Three Prayers for Lent

O God,

I lack a certain courage :

to risk abandoning all my closets

to fulfill life’s dreams,

giving up securities, pretensions,

presumptions, indulgences,

fears—especially fears—

to be all you claim I am,

to be all you call me to be,

to be all you hope for me.

I dawdle at the starting line,

telling myself I’ll begin tomorrow.

Or, part way through the race,

I decide, I deserve a break today,

and find it difficult to limit that break

to time enough to rest and restore myself

to run again.

Dear God,

Jesus fought the good fight,

finished his race,

and kept faith with his dreams

of your commonwealth.

Why do you give me this model, God?

It’s like comparing my body to Olympic athletes,

or my ministry to Mother Teresa’s,

or my sacrifice to martyred saints in Central America!

I can’t give it all, can I, Lord?

I can’t sacrifice all for the commonwealth of God, can I?

“Seek first God’s kingdom…,

and all these things shall be yours as well.”

Jesus, is this true?

Did you have all you needed

as you gave everything to finish the race?

It’s so easy to say prayers, God,

so difficult to translate ours words to actions.

Your Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

We nailed him,

we suffocated him,

we buried him,

in part because we were so damned jealous

that he did something we couldn’t :

he lived out his prayer life.

When he prayed “Thy kingdom come”

he meant it,

he preached it,

he lived as its citizen

and became its King.

We mocked him

by making his throne a cross

because we thought he mocked us,

making it seem so easy to be your children, God.

Though tempted as we are,

he, in prayer and fasting,

waited on your word,

refused to tempt your love,

and worshiped only you.

O God,

forgive me for not waiting,

forgive me for tempting you,

forgive my worship of idols.

Teach me to listen for your word,

trust in your love,

and worship in spirit and in truth.

Remind me that Jesus is not an only child,

nor your kingdom’s only citizen.

May I live up to my inheritance as your child

and as a citizen of your commonwealth,

through Jesus Christ, who leads my way.

Amen.

Dear Jesus,

sometimes we expect too much sanctuary

within the church.

We want a womb,

a warm, retreat experience,

not harsh reality

of needy people

and petty politics,

ecclesiastical or societal,

which may lead to a tomb

as it did for you.

But the kingdom of heaven lay beyond

your forty-day prayer retreat in the wilderness, Jesus.

The commonwealth of God lay within

your interactions with the world that followed.

The commonwealth you preached, Jesus,

is in our midst

as healing occurs among us.

And healing comes

as you, the Christ, are in the world,

not in retreat,

nor entombed

either by calcified doctrines

or grave doubt.

You taught that for us to pray,

for us to find healing for ourselves,

is not enough.

“Faith without works is dead.”

Faith without work is death.

Dear Jesus,

Keep me from resting in peace,

a self-satisfied smile on my face,

while others hunger for my touch

as a member of your Body,

the Body of Christ,

healer of this world.

Amen.

These are prayers Day 20, Day 41, and Day 46 from my book Coming Out to God: Prayers for Lesbians and Gay Men, Their Families and Friends, published by Westminster/John Knox Press in 1991. Each prayer was broken into phrases not out of poetic pretensions but to slow the reader. I often refer to God’s “kingdom” as a “commonwealth” in which everything is shared, including our common spiritual wealth. The only change I’ve made is substituting “Olympic athletes” in the first prayer for the name of a well-known body builder of the time, and this, contrasted with the reference to Mother Teresa, demonstrates the longevity of compassion over other accomplishments. The second prayer’s mention of suffocation refers to how victims of crucifixion die: their bodies eventually sag from exhaustion and cut off the flow of air to the lungs. The final lines of the second prayer’s first section refer to Jesus’ three temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). The photo is a shadow on our deck I noticed days ago during my morning prayers.

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

Transforming Negatives to Positives

Bill Silver with his cat in his New York City 

rooftop garden, which he cultivated. 

I believe I took this picture in the late 70's or early 80's.

In honor of Pride month, this is the final of four posts adapted from a Meekhof Lecture I gave at Newport Presbyterian Church in Bellevue (WA), January 11, 2014, regarding the meaning of the LGBT movement for the broader church. Next week, a postscript to this series: “Sexually Active and Spiritually Active.”

When Union Theological seminarian Bill Silver came out as gay, sending celebrative birth announcements to all of his friends, and New York City Presbytery asked the 1976 Baltimore General Assembly for “definitive guidance” as to how to handle his candidacy for ordination to the Presbyterian ministry, they opened this Pandora’s jar of challenges: xenophobia, inertia, erotophobia, pleasure, progressive interpretations of scripture, gender dysphoria, ordination, and marriage.

Yet I believe that all of these challenges have proved blessings for the church. They have given a sometimes dysfunctional church an opportunity to talk about needful things: our fear of being inclusive, our resistance to change, our discomfort with embodiment and sexuality, our mixed feelings about pleasure, our differing interpretations of scripture, our gender dysphoria, and what ordination and marriage mean to us.

One challenge that was not in that initial Pandora’s Box that the church feared was HIV and AIDS, which highlighted our fears of disease and death. In its fear of homosexuality with its attendant challenges, too many in the church thought of AIDS either as God’s punishment or as a natural, even deserving curbing of what they considered unnatural.

What AIDS did—and I would quickly add my belief, not by divine plan—what AIDS did was reveal the heartlessness of too many but not all Christians, as well as the compassion of many, many lesbians and gay men, who came to the aid of the sick and dying of all kinds, and the failure of both government and society to care for marginalized or undervalued citizens.

AIDS also opened church doors for many to come out as LGBT or as families, friends, and allies of the LGBT community. Only as the church realized it too had AIDS did it recognize, in Mother Teresa’s phrase, “Christ in a distressing disguise.”

So what is the Hope left in Pandora’s jar? I have no idea what Pandora’s Hope might be, but I have many ideas about “the Hope to which God has called us,” in the words of the apostle Paul, and the Hope to which Jesus called us in the Gospel of John, “that we may be one,” even as he is one with God and with us, as well as his promise of Holy Spirit as Paraclete: an advocate for victims, for the marginalized, for the undervalued.

A couple of verses in the first chapter of Paul’s epistle to the Romans got overused over the past four decades as a weapon to resist and reject same-gender loving people. If only we had concentrated on the rest of Paul’s letter, which celebrates God’s grace revealed by Jesus.

Jesus said that what comes out of a person’s heart is what is spiritually significant, spending his time with religious outcasts, challenging the religious authorities who excluded them, sending his spirit upon the Church at Pentecost, a Spirit that spoke in the languages of strangers, a Spirit that would baptize unjudaized Gentiles into a community that grew spiritually and numerically by incorporating more and more diversity throughout the past two millennia.

“Nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus,” the apostle Paul thus affirmed in Romans. “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.”

In his book, Care of the Soul, Thomas Moore says that everything we experience, good and bad, shapes our souls. I believe this is another way of saying “All things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.” We have a context in which to make sense of all that we experience. One context is our relationship with God. Another context is God’s purpose, as we know it through the teachings of Jesus.

One of The New Yorker magazine’s quips once quoted a title of a hymn in The Presbyterian Hymnal followed by a reference to its meter: “God Is Working His Purpose Out” on one line, and on the next, Purpose Irregular. The magazine’s wry comment was, “How true.”

So how do we understand God’s purpose opening Pandora’s jar, unleashing the challenges of the church dealing with homosexuality? What might God’s purpose be in revealing our xenophobia, inertia, erotophobia, suspicion of pleasure, resistance to progressive biblical views, gender dysphoria, and defensive and exclusive attitudes about ordination and marriage?

In the days when most film processing meant transforming negatives to photographs, Henri Nouwen used the metaphor for the spiritual life as transforming negatives to positives. Thus our fear of the stranger may be transformed by another Pentecost embracing diversity and “the least of these.” A vision of God’s Spirit in LGBT people may overcome our resistance to change, causing us to welcome the progress of the inbreaking kingdom or commonwealth of God.

Sexuality and pleasure may be opportunities to refresh our belief in creation, incarnation, and resurrection. Progressive interpretations of scripture will lead us to the truth beneath the truths, the Word (with a capital “W”) within the words. Overcoming our gender dysphoria will liberate us from restrictive gender expectations. And lastly, we may finally let go of our defensive and exclusive postures regarding ordination and marriage, enabling more people to enter either or both of these blessed estates.

I believe that everything can connect us to the love of God in Jesus, including diversity, progress, sexuality, pleasure, progressive biblical interpretations and theology, freedom from gender expectations, and the membership, ministries, and marriages of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. That is the hope to which God has called us.

And we may take comfort that the past 40 year sojourn in the wilderness of homophobia has led us to a better place, if not a Promised Land. We should not regret what has been, but rejoice at what will be.

I urge you to make a donation to and/or attend these once-in-a-lifetime ingatherings of LGBT saints and allies:

Rolling the Stone Away

Oct 31-Nov 2, 2017

St. Louis Airport Marriott

https://rollingthestoneaway.org/

40th Celebration of LGBTQ Lives at Kirkridge

Sept 8-10, 2017

Kirkridge Retreat & Conference Center

http://www.kirkridge.org/?e=event&eventId=26746&rDate=1504878949

To support this blog ministry: 

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

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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!

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

Find Your Orlando

At first I intended only to post this rainbow flag at half-mast in front of a church—so overwhelmed and silenced I was by the carnage at the LGBT nightclub in Orlando this past weekend.

May those who lost their lives rest in peace. May those who are injured heal physically, emotionally, and spiritually. May those who lost loved ones find healing ways to grieve.

Yet, as I reviewed my notes from the international Henri Nouwen conference I attended in the Toronto area that same weekend, I found many things that might help us all, and now find myself writing a post I had intended to write next month.

A workshop on care and grieving reminded participants that “care” comes from a word that means “to lament, to grieve.” I’ve since learned that even “anger” is derived from a Norse term meaning “grief.”

“Compassion” is “to feel with,” “to suffer with.” Health care professional Saki Santorelli has described care as a “crucible for mutual transformation,” hence Michelle O’Rourke, the workshop presenter, suggested we think of ourselves as “care partners” rather than “caregivers.”

“Where two or three are gathered together,” Jesus said, “I am there…” in the care given and received.

So caring for Orlando is deeply spiritual. Yet we cannot all be in Orlando to help.

Henri’s brother Laurent spoke of how the person with multiple disabilities Henri had cared for as part of his ministry at Daybreak, the L’Arche community in Toronto, had brought him into proximity with God. “Adam helped me get to know God,” Henri wrote.

“The whole world is Daybreak,” Laurent observed, suggesting we ask ourselves, “Who is my Adam?”

This theme echoed in keynote presenter Shane Claiborne’s description of serving with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. As he departed that ministry, he asked how he might next serve God. “Calcuttas are everywhere,” Mother Teresa told him, “Find your Calcutta.”

What is your Orlando? Orlandos are everywhere. Find your Orlando.

Nouwen’s friend and literary executrix, Sister Sue Mosteller, had opened the conference with a story about visiting an art gallery with Henri. Henri sat down in front of the first painting, so she joined him on the bench as he intently gazed upon it. Time passed.

She explained to us that her usual way of visiting a gallery was to look at a painting and read the little card beside it before moving on to the next painting. She was feeling a bit restless, and, after 15 minutes had passed, she finally asked Henri, “What are you doing?” To which Henri replied, surprised, “Are you not in the picture?” Suddenly Sue realized that he was in the south of France, strolling in the fields with van Gogh.

Our encounter with scripture is much the same. Often we read a text without putting ourselves in the story. Contemplation helps us to place ourselves in what we are reading. I realized that contemplating sacred texts is less about finding God than finding ourselves, our true selves in God’s eyes.

And just as many read scripture as if it were a newspaper, we read the newspaper as if it weren’t a transcendental conduit, a sacred text inviting us to put ourselves in its stories.

We are the ones massacred and wounded in the Orlando nightclub. We are their lovers and families and friends awaiting word of their fate, and inconsolably grieving when it is known. We are the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and Latino/Latina communities who are targets of hate. We are the Muslims fearful of the prejudice and suspicion engendered by such violence. And—and this is harder to imagine—we are the gunman armed with religious intolerance, sometimes even of one’s self.

I am crying as I complete this post. I am in Orlando, and Orlando is in me. My consolation is that Jesus is there and here too in the community of care such crises awaken.

Related Posts:

We’ll Always Have Paris

Newtown to Newcountry? “We Must Change.”

Wounding God  (Charleston)

What I Love about the U.S.A. (San Bernardino)

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

The Natural World Is Super Enough

Last week, subscribers received a link that failed to work! I substituted a better one for Teresa of Avila’s quote.

Pope Francis recognized a second miracle associated with Mother Teresa, meaning she will soon be canonized as a saint.

When I visited her home for the dying in Calcutta, a woman in front of me whined contemptuously to a companion, “Do you think Mother Teresa is a saint?” I held my peace, as this woman had been antagonistic during most of our Fordham University religious studies tour of India, severely testing my contemplative reading about non-violence during the trip, selected writings of Gandhi.

To me, Mother Teresa’s whole life was a miracle, far surpassing any unexplained healings from those who pray for her intercession.

Miracles do not convince me. What Mother Teresa did “naturally” is enough.

I’ve been reading through Matthew lately and I love Jesus’ teachings, but am put off by the many miracle stories recorded in the gospel. I believe Jesus was a healer in a larger sense, bringing spiritual healing to individuals, neighborhoods, even rivals. But I can’t fathom the “unnatural” and, in my mind, unlikely restorations of sight, hearing, and speech.

I eventually stopped reading Autobiography of a Yogi by one of my spiritual heroes, Paramahansa Yogananda, when I became overwhelmed by the increasingly magical elements of his self-reporting, though I learned in a recent documentary about his life that the book was the only one Steve Jobs had on his iPad.

I feel pretty much the same way about Jesus’ miracle stories. For a long time I’ve interpreted these metaphorically, or considered them a retrospective hagiographical portrait of Jesus painted by his early followers.  “No signs shall be given this generation,” Jesus was believed to have said, but he ironically delivered many signs and wonders, according to the Gospels.

Personally I don’t feel a spiritual need for the supernatural; the natural world is super enough! That’s one of the things we learn from the great mystics, our spiritual poets, as well as scientists.

The natural world seems so miraculous, from infinitesimal neutrinos and organisms to galaxies far, far away (homage to the Star Wars’ fresh release, wink-wink) in space and time, one shouldn’t need an interruption or intervention of the natural order to believe in a Higher Power—why, it’s as plain as the nose on your face and the brain in your head and the heart of your compassion.

Even if there are dimensions of reality as yet unrecognized by our limited perceptions, that doesn’t make them magical or supernatural, just unperceived. I for one am hoping against hope that death is but an entrance into another dimension of existence. If not, the life I’ve been given is miracle enough.

Over the Christmas holidays, watching again several versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, I realized that Scrooge’s resurrection is the most accessible and believable miracle that the birth of Jesus invites. Scrooge becomes downright giddy and playful, gracious and generous, embracing life and others and causes with gusto.

“God brought you to life with Christ,” Saint Paul wrote the church at Ephesus. Contemplating this long ago, I realized how true this was for me. And it’s taken a lifetime to get used to it.

Jesus has given me a life. You too.

A reading for Christmastide: The Soul Feels Its Worth

My personal pick for “the” Moment of the Year 2015.

Last call for a 2015 tax-deductible donation! Please 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!

Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of a first edition of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.