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/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

Souls "Flung Up to Heaven": Maya Angelou and Hildegard of Bingen

This week I am co-leading a contemplative retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. Four years ago on this site, Dewey Weiss Kramer gave an uplifting course on Hildegard of Bingen for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program. I decided to adapt today’s post from my reflections on that experience.

I am writing this in the wake of the news of the death of Maya Angelou, and this propinquity prompts me to note Hildegard and Angelou’s shared recognition of our musical and lyrical needs spiritually, as well as the role that deprivation plays in appreciating those needs. Both Hildegard and Angelou played many roles in life, and both were strong and savvy women, unflinching in challenging injustice as well as carving places for themselves in patriarchal systems and cultures.

Angelou took the wistful title and theme of her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from a poem by African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  As a poor African American girl turned woman from the backwaters of the South, Angelou knew deprivation on multiple levels.

Hildegard, from a wealthy family in Germany, used her privilege to create and defend a group of women religious, but wrote some of her most profound words and theology when her community was deprived of singing in worship by church hierarchy.

I fantasize about the harmony that these giants, Hildegard and Angelou, might make now that both have been “flung up to heaven,” in the words of the title of the latter’s last book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

At nine years of age, Maya Angelou chose to go mute for five years after naming her rapist and believing it was her words that killed him. It could be argued that her six memoirs that followed, perhaps all of her writings, were born out of that silence, a kind of self-imposed spiritual discipline that emulates the contemplative silences of the monastic life.

Silence may have allowed her to listen closely to those around her, better able to capture their choice of words and phrasings; to see life for what it was, better able to be a truth teller in a world of denial and deception; to deeply smell and taste and touch the world, better able to depict scents and flavors and textures; and then to conjure her worldly, earthy, and cultural experience in lyrical but accessible language.

Similarly, Hildegard’s contemplative life empowered her to describe her visions, coaching artists in their design, then to interpret “their truth,” their meaning spiritually and theologically, in her rudimentary Latin, the mystical language of the time.

And, of great interest to this writer, Hildegard listened to the music of the soul, creating her own forms of spiritual music that did not follow the conventions of the day, thus creating an ethereal, unearthly music, music that serves as a haunting reminder of the harmonies inherent in Eden (not far from that of angels) and in the unfallen first human creature, of whom she said, “If he had remained in his original state, the weakness of mortal man would not have been able to endure the power and the resonance of his voice.”  I have some sense of this, having heard Maya Angelou speak and read her work with a musical, resonant, majestic intonation.

We are blessed that Hildegard and Maya both found their voice.

I am one of those persons of whom Hildegard writes “sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of celestial harmony.” Maybe these are echoes of the sound of Eden, as Hildegard suggests, or premonitions of heavenly bliss, or “the music of the spheres.”

I hear that music in lyrical writing, whether poetry or prose. That’s why I was so taken with Hildegard’s prayer, “O ignis Spiritus Paracliti,” which, even without music, sings to me, especially that phrase, “O sweet savor in the breast.” Like the Lord’s Prayer, it would be a worthy part of every liturgy.

Harmony comes from the integrity of body and spirit that I experience with Hildegard in the sacrament of music. Augustine’s reservations about the sensuality of music is the very thing that draws me to it as an instance of the Incarnation of God. Music is the Word made flesh—again.

“The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God,” Hildegard affirms.  Just as for Hildegard encountering one of the Trinity is to encounter all of the Trinity, in my view, to encounter an instance of Incarnation is to encounter all Incarnation.

That’s why Hildegard’s understanding that Incarnation was not the result of The Fall but intended from the beginning makes sense to me, especially as she views Creation itself as an incarnation of God, its fecundity, its greening (viriditas)—in my words, a divine impulse, a holy “oozing,” and the soul’s melody.

And the soul’s melody is not just human, it is in every creature, every atom, in the whole of the cosmos—nothing is truly inert in Hildegard’s view, everything is a “sounding icon” and “vibrations” of God’s self in everything.

As I wrote in Communion of Life:

Our original sin

Is not the seizing of forbidden fruit,

But failing to see

The infinite in the finite,

The luminous, sacred essence

Of the garden;

Failing to revere

The life that gives us life;

Trampling on the taboo,

Sequestering, quantifying,

And qualifying the holy—

The heart of our garden.

Forgive us, earth,

Be merciful in our willful ignorance

As you are gracious in your altruistic nature.

Hold us accountable, and then,

Hold us.

Reading this you will understand why I was so taken with Hildegard’s fresh understanding of human alienation, that the first human transgression was refusing the white flower, the fruit of humility offered by a benevolent God: “Its scent comes to the human’s nostrils, but he does not taste it with his mouth…for he tried to know the wisdom of the Law with his intelligence…but did not perfectly digest it…or fulfill it in full blessedness by the work of his hands. … He did not seek God either by faith or by works.”

  

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you!

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

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

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

Potlatch

As a youth I was fascinated by a custom practiced among Pacific Northwest Native Americans called the Potlatch. I capitalize the Chinook term here, though my OED does not, because it seems every bit as sacred as Christmas and Easter.

Having accumulated much, a person (often a chief) would give away or burn all possessions and start afresh. Though my dictionary implies this was a show of wealth and prestige rather than generosity and humility, I’d say Christmas or any show of charity and humility is practiced with similar mixed motives, so why quibble?

Wade and I have been engaged in a similar practice as we downsize and move to a smaller, more affordable home, though one we hope to improve. I got practice for this in October by emptying my public storage unit in Los Angeles of my parents’ library and a few pieces of their furniture.

I was ruthless in finding new homes for their books, though I did glean three boxes of books and memorabilia to send home. About 35 boxes of books went to a used book store in the suburb where they lived. The furniture went mostly to family, thankfully, though a few pieces found their way to Mexico thanks to my brother’s enterprising neighbor.

My parents were not hoarders in the problematic sense, but they did hoard memories and books. Those “sacramentals” whose stories we knew we often kept, but the ones whose stories have been lost to us easily wound up in the yard sale after my mom’s death. Yet the books also contained “sacramentals”: postcards, photos, news articles, letters, poems, etc. that I needed to remove before giving up the books.

Maya Angelou shared her steely resolve with me through a book of hers I was reading in my morning prayers during that process, one I had found in one of those little lending libraries in a neighbor’s front yard. She could be sentimental and nostalgic, but also realistic and pragmatic, and she helped me recognize the grief and nostalgia of my enterprise as well as its practicality and necessity.

This October pilgrimage prepared me for our December/January Potlatch. Wade, the true materialist of the household, nonetheless loves giving up things just as much as acquiring them, and has made multiple trips to our neighborhood Habitat for Humanity ReStore, delighting its volunteers with every batch of items we will no longer have room for or have fallen into disuse.

As it was my job with my original family to empty my parents’ bookshelves, so too I needed to prune my own overflowing library, an exercise that reveals my present priorities.  My books about theology, church organization, and interim ministry were the easiest to surrender, but the books about spirituality will stay with me for now, including my Henri Nouwen collection.

My collections of books by Gore Vidal and Paulo Coelho, LGBT authors and other contemporary writers I deeply appreciated reading, but can release to keep books that changed my life and make room for those I hope to read. And of course, my volumes of poetry and art will stay. A local seminary library has benefited from my literary Potlatch.

My many boxes of personal and professional files I am still sorting for my archive at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion at the Pacific School of Religion. Many boxes were sent years ago, many are still to be reviewed. I have given up my desire for putting together a scrapbook, wanting rather to “move on” rather than be kept in the past.

These archives serve as the “final resting place” of the papers of such folk and ministries as John McNeill, Janie Spahr, and the Lazarus Project (to name a few) and I would urge you to make a donation to preserve them, and include them in your will. Write to CLGS, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94709, call toll-free 800-999-0528, email clgs@clgs.org, or visit http://www.clgs.org.

The first sermon I gave to an LGBT congregation, MCC Hartford in 1974, was entitled “Letting Go.” Coming Out is ultimately about letting go, whether coming out sexually or coming out spiritually. In a post entitled “Spiritual Picassos,” I described spirituality as a process like Picasso’s life’s work, letting go of unnecessary lines in his paintings and drawings to suggest the essence of his subject.

In October I found a big box of my childhood writings: stories and poetry. When I mentioned I was surprised that there were so many, my brother reminded me, “You were always writing stories.” Somewhat arbitrarily, I selected a few for my archive and tossed the rest, so impatient was I to let go of the dross of my life!

However, one story I rescued long ago was my first childhood attempt to write a story from the Bible, the story of Joseph and his brothers. His having to let go of his family, country, safety and security, believing in his dreams, spoke to my spiritual imagination.

“You intended this for evil,” Joseph later told his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “but God intended it for good.” As I think back on my life, disappointed and disregarded by the church alongside my LGBT sisters and brothers, there is no doubt our exclusion was evil, but God has used the injustice for good to those who follow.

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

Who Was That Masked Mystic?

We love our super heroes, from comic books to graphic novels to fantasy films. But what if their strengths or particular gifts were spiritual rather than physical?

Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s SuperMystic!

Instead of Wonder Woman displaying awesome abilities, we could have Wonder Sister, whose sense of awe inspires our own.

Who was that masked man? Why, it was the Lone Contemplative and Two-Spirit soul friend!

To quote Carl McColman’s Big Book of Christian Mysticism: 

Thomas Merton, in his book The Inner Experience, wrote about what he called “masked contemplatives”—ordinary men and women who, although they may never have a formal practice of contemplative prayer, nevertheless cultivate a spirit of openness, of wonder, of resting in God in a place deeper than thought. 

While imagining this post I learned that Maya Angelou died. And I thought, what a great example of a “masked contemplative!”

At nine years of age, Angelou chose to go mute for five years after naming her rapist and believing it was her words that killed him. One could say her subsequent memoirs were born in that silence, memoirs that recount her many and serious difficulties, but also celebrate life’s sensual and spiritual delights.

In her book, Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now, she describes having a transforming moment with the help of another masked contemplative, her voice teacher. “In my twenties in San Francisco I became a sophisticate and an acting agnostic,” she explains. “It wasn’t that I had stopped believing in God; it’s just that God didn’t seem to be around the neighborhoods I frequented.”

In class, the teacher had her read a section from Lessons in Truth, a Unity publication, which ended with “God loves me.” To her consternation, he had her read the phrase again and again, until: 

After about the seventh repetition I began to sense that there might be truth in the statement, that there was a possibility that God really did love me. Me, Maya Angelou. I suddenly began to cry at the grandness of it all. I knew that if God loved me, then I could do wonderful things… 

And of course, she did.

She adds: 

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I’m a spring leaf trembling in anticipation. 

+++

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution. Perhaps your congregation might include it in your mission budget. Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

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