At Most a Lighthouse Can Beam an Instant

A friend caught my surprise when the congregation

applauded my ordination at Christ Covenant MCC, October 2, 2005.

I miss a custom I created for myself when living in Southern California. New Year’s Eve parties left me wanting some more meaningful way of observing the passing of an old year and the welcome of a new year. I did not want to “pray in” the new year as we did in my Baptist church with us kids keeping one eye open to see the sanctuary clock silently clap its hands together on the number 12. 

But the ticking of a clock or the descent of a ball in Times Square felt artificial, so I began watching the sun set as I walked along the beach in Santa Monica every New Year’s Eve. I would spend the time revisiting the events of the past year and imagining what the new year might bring, thanking God for the good and the bad as well as the possibilities. It was something I could do alone, well before the parties. And it felt more natural. 

This bit of shoreline is the sanctuary where, in college, I ruminated on my sexuality, spirituality, and call to ministry. This is where I thought I’d like to be reincarnated as a seagull so I could stay near the shore and see my friends on the beach occasionally! This is where I stumbled onto a gay meeting place long before I knew about gay bars. This is where, on a day off from my church work, I would do a long run and work out on the outdoor gymnastic bars. 

This is a walk I’ve shared with many friends, including some of you, and others you might know, such as John Boswell, Isabel Rogers, and Malcolm Boyd. This is the walk that Henri Nouwen declined, insisting instead that we sit down on my sofa and “have a really good talk”! 

This is where I walked weekly on Thursday evenings with a partner to share whatever was on our minds and hearts. This is where we walked one Easter after worship, ending up at Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s hangout, the S. S. Friendship, bumping into an old friend there whose partner we learned had died the previous week, who gave me the Easter message I needed to hear, “He died in my arms. I felt him leave his body. That’s why I’m sure I’ll see him again.” 

This is where I took my mom and her dog for her last walk along the shore a few weeks before she died, where she mischievously chose an ice cream cone over lunch. And this is where at least some of my ashes will be scattered. 

Though I live far from that shore now, I go there often. 

There is no lighthouse there, but in college I composed this poem using the metaphor, which feels all the more apt in later life: 

            To Be the Sea 

The sea beside, I stand alone,

By seasons, wait and search

To be discovered and to discover

In boundless quest.

The sea has all at any time—

No search nor wait.

 

At most a lighthouse

Can beam an instant

Before bowing to the sea.

 

This post originally appeared as “New Year” on January 1, 2014.

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My final post on my blog “Progressive Christian Reflections” will occur next Wednesday, June 30, 2021. More than ten years of posts will remain available to you on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and I encourage you to enjoy them. I regret that I never created an index of post titles, but the search engine in the upper left corner of my blog can help you find posts of interest by typing in a subject, topic, name, scripture reference, religious season or holy day. Or you may work through them by year and month listed in the right column. 

Though they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to be read meaningfully at any point in time. You may continue to contact me at my email address used by the delivery service or by leaving a comment on a particular post. FeedBurner has announced it will discontinue all subscription services sometime in July, the occasion for my timing. It has been a pleasure writing this blog, but now, I believe, is a time for silence, something I considered when writing the Zen series. 

I assure you I am well, content, and thankful to God for this extension of my ministry. Thank you for your interest, comments, correspondence, and contributions. I am grateful to Metropolitan Community Churches for recognizing this blog as an “Emerging Ministry” and ProgressiveChristianity.org for reposting many of my reflections, as well as the dozens of Facebook pages that allowed me to provide links to particular posts. I am grateful for the free services of Blogspot, Google, Facebook, and the delivery service, FeedBurner. I am grateful for artist and friend Becki Jayne Harrelson and my husband Wade Jones for their technical and moral support. 

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

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Ormewood Park Presbyterian--R.I.P.

Howard, Michael, Mark, Chris, Peter at OPPC in 1994

I have just come from a funeral for my Presbyterian church. I’ve cried less at funerals of dear friends. Every hymn, every scripture, every memory, every familiar and unfamiliar face made me want to weep inconsolably, tugging at the proverbial heart strings. I held back, lest I terrify those around me. Blessed I was to be surrounded by longtime friends who felt much the same.

The sanctuary of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church was packed with many generations of its membership for the final service, April 3, 2016. The only other times I’ve seen it filled was for its 100^th anniversary a few years ago and in 1994, for my then partner’s and my “Ceremony of the Heart.”

A love story always has a beginning, even with a church. When Mark King and I moved to Atlanta in 1993 for his job as executive director of AIDS Survival Project, we began looking for a church home where we could be open and honest about our relationship. We visited several welcoming congregations, but we found ourselves drawn to the small Presbyterian congregation at the corner of Woodland and Delaware. We moved to the neighborhood, Ormewood Park, largely because of the church.

The members were warm and friendly, both young and old, maybe especially the elderly. There was already a handful of gay and lesbian members and leaders of the church. It would be several years before it formally became one of the few More Light churches in the South, at Mark’s urging in a letter to its Session.

The pastor, Peter Denlea, a retired Navy bomber pilot for whom this was a second career, grappled personally with scriptures in every sermon—still a scrapper from his days as an Irish Catholic youth in Boston’s Southie neighborhood. During worship, he would invite us all to wrestle with a biblical text until it blessed us. The congregation was enjoying a renaissance.

Peter eagerly created and celebrated our “Ceremony of the Heart” with “God’s glorious gadfly” and LGBT/AIDS activist Howard Warren on October 30, 1994. My dear friend Michael Morgan served as organist. The congregation turned out in full, and that, with Mark’s family from Shreveport and our friends (many attending an AIDS conference in the city that weekend) filled the sanctuary.

When other Presbyterian pastors got wind of it, they called Peter to account, urging the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta to reprimand him and nullify our blessing, which, as then Central Presbyterian pastor Ted Wardlaw told me at the time, was “like trying to undo the ringing of a bell.” This gave Peter a chance on the floor of presbytery—like his namesake in regard to baptizing Gentiles in Acts 10 & 11—to defend his decision and us by giving a persuasive speech that prompted a resounding ovation and a refusal to press charges.

Today, as he left for his assisted living facility, where he still offers a friendly touch and ear to his neighbors, Peter—as straight as God can make a man—kissed me full on the lips in saying goodbye.

The church went on to be served by several capable pastors, but Peter was a hard act to follow. They continued his welcoming legacy by later attracting transgender members, thanks to one-time parish associate, Erin Swenson.  We were grateful that she led us in a conversation in place of a sermon on the Sunday following 9/11.

Though I liked the congregation, I began to feel that formal worship was not the best way for us to be a spiritual community. Then I was given opportunities to serve others spiritually in a way I could not serve Presbyterians. Thanks to OPPC, I stayed on the rolls as a member even as I served Atlanta’s Midtown Spiritual Community and subsequently, MCC, and now as your progressive Christian blogger!

Perhaps my grief is deepened by feelings of loss of the entire denomination, whose timid and tepid “welcome” of LGBT people is much less than hoped for in my 40+ years of activism within it. I am dissatisfied that it still protects the “conscience” of those who oppose us, those same people who refused to protect the conscience of our supporters. Prejudice and bigotry have no right of conscience in my possibly jaundiced view. (Grey Panthers founder Maggie Kuhn said that the advantage of being a “senior” is that you can say what you really think!)

Though the presbytery plans a “re-branding” of OPPC, which makes me think of branding cattle, Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church will also be a hard act to follow. Its members and leaders and pastors should be proud of its ministry and witness and service.

For me personally, the church not only celebrated that “ceremony of the heart,” but supported me through the brokenness of my heart when my relationship with Mark ended and my mother died within weeks of each other.

Churches are the repositories of memorable life events of all they’ve welcomed. That hallows them, and gives us a taste of the eternal.

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

The Gospel of Glee

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

In thanksgiving to God for the life, ministry, art, and friendship of Bill Silver, a fellow openly gay candidate for ministry in the Presbyterian Church in 1975.

For another blog and another purpose, I recounted Jesus telling his disciples “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” It is the story of a widow—vulnerable because of her lack of marital status as well as her gender—seeking justice from an unjust judge, a judge who cares neither for God nor people. For a while the judge refuses, but finally concludes, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming” (Luke 18:4-5).  Jesus’ point is that no one should feel discouraged from praying for the good, because God is all the more swift to grant justice.

God’s swift justice, however, is nonetheless retarded by unjust judges. Jesus’ parable has given me heart in our struggle to persuade the church that it has unjustly judged and excluded lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Like the persistent widow, meeting after meeting, in every denomination, our movement has petitioned for justice—membership, ministry, marriage. After one defeat, one of the last things my supportive father said to me before his death in 1991 was, “The next time you go tilting at windmills, I hope they fall down!” It seems finally we have worn down resistance in several denominations. The windmills are falling.

Yet the ratification of an amendment to the Presbyterian Church’s constitution last week that plucks out the prohibition of LGBT ordination is a mere whisper of justice. The prohibition that dared not speak our name (requiring heterosexual marriage or chastity for ordination) is replaced by an affirmation that also dares not speak our name!

I found myself grieving and angry over hundreds of friends and colleagues who did not live to see this sliver of “More Light” dawn on a church in which they had been raised to believe they belonged but who died being told they did not.

But I didn’t feel my rage at “justice delayed / justice denied” until I watched the Glee episode “Prom Queen” broadcast the same Tuesday evening of the deciding presbytery votes. A vision of God’s commonwealth always makes reality pale in comparison. Though I initially resisted becoming a fan, I believe the program is the most uplifting hour on television. Glee blessedly proclaims the Gospel the church has resisted, in one way or another, throughout our history—that all of us belong, equally, of whatever color, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, gender.

An artist who proclaimed a similar Gospel was Vincent van Gogh, but only after he was removed by the institutional church from his pulpit as a Calvinist minister because he identified too much with the poor and marginalized he had been sent to serve. He went through an idle wilderness period to discern his new call, as a painter of the overlooked and marginalized. His sermons, he wrote to his brother Theo, would be his paintings, offering the consolation that the Christian religion once gave.

Glee gives me the consolation and the inspiration the church is called to offer. When the church fails, Jesus speaks to us any way he can.