passing between the sun and earth on this day, and apparently at that time.

As I ran, I noticed on the sidewalk beneath my feet tiny crescent shapes of light that appeared to be coming through the leaves overhead, and I laughed to think I was witnessing the eclipse in miniature. I wrote it off to my overactive imagination; probably the sun always filtered through leaves like that, and I had never before noticed.

Months later, in Madison, Wisconsin, I was in the home of a young lesbian couple. At my feet played two tow-headed children, a boy and a girl, and I learned that each woman had given birth to one, with the help of the sperm of gay partners, friends of theirs living on the West coast. It was a remarkable reimagining of what family could be!

I happened to look over at one woman’s home work space, and noticed pinned above her desk several newspaper photos of crescent shapes of light like I had seen during the eclipse. Her photo appeared in one of the news articles beside this phenomenon. As it turned out, she was a meteorologist and she confirmed that what I had “imagined” was in truth, reality!

“It’s like when you put a pinhole at one end of a shoebox to see an eclipse,” she explained. “The light at the other end of the box is what you saw many times over on the sidewalk beneath your feet.”

In his book, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore wrote that imagination is the most underutilized spiritual gift. Saint Ignatius believed that imagination is needed in the spiritual life, and those who have tried his rigorous Spiritual Exercises know the necessity of the imagination in accomplishing them.

Every human endeavor requires imagination. Whether you’re bagging your groceries or developing the theory of relativity, creating a work of art or doing a house repair, imagination opens us to new ways of accomplishing our tasks, being creative, and understanding the universe.

Albert Einstein’s imagination prompted him to suggest that light could bend, demonstrated by Arthur Eddington in documenting the “shifting” positions of two stars during a solar eclipse, an early confirmation of the theory of general relativity.

The Psalmist’s imagination prompted an expectation that God is with us, even in “the valley of the shadow.”

And poet Mary Oliver advises us to “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

My scientific knowledge is, like all other aspects of my knowledge, probably dated. But a few years ago it was reported that astrophysical and cosmological measurements have suggested that the universe is 4% atoms, 25% dark matter, and 70% dark energy, a mysterious energy unrelated to dark matter that holds everything together.*

What that says to me is that we are only seeing with our eyes the manifestation of 4% of what’s here, the 4% of the universe that consists of atoms. We can’t see the 25% that is dark matter, or the 70% that is dark energy.

So, in this cosmic “shadow of the moon,” imagination may take us beyond our eclipsed knowledge and awareness, whether our own imagination or that of visionaries: scientists, artists, mystics, prophets, poets, lovers, and children.

  

Solar eclipse reflected through leaves.

*Thanks to Dennis Overbye’s reporting in The New York Times.

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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.  

A Christmas Memory

"Tree of the Gods"

Christmas morning I awoke from an extremely pleasant dream. I was back in the home I grew up in, in Southern California, with my mom and dad, sister and brother. I looked out of our living room windows, and discovered it had begun to snow, a rarity in L.A. The window frames had a white dusting, as did our deodara outside, a tree that had been our Christmas tree one year. Only checking on its spelling for this post did I discover the term deodara’s  mystical origin, meaning “tree of the gods” in Sanskrit, a sacred forest for Hindu sages.  And “dara” is related to the words Druid and truth!

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I had read once more Truman Capote’s story, “A Christmas Memory.” Some months ago I rescued it from storage in my crawl space, a bit damp from its place of safekeeping. I allowed the boxed edition to dry, and now it has character: a bit warped, like its author and the true life characters he writes about.

I know the story well. For years I read it at Christmastime to a Wednesday night Bible study. I’ve also viewed two film versions, the most memorable having Geraldine Page as the doting and doughty elderly cousin who befriended the author as a boy, otherwise  abandoned until the age of ten.  

One day, late in the fall, she would announce, “Oh, my, it’s fruitcake weather,” and together they assembled the ingredients and prepared the Christmas fruitcakes that they sent to everyone from President & Mrs. Roosevelt to that nice California couple who spent an afternoon on their porch when their car broke down.

As I read the story once more, I was delighted by Capote’s turns of phrase, painting a portrait of a time long past—yes, harsh in its poverty and sad in its way, but with a kind and gentle lilt to its voice that uplifted my spirit.

What surprised me on this reading, however, was the glimpse of grace toward the end of the book, reminding me of another Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, at the end of her story, “Revelation,” of which I wrote in a post entitled “Tricked by Grace.”

The boy and his cousin fashion kites as their Christmas gifts to one another, as they had done the year before, and the year before that.  They go out to fly them with their terrier Queenie in a neighbor’s meadow, when the old woman has a startling revelation, “like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the oven”: 

“My, how foolish I am! You know what I’ve always thought? I’ve always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when He came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as colored glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don’t know it’s getting dark. And it’s been a comfort: to think of that shine taking away all the spooky feeling. But I’ll wager it never happens. I’ll wager at the very end a body realizes that the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are”—her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone—“just what they’ve always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.” 

“As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.”

I thought back on their sacramental preparation of a communion of fruitcakes, and of the many, often women, who consecrated our kitchens with the incense of baking, the breaking of bread, the squeezing of juice. I thought of my mother baking Christmas cookies, red and green, and giving me the “failures,” the ones that didn’t look as good as they tasted, as she sorted them in tins for relatives and friends.

In her poem “Answers,” Mary Oliver envies her unlearned grandmother picking and canning fruits in the kitchen even as Mary “wakened / To books and music and circling philosophies” at the kitchen table, concluding:

My grandmother stood among her kettles and ladles.

Smiling, in faulty grammar,

She praised my fortune and urged my lofty career.

So to please her I studied—but I will remember always

How she poured confusion out, how she cooled and labeled

All the wild sauces of the brimming year.

This poem brings back the aroma of my maternal grandmother’s Swedish pancakes, the colors of my paternal grandmother’s jars of fruits and vegetables at the farm, the salty crunch of the batter on my mother’s fried chicken—and it honors them all as gods bringing order from chaos, as priests and poets and psalmists reminding us to “taste and see that the Lord is good,” even as we are, in Mary Oliver’s words, “sorting through volumes of answers / That could not solve the mystery of the trees.”

We didn’t have a Christmas tree this year, because we are downsizing, packing, and moving. But I had the mystery of home and our deodara in my dream. And, as I fixed breakfast for us, I heard Eugene Peterson (The Message) on the radio program “On Being” say, “Prayer matures into the practice of memory.”

I thought of a spiritual formation program paper I’d read earlier in the week by a minister who works with the elderly, and how those with dementia and Alzheimer’s seem to remember the ritual of Communion, even as they forget so much else.

The Lord has already shown herself.

Please make an end-of-the-year tax-deductible contribution to this blog ministry by clicking on or copying and pasting in your web browser:

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description. 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!

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

The Road Not Taken

As a result of an e-mail conversation about something on my blog, poet and preacher J. Barrie Shepherd sent me his delightful book, Whatever Happened to Delight? Preaching the Gospel in Poetry and Parables. It inspired me to reclaim excerpts from a reflection I wrote for a Christian poetry spiritual formation course, which here I blend with thoughts from Barrie's book, properly credited in text.

The road not taken. The poet Robert Frost’s famous line has been used so often, many think of it as a cliché. But it yet carries poetic power, because many, if not most, if not all of us have roads not taken in our lives, roads whose destinations are hidden from us, just as the lion Aslan explains to the children in The Narnia Chronicles that we are not told what might have been.

In college I was a double major: English Literature and Religious Studies. I loved literature but I loved God more, and though literature might have been the safer path for someone who was gay, introverted, and a writer, the devotion, service, and activism of ministry was the higher calling and I went on to seminary and ministry. 

Let us risk the wildest places,
Lest we go down in comfort, and despair. 

Mary Oliver writes this about the explorer Magellan.

I confess literature and religion have never been that far apart for me, nor in reality. Both are at their best when they tell a story. Both are at their best when, even deconstructed or dymythologized, they reveal a better, deeper, and more meaningful story.

Analysis reveals the parts—the bones, the sinews, the surfaces—without breathing life into the whole, without giving it a heart that pumps life through the body, without creating soul. Just as a human skeleton hanging in a medical classroom is far from life as we know it, theology worked out on paper or chalkboard or worse, by church votes, loses its liveliness when it is far from the story, the myth, the Word made flesh.

“If God had wanted to appeal directly to our minds, Mary would have written a book instead of bearing a child,” Barrie quotes The Ironic Christian’s Companion by Patrick Henry.

My youthful poetry expressed my passionate, earnest self. My early prose wanted to tell a story—often my story, disguised. Novelist Saul Bellow has said that “Fiction is the higher autobiography.” The most puzzling comment I received from a reader of my first (unpublished) novel was, “What are you trying to say?” I wasn’t trying to “say” anything so much as tell a story.

Barrie mentions Ruben Alves’ observation “that the verbs ‘to explain’ or ‘to explicate’ come from Latin roots that mean to flatten, to spread out, to make level,” and then quotes Peter Gomes to the effect that at first, in preaching, he felt called to explain, and later to apologize, but only toward the end of his preaching career to celebrate “the holy mysteries of the faith.” Gomes concludes, “We are saved by our metaphors, not our metaphysics.”

My poetry became liturgies and my prose became sermons and subsequently, a dozen published non-fiction books focused on the biblical stories, stories of others, and my own stories. Along the way I’ve written four unpublished novels as well, the last of which is my life revisited, as if I had pursued “the road not taken,” resisting ministry and writing fiction.

Writing is my central spiritual discipline. Kathleen Norris considers writing her form of lectio divina. This is where and when and how I figure out the why and the who. Spiritual pilgrims once meandered here and there on their way to holy sites, and that’s what I do, in words, hoping that I might happen onto a sacred place or two in the process, perhaps encounter God, or the Word made flesh, or the Spirit’s pentecostal gift.

I do not outline beforehand, I do not “plan” the outcome, but “wait for the Lord” and the serendipitous gifts of water from rock, manna from sky, quails overhead, a still, small voice or “the sound of sheer silence,” the providential beauty of lilies, the thrill of promised land, the in-breaking commonwealth of God, the birthpangs of all creation. Like Emily Dickinson, I don’t need to go somewhere to witness these wonders—I experience them in my room, in my case, a tiny office off the garage with windows to see outside.

And, according to Barrie, “Emily Dickinson once wrote in a letter to a friend that ‘consider the lilies of the field’ was the one commandment she had never disobeyed.”

 “We are put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love,” the mystical poet William Blake wrote.  Oliver includes an homage to Blake in her poem The Swan, declaring, 

The path to heaven

doesn’t lie down in flat miles.

It’s in the imagination

with which you perceive

this world,

and the gestures

with which you honor it.

Thank God for poets and visionaries, artists and children, cooks and gardeners, mystics and musicians, scientists and writers, professors and preachers, mentors and colleagues, contemplatives and activists, who have helped us, who have helped me, see the big picture, the grand scheme, the expanding universe, the enlarging heart—and where I belong.

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

Finding Walden Where You Are

I offer an excerpt from my paper for a Christian Poetry weekend course I recently took through the Spiritual Formation program of Columbia Seminary. The paper was to be about one’s own spiritual pilgrimage. 

Writing is my central spiritual discipline. Kathleen Norris considers writing her form of lectio divina. This is where and when and how I figure out the why and the who. The word “saunter” is believed to come from the practice of spiritual pilgrims meandering here and there on their way to holy sites, and that’s what I do, in words, hoping that I might happen onto a sacred place or two in the process, perhaps encounter God, or the Word made flesh, or the Spirit’s pentecostal gift.

I do not outline beforehand, I do not “plan” the outcome, but “wait for the Lord” and the serendipitous gifts of water from rock, manna from sky, quails overhead, a still, small voice or “the sound of sheer silence,” the providential beauty of lilies, the promised land and commonwealth of God, the birthpangs of all creation.

Like Emily Dickinson, I don’t need to go somewhere to witness these wonders—I experience them in my room, in my case, a tiny office off the garage with a window to see outside. I identify with Mary Oliver’s reaction to friends suggesting she visit Walden, in her poem of that name.  I checked Mapquest and found she lives just three hours from Thoreau’s paradise, the transcendentalist prophet whom Oliver characterizes:

They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:

How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

She resists making the trip, realizing she can do so in her imagination, reminded by his book of that name:

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

I understand her resistance to friends’ suggestions she go there, because some of my friends have suggested I visit the monastery in nearby Conyers, when indeed, I live in some ways a more monastic lifestyle than if I had been a monk! Such is the life of the writer, the self-employed, those who work from home. 

And besides, as I tell those attending my workshops and retreats, the “trick” is finding Walden “where you are,” finding the contemplative life within one’s own space and schedule and work.

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

To Be or Not to Be

For Hamlet, as for many young people, “that is the question.” In my sixties, I experience it more as a simple declaratory sentence.

I am more passionate than ever. But the often conflicting and tumultuous passions of my youth had an either-or, sometimes judgmental edge to them, rather than a both-and, welcoming quality. Choices had to be made. Nothing was worse than fence-sitting or being middle of the road, or, in the case of the church of Laodicea in Revelation, being lukewarm.

Older, presenting to church audiences a progressive understanding of sexuality, gender, and also spirituality as broad spectrums of identity and experience, I sometimes pointed to my slacks, saying, “I wish we had the same tolerance for ambiguity that my dry cleaner has. Every time I get these pants back, the crease line is in a different place.”

The lines are always changing. Boundaries too. And our places along those spectrums, lines, and boundaries. As an old hymn about God’s commonwealth declares: 

New occasions teach new duties,

Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still and onward,

Who would keep abreast of truth.

Many of us had our Christianity questioned by those who wouldn’t let go of their certainties: There is “One Way”: to read the Bible, to follow Jesus, to be saved. There is one Christian lifestyle. You can’t be Christian and (fill in the blank: gay, agnostic, divorced, use contraceptives, etc.). 

Orthodoxy literally means “straight or right opinion,” and I like to joke that I can’t even think straight. My “fundamentals” of faith would be very different from those who claim a fundamentalist identity. So too my understanding of “evangelical.” I think Jesus would differ from them as well.

We often feel pressure to make choices that conform to those of peers, parents, partners, or preachers. We may question our very lives: “To be or not to be?”

We have “not been” most of eternity. Best to make the best of being now.  In the words of poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”

Related posts:

Has Been

A Personal Axis Mundi

Spiritual Yearnings

“All Theology Is a Kind of Birthday”

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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 personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Why Do We Have to Be Reminded?

In memory of Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, among those killed at the Nairobi mall.

Coming out of the first evening of a weekend poetry course featuring Mary Oliver and Thomas Merton last Thursday, heading toward my car, I heard a loud rustling and looked to see a huge owl half-leaping, half-flying from the pavement to the top of a chain link fence that bordered the parking lot and a small wild area beyond. I could see its eyes, but they were not fixed on me, so I turned to the opposite horizon to see what it was staring at and saw a huge full moon rising, whose light shortly silhouetted a slowly ascending jet.

For those familiar with Mary Oliver’s poetry, attending to the owl and the moon could be considered a “Mary Oliver moment.” Her poetry contains a vast zoo of critters and a lifetime subscription to National Geographic images. But the ascending jet made me think of Merton’s poetic concerns about encroaching “civilization” as well as human vulnerability and glory.

The basic message of the course was that poets remind us to look and to listen. Why do we have to be reminded to look? Well, to see, of course! Why do we have to be reminded to listen? Well, to hear, of course! Or savor or smell or feel! Jesus reminded his students to watch and listen, and the Psalmist reminded worshipers to taste and smell and touch.

Poets and preachers, contemplatives and prophets, mystics and artists and scientists—all urge us: Look! Listen! Pay attention! Be mindful! Be aware—be VERY aware!

One might think that with all the communication devices we have that seeing and hearing would be our least unused senses, but in truth we are flooded with images and sounds, overwhelming the mere sprinkling needed to ensure a harvest in reflection. Thus focus is the key, and a few carefully chosen and crafted words, whether of poetry or scripture or (might I daresay) blog, can prove helpful.

A great example of focus can be found along Atlanta’s BeltLine, which exhibits many temporary outdoor works by artists. Look at the photo at the top of this post. What do you see? Metal and glass debris strewn over more than twenty feet? (That’s our dog Hobbes in the foreground for perspective.)

Yet if you walk up to it and look through the empty frame provided, as below, you will see a face, a portrait of local glass artist Matt Janke. A sign beside the frame explains, “Object of Ma(tt)n challenges the notion that materials, ideas, places and people within Life are disconnected. After gathering together discarded items from all areas of Atlanta, artist William Massey shows that our perspective is our portrait—separate or together, clutter or culture, divided or One.”

That’s pretty much the gist of what the spiritual formation poetry class reminded me this past weekend, from the poetry and professor as well as from fellow participants and our morning and evening prayers.

Related Posts:

Dolphins and Sharks

Seeing Things as if for the First Time

Spiritual Picassos

Related upcoming morning retreat in Dallas, TX, Nov. 9:

Seeing as if for the First Time

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

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 personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Spiritual Arboretums

Walking and running along Atlanta’s BeltLine, while others wheel and roll, has given me a new appreciation for the term “arboretum.” I always thought of arboretums as enclosed spaces with exotic, tropical plants, like the ones in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and multiple other cities I have lived or visited.

The Beltline is an abandoned railroad track being transformed into a walkway that encircles the city and connects neighborhoods. Planting native grasses, wildflowers, shrubs and trees along this path, Trees Atlanta and the Atlanta BeltLine Arboretum explain their efforts with signs like the one pictured above, broadening my understanding of the term: 

ar-bo-re-tum / noun - A botanical garden devoted to trees or a place where an extensive variety of woody plants are cultivated for scientific, educational, and ornamental purposes.

When doing a five or ten-mile run, I have a lot of time to meditate on such words, and of course my mind goes to things spiritual, and I find myself amplifying it to read, “cultivated for scientific, educational, ornamental, and spiritual purposes.”

As I once thought of an arboretum as a confined and controlled environment, many of us think of a house of worship as a kind of spiritual arboretum, an enclosed space or sanctuary in which delicate hothouse plants are cultivated—plants that could not survive outside, either in their communities or the world.  And it is true, many worshipers wilt at the notion of being involved outside their churches, temples, and mosques. I’ve been told that some plants do better in pots, so being “potted” in one place might benefit some—a good reason, perhaps, for the monastic vow of “stability.”

But I need the outside, which is why I run outside rather than use a treadmill in a gym. In my first book, Uncommon Calling, I wrote that “though the church could give sanctuary to so much of me and so many of my concerns, it was to the sanctuary of the seashore that I fled to reflect on the relationship of my sexuality and spirituality. … Particularly at sunset and twilight, the colors of water and sky joined the rhythm of the waves to mete out God’s grace in language both more primitive and profound than that of liturgies.”

I could identify with William Blake’s reservations about church as he remembered his youthful innocence in this Song of Experience, “The Garden of Love”: 

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

Affirming that houses of worship can also be helpful, Mahatma Gandhi contrasted their limitations with the limitless sky: 

Churches, mosques, and temples which cover so much hypocrisy and humbug and shut the poorest out of them seem but a mockery of God and His worship when one sees the eternally renewed temple of worship under the vast blue canopy inviting every one of us to real worship, instead of abusing His name by quarrelling in the name of religion. 

Celtic Christianity saw the effects of grace and redemption not only in Christ and church but in creation, a creation that the apostle Paul—a progressive in spite of his blindspots and ours—described in Romans 1 as making God “plain” even to Gentiles, in which divinity is “seen through the things God has made.” “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” the gay Catholic priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins affirmed.

Mary Oliver captures an aspect of the contemplative life: 

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields.

When our Good Shepherd prompts us to lie down in green pastures and leads us beside still waters, restoring our souls, we better understand the assurance of the Psalmist: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.”

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

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 personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

"All Theology Is a Kind of Birthday"

All theology is a kind of birthday

Each one who is born

Comes into the world as a question

For which old answers

Are not sufficient. 

Maybe you will do what I did when I read this first stanza of Thomas Merton’s “Untitled Poem.” Like a puzzling koan, it focuses my mind, causing me to read it again and again to glean its meanings before proceeding to the additional pages of the poem. Perhaps you too will stop at the words above, and that’s okay, because they’re much more profound than what I can offer.

Thomas Merton and Mary Oliver and the apostle Paul have joined me of late for morning prayers. I’ve read at least nine of Merton’s books, but this is my first exposure to his poetry. I’ve read occasional Oliver poems, but not a lifetime collection. I’m reading them for a Columbia Seminary Spiritual Formation weekend course on Christian Poetry and the Christian Journey: Illumination and Mysticism in Blake, Hopkins, Merton, Levertov, and Oliver that I will be attending later this month.

And I’m reading Paul because I created morning and evening prayers for the program’s recent Spiritual Immersion course, and the professor discussing New Testament spirituality suggested using liturgical elements from Colossians and Philippians, and that got me started again on Paul.

Though Tom and Mary seem to inhabit the same countryside, bringing Tom, Mary, and Paul into dialogue is only possible, perhaps, in meditation. All can be inscrutable (at least to me), and all can create golden one-liners and inspiring spiritual metaphors. Mary has always seemed free to me, borrowing from nature as much or more than from tradition, but Tom and Paul came to their freedom later in life.

Tom’s freedom makes his later poetry more accessible to me, his spirituality broader and more welcoming. Paul’s freedom makes his spirituality soar beyond the confines of his own traditional religion, and I better realize why the mystical Christ seems so important to him—a mythologized Christ helped him bust free from his religious rigidity.

My own experience is the opposite of Paul’s: I needed to bust free from the religious rigidity of a mythologized Christ sacrificed for sins to reclaim the life and teachings and belovedness of Jesus. “For freedom Christ has set us free.” Paul’s words about Christ are also true for me about Jesus. Yet at the same time, I do love Paul’s understandings of our unity with Christ and our spiritual community as Christ’s body, indivisible by condition or culture, sharing burdens and joys with one another, and sharing Christ’s spiritual inheritance as God’s children.

Mary Oliver best captures what I hope from life in these words from her poems “When Death Comes” and “October”: 

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder

if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,

or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited the world.

…

Look, I want to love this world

as though it’s the last chance I’m ever going to get

to be alive

and know it.

Posts about 9/11 in the U.S. on today’s anniversary:

9/11: When We Were One

Where Is God?

A post about Chile on today’s 40^th anniversary of their 9/11 coup in 1973:

Redeemed from the Pit

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC. Your donations by mail or credit card are its only means of support, click here. Thank you!

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 personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.