In Memory of Trees

The tree that was (in spring)

A few days before Halloween, Wade and I were awakened one very dark and early morning by a loud swooshing sound followed by a thud that shook the house. A neighbor’s (and our pastor’s) very tall oak fell across the yard of the neighbor between us and into our backyard, taking out two fences (ours was brand new!) and a good portion of our only tree there, compliments of the winds and rain of Hurricane Zeta, which took down 350 trees in Atlanta.

The Bradford flowering pear, doomed eventually to split anyway by its very nature, was the sixth tree over 26 years that I have planted in the backyard. Each full-grown tree fell or was irreparably damaged due to a variety of natural circumstances, including drought, storms, and high winds: a maple, a cottonwood, a weeping willow, and two cypresses.

Our pastor's daughter and cat Luna

strolling toward our backyard in the distance.

Photo by Rev. Jenelle Holmes.

Probably related to the earlier storm, a very old and tall oak fell late afternoon on Halloween across our street to our front yard, demolishing our crepe myrtle and dogwood and burying our fountain and its flower bed. Thanks to the pandemic (how often do we get to use this phrase in a favorable way?), no trick-or-treaters were endangered.

In both cases, our yards got the top part of the trunk with all its branches, making quite a mess. Ironically, this season our lawns and yards had never looked so good, and now—! Where we live, where the tree lands is the landowner’s responsibility, and homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover tree removal except at the very point it intersects with a structure.

Tree across Berne Street, our front yard on the right.

This event coinciding with the fearful pandemic and the contentious election, the biblical character Job came to mind. And, given how we were feeling about our yards, the phrase, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Virtually all who saw our wreckage said it’s a blessing we were not injured and that our house was not damaged. A couple of passersby and several friends told us we must have had someone watching over us. One older black neighbor, Mary, cried to see the damage, grateful to find we were not hurt, and Wade realized she needed a masked-but-non-socially-distanced-yet-assuring hug.

Several neighbors/friends/members of Ormewood Church helped us clean up what we could before we brought in the “big guns” of a tree service to clean and remove the debris this week. One of them loaned us a generator to keep our fridge running during two periods without power. As Mister Rogers always said, in times of crisis, “look for the helpers.”

View from our front porch.

You know my penchant for observing synchronicity, what some call coincidence and others name miracle. When all of this happened I was finishing up reading Intelligence in Nature during my morning prayers, researched and written by anthropologist Jeremy Narby. He compares the wisdom of indigenous animist shamans in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil with worldwide scientific research discovering intelligence in other animals (not just the human animal) and in plants and microscopic creatures.

God knows a virus can outwit much of our national leadership!

Another bit of synchronicity: friends recommended and we watched (and also recommend) a Netflix documentary entitled, My Octopus Teacher, about a relationship of an octopus with a South African diver. Narby reports that “Octopuses have the largest brains among invertebrates, and scientists have noted their intelligence (p73).”

Narby explains that “intelligence” comes from words meaning “choosing between (inter-legere) and implies the capacity to make decisions.”

Anthropologists have pointed out that some cultures have no concept for intelligence, while others define it in ways surprising to Westerners, for example in terms of good listening skills, or a strong sense of ethics, or the ability to observe, interpret, and negotiate the social and physical landscape (p44).

In my view, then, intelligence is what spirituality is all about, especially “good listening skills.” For me prayer and meditation require good listening, not just for God’s “still, small voice” but to ourselves and one another in our own decision-making.

I grieved for the lost trees. The one in back outside my office window especially served as my “axis mundi” during morning prayers, my center of the universe. Just as trees send chemical warnings to other trees of impending predators, I’ve wondered if these fallen trees were trying to warn us of how we are endangering our climate, we who are the most invasive predatory species.

Sitting on the back-deck seconds before the tree across the street came crashing down, something jumped on my sleeve, grabbing my arm. Startled by either its talons or claws, I jumped up, dislodging whatever it was, a bird or a chipmunk. I never saw it. Then I heard Wade shouting from inside the house as I heard a splintering groan.

I wonder if the creature on my arm was simply escaping the disaster or was flung over our roof.

Or was it trying to warn me?

Damaged tree from my office window.

Related post: I Live in a Forest Called Atlanta

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

SIGNS OF LIFE!

In the midst of the pandemic, I have been grateful to see these signs of life in our neighborhood:

Baby frog on our deck

Our neighbors across the street thank first responders.

The Atlanta BeltLine advises social distancing.

Neighbors Jonathan and Gabriela created a labyrinth on the BeltLine.

Church via Zoom

Luna our neighbor with Jenelle our pastor.

Lizard on our front porch pillows.

BeltLine art.

To Life, a toast for Passover!  To Resurrection, a toast for Easter! 

Be safe, be well, look for the signs of life in your neighborhood!

with gratitude for each of you, Chris and Wade

I was invited to contribute a meditation for Maundy Thursday to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

Rage to Ecstasy: Praying the Psalms

Church of the Holy Comforter along our walk.

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic and the requirement to “shelter in place,” I believe this post from three years ago might be helpful. Thanks to those of you who planned to attend “Beside Still Waters: A Contemplative Retreat,” April 27-May 1, 2020. It has been cancelled to prevent further spread of the virus. 

On our morning walk a couple of weeks ago, Wade and I learned of the death of Joe, who lived a few houses down from us. A former Roman Catholic priest in his 90's, he was a friendly neighbor, and gave me permission to take some of the fronds from his palm trees years ago for Christ Covenant MCC’s Palm Sunday service. I offer this post in thanksgiving for his life.

If I were to send into space one item that would explain the human experience to other civilizations, it would be the Psalms. They would serve as warning and explanation and exaltation of our capabilities.

Cross us, and we will dash your little ones against the rocks. Exile us, and we will nonetheless try to sing God’s song in foreign territory. Wow us, and our spirits and words will soar in thanksgiving and praise.

An agnostic boyfriend wanted to better understand my religious devotion, so I suggested that we read a psalm each day on our own, conferring occasionally. Soon into the exercise, he good-naturedly but definitively expressed dismay at the texts. He said something like, “I expected a more uplifting experience, but there’s a lot of vengeance and wrath.”

A retired church member whose lifelong partner died was about to go on his first trip without him. I suggested we pray the psalms together, one each day, as he traveled. Afterward, he said he felt less alone, knowing I was praying the psalms with him.

That’s a gift of the Psalms, that praying them, we feel less alone. Those who wrote the psalms were imperfect, much like us. They didn’t know everything, but they had feelings about everything. And, like us, they had multiple situations and events to have feelings about, some good, even great, some bad, even evil. They reflect the human range of experiences and emotions.

They are like us, but perhaps unlike us, they are willing to express even their uglier aspects. They are not pretending to “have it all together.” They are willing to offer their broken spirits to God, to one another, to us. They are the original 12 Step meeting, the first confessors, the first monastics using prayer as a place of transformation.

As much as they, like us, might pray that God will “fix” things, they understand repeatedly their need to hope in God, to trust in God, to witness the beauty and wonder of creation, from the heavens to the earth. And they give us wonderful images and metaphors for God: a good shepherd, a mother’s lap, the rising sun of justice.

For centuries, monastic communities have prayed the psalms during their daily multiple prayer services. My first real taste of that was visiting the Episcopal Order of the Holy Cross at their Mt. Calvary Retreat House in the foothills above Santa Barbara, California. Over the years of my occasional retreats there, I found peace joining them in the reciting or chanting of the psalms. The brief silence between each line gave the words a chance to sink in, as one might pause after any line of poetry. And saying or chanting the words myself and with others gave the psalms an altogether different resonance than reading them silently on my own.

In praying the psalms, if we can’t identify with a particular mood or condition in the words, we might consider those in the world who are experiencing that mood or condition, praying with them or on their behalf. That makes the psalms at least one more way in which we realize we are not alone.

At the risk of offering a mere tautology: that the psalms are directed at the self and others and God makes them a resource of reflection and contemplation: an opportunity for dialogue with ourselves, with others, and with God.

The psalm that got me through my toughest times is the psalm divided between Psalm 42 and 43 that begins, “As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God.” The psalmist was prevented from going to God’s house, perhaps by illness, but the longing presented reminded many of us in the LGBT community of the church’s exclusion.

More than once I have prayed with the psalmist, “Create in me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me” and “Restore to me the joy of thy salvation.”

And, during an extreme and extended period of multiple griefs, Psalm 73 spoke of my experience:

My heart grew embittered,

my affections dried up,

I was stupid and uncomprehending,

a clumsy animal in your presence.

Even so, I stayed in your presence,

you grasped me by the right hand;

you will guide me with advice,

and will draw me in the wake of your glory. 

Psalm 73:21-24 (NJB)

“Even so, I stayed in your presence” became my mantra and my discipline that year, else I would have been lost.

My favorite psalm for contemplation when leading a retreat is 131, whose key mantra is, “I hold myself in quiet and silence, like a little child in its mother’s arms” (NJB).

Please support this blog ministry: 

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

The World Is My Cloister

St. Bernard Abbey Church

Cullman, Alabama

The world is my cloister.

Yours too.

It’s a too obvious pun, but often the art of writing for the spirit is stating the obvious. “The world is my oyster” is an idiom or metaphor for personal success. “The world is my cloister” is an invitation to experience the world and success in a different way.

And, given that beings like ourselves are multiple light years away, if at all, earth is our own little cloister in the known universe.

That’s what came to me Monday morning, the day I write this. Before I continued my re-reading of The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris (which clearly gave me the idea), I sat on our front porch for some time sipping my coffee, listening and observing.

The street is quieter now that we are sheltering in place because of COVID-19. Fewer of us going to work and no children being driven or biking or walking to school means diminished traffic. The only people I see are walking their dogs or walking and running themselves. Most of the sounds I hear are squirrels chasing one another in the trees and birds chirping or bickering.

An almost invisible flash of light overhead sends a slow and lengthy rumbling of thunder through the clouds above. A light, almost imperceptible rain begins to fall, and in places where the moisture silently gathers until released—leaves, roofs, gutters—I can better hear the periodic splatter of its deliverance to concrete, asphalt, or puddle.

These gentle sounds are occasionally and briefly overrun—nearby or from afar—by the roaring and screeching and banging of the city’s metal dragons devouring our rubbish and our recyclables—Monday is trash day in our neighborhood, after all.

I revisit a very pleasant dream I had Sunday morning as I awoke. I was home with my biological family in our tract house in the L.A. suburbs, enjoying a happy visit. We were all about to leave to go other places and were explaining to one another what we had planned. I felt a hand on the top of my head, gentle but firm, as if in blessing. I didn’t know if it was Mom’s or Dad’s or, wishful thinking—could it be God’s? I fully woke up, still feeling this hand pressed on my head and thought I’d find my hand there or Wade’s, but lo, there was no hand. I told Wade about it on our morning walk.

Now, on Monday, a familiar neighbor walks by with his big friendly dogs, and I pick up an umbrella to walk toward him while keeping our respectful six feet of social distance. We speak of our shared experience of Ormewood Church on Zoom yesterday, a digital app that allowed our spiritual community’s first meeting since the governor of Georgia banned gatherings to constrain spread of the virus.

I had been surprised that so many—35 family units—signed on for the service, with liturgists, singers, and pastor leading us remotely.  Wade and I had kept our setting on “gallery” so we could see the families attending in their varied home environments.

I confessed to the neighbor that, because we didn’t focus exclusively on our pastor during Jenelle’s sermon, I untypically did not follow the sermon so well—my fault, not hers—as I enjoyed the distractions of kids climbing on parents or fiddling with the devices or sticking faces or fingers in their camera's eye.

What our neighbor took away from the experience, he said, was that “this is community” –that so many went to the trouble to log in and participate, including our usual small group time in which we were asked, “What has been your ‘darkest valley’ this week and what has been your ‘grassy meadow’?” Our text for the service and the sermon was Psalm 23.

I was especially in awe that Zoom could scramble us into small groups after the sermon where we could see one another on our screens and offer our answers to one another by unmuting our speakers.

We are blessed by these new cathedrals. And we are blessed when we see and hear, taste and sense our neighbors and neighborhoods as cloisters of the Spirit, of the holy, of the whole people of God. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow us all the days of our lives, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord our whole lives long.”

Related post: A Healing Touch

I was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

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

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

Our "Spiritual Universe"

As happened last week, I am writing this the day before posting it, a rarity. Usually I have several days or weeks to write and review (and review again) a post. Despite my occasional despair at the large empty spaces that I experience in retirement, I still find that life is often full, and this week served as an example.

This past Sunday, with others from what is now Ormewood Church, I attended a brief and informal graveside service commemorating the life of Rev. Peter Denlea, the one-time pastor of our predecessor Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church. It was organized by one of his sons, Colin, also a pastor, at Georgia National Cemetery to which Peter’s first vocation as a Navy bomber pilot gave him access. I wondered if the cemetery rules (above photo) really permitted a spirit as expansive as Peter’s, given its prohibition of “boisterous actions”! Later this month, his boisterous spirit will be celebrated at a wake in our neighborhood, where he once lived at the end of our block.

With a similar group from Ormewood Church the next day, I attended the celebration of the life and legacy of Judge Elaine L. Carlisle at Cascade United Methodist Church in Atlanta, a member of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church who lived three houses uphill from us. The largely African American church was packed with fellow judges and lawyers, the City of Atlanta Police Honor Guard, and sister members of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms also attended.

Our pastor, Rev. Jenelle Holmes, offered moving and meaningful prayers at each service.

And synchronicity strikes again as, at both services, we sang “How Great Thou Art.”

I lost it each time we sang it. Remember, I mentioned last week that I had been viewing the mind-boggling 2007 series The Universe, now available on Netflix. I had just finished watching the final episode, so these words by Stuart K. Hine particularly moved me:

O Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder

Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made,

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee:

How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

I’m losing it again as I type these words. They take me back to my childhood faith, which included Billy Graham evangelical meetings featuring George Beverly Shea boisterously singing this hymn. As the song affirms, I want to believe that Peter, who lived longer than I have, and Elaine, whose life was cut shorter than mine by an as-yet-unexplained traffic accident, have been “taken home.”

Former Mayor and later Ambassador Andrew J. Young, who appointed Judge Carlisle to the bench, offered “Words of Comfort” to us. His storytelling gifts as an elder preacher and politician served us all well, bringing smiles and laughter, including one tender story about his affectionate but mistaken greeting of Elaine’s twin sister in the airport of Gary, Indiana, their hometown!

But then something he said comforted me very personally in the midst of my “lost in space” doubts. He said that now Elaine was part of our “spiritual universe,” the commonwealth of God. A spiritual universe is no more unimaginable to me than the physical universe.

I was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

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

Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  “How Great Thou Art” copyright © 1953 by S. K. Hine, renewed 1981 by Manna Music, Inc. All rights reserved.

I will be co-leading “Beside Still Waters: A Contemplative Retreat” with Debra Weir April 27-May 1, 2020 at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. It is open to the public, and some limited scholarships are available. Three readable texts are recommended to prepare but are not required to have been read by opening day. Here is the link: https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd

A Death in the Neighborhood

This is a true story, but the names of the family members have been changed to protect their privacy. A few weeks ago I showed it to “Susan” for the first time, and asked her permission to use it on my blog, and she gladly agreed. I gave it as a talk for Atlanta’s Midtown Spiritual Community on July 28, 2004.

An order of the day for me is walking my dogs, and before the summer day became a furnace, I decided to take them. Outside was bright and colorful and inviting. Royal blue sky above the lush green Southern urban-residential landscape of my Atlanta neighborhood called Ormewood Park: undulating rises and ravines draped with kudzu, wisteria, and ivy out of which grow tall oaks with thick limbs reaching high, alongside squat magnolias with thick limbs reaching wide, their leaves filtering morning sun like light or dark green stained glass. Standing out in furry golden contrast to all this green, my dogs inspected and sniffed the usual places en route: telephone poles, mail box bases, root systems of trees, tall grasses, stones and curbstone. They left their messages for other canine passersby to read with their all-knowing noses.

As usual, we passed Jim’s house. The screened porch veiled the presence of Jim initially, but he spoke out in greeting. I asked how the chemotherapy was going. He said fine, that they had stopped it in preparation for the surgery. Today he was going in for a test to see if the surgery would be done to remove the original cancer. I made my usual commitment to pray for him, as well as my customary “if there’s anything I can do, let me know.” He belongs to the church down the street to which I also belong but seldom go. On another walk I had met some of his neighbors who were checking in to see how he was doing.

My dogs and I continued down his street toward the church. In front of another church, where the homeless congregate because of an outreach program there, we make a decision whether to turn onto a street, which we often do, or go further along this street, always the choice of the doggies who usually have me in tow rather than the other way around. But the next block had an emergency vehicle, paramedics, with flashing lights on the other side of the street, and a police car on our side—always problematic for my dogs, who do not take well to men in uniform, either because my dogs are pacifists, which I doubt, since they bare their teeth when it suits them to intimidate each other or a potential intruder or even me when I try to move them on the bed, or more likely, because police look like those delivery persons who invade their turf: our yard and porch.

As we approach, my intuition tells me of trouble and I wonder do I want to get involved, especially with the dogs pulling on their leashes and work waiting for me back home. The paramedics made me think perhaps some older person on the block is ill or reluctantly given up the ghost, but the police caused me to consider foul play. CJ, also a member of the church down the street, drove by me, waved, and parked, but not to greet me. She ran across the street to the house behind the box-like paramedics’ truck. I figured it was someone she knew. Doggies and my curiosity won out, and we continued down the street, alongside the police car now, then rounding the paramedics truck that blocked our view. I had already heard sobbing, and now saw its origin, young Jeff on his knees in the front yard, seemingly inconsolable but being consoled by two women, one being Sharon, the pastor of the church. Jeff is home from college for the summer.

Sharon saw me and came over to explain. He had just found his father dead in the bedroom. Jeff had laundered the cat and was bringing it into his father’s room for help drying it when he made the terrible discovery.

His father Dennis flashed in memory, not an old person, younger than me as it turned out, approaching his fiftieth birthday, but he looked way older and always smelled of alcohol. Later a neighbor said bluntly to me he had drunk himself to death, and, at his subsequent memorial service, his alcoholism was talked about openly. He hadn’t eaten in weeks and a case of beer was found in his room. He had simply collapsed in the night on his bedroom floor. I had known he had a problem with alcohol. And I know alcoholism is a disease. But other people fight life-threatening diseases, like Jim down the street. I wondered what had broken Dennis’s spirit or his heart for the fight against his own life-threatening disease?

Sharon kindly held the dogs so I might offer condolences to Jeff, still sobbing on the ground. I was self-conscious, both because I never know what to say in the face of such grief and because I was shirtless, feeling a little naked, and I doubted a half-naked gay man hugging Jeff would have felt comfortable for either of us. Thankfully, another person on the ground between us served as a buffer.

“Jeff, I am so sorry...” is all I could say and probably all I should have said. Too many words at such a time often prove to be facile, sentimental, or sophomoric. We all sat there in silence and let Jeff cry. I realized as we crouched facing the sidewalk that this was the house with the tree with an intricate root system above ground which the dogs loved to sniff and I loved to imagine is inhabited by leprechauns and gnomes, perhaps even the site of Middle Earth. I had never been in the house, but I had been in the backyard for a fireworks display, though I can’t remember whether it was on a New Year’s Eve or a Fourth of July. Then I returned to Sharon and the dogs, so she could get back to Jeff.

The dogs were well-behaved. They seem to understand grief. God knows they’ve comforted me when I’ve cried, either watching the news or a nostalgic movie. When my mother died and my then partner left, Calvin was my only child and had seen me collapse in tears, and like a St. Bernard—which he is not—came to my rescue with an elixir better than alcohol, his own sloppy licks and kisses, trying to make me better. As I say, though they were well-behaved, I pulled them away from the police officer who was trying to make nice with them, for fear they might prove distrustful. As I later found out, the policeman lives across the street.

I learned from Sharon that Dennis’s wife, Jeff’s mother, did not yet know. She was flying home at that very moment, having visited her daughter Anna, who has spent the past year in Germany as a student. Anna didn’t know either, intending to follow her mother home a week later. How horrible, I thought, not to know one’s partner in life is dead, and having to come home to discover it. And yet it was worse. Their dog, Shelly, had died unexpectedly just two days before. Jeff was sitting with her in the vet’s waiting room when she passed. I felt overwhelming grief for the family. The memorial service bulletin, as it turned out, was to have Dennis’s picture on the front and Shelly’s photo on the back.

As with Jim earlier in the walk, I told Sharon I would be glad to help, if there was anything I could do. She said, as a matter of fact, could I come and sit in the house while they went to pick up Susan at the airport? She said she didn’t think the house should be left empty. I’ve learned not to question requests made in the throes of grief. They must be honored as if they have their own logic, because they do. I said sure. She told me when to return that afternoon.

Upon my return I learned that all sorts of neighbors had been over cleaning the house and the yard. Some were going to be bringing back laundry and needed to be able to get in. Other friends and coworkers who had been notified might stop by or call. Everyone seemed to know what had happened except Susan. An email had been sent to alert church members. So there was a reason for me sitting in the house after all. And, as it turned out, this was all just the beginning of a week-long effort of neighbors and fellow church members to provide food and comfort and care to the family and the several dozen family members and friends who came from near and far for the memorial service.

But I found quite another reason for being there. I had my Dr. Zhivago in my car to read, but I left it there, feeling it might seem less than reverential to sit in the house reading. I chose instead to sit in the house reflecting on the awesome event that had transpired there that day, a death in the neighborhood. There was something almost tangible in the quiet empty house that was holy and sacred and worthy of awe. I thought of all the drama of the day, and it surfaced deep emotions from my heart and involuntary tears to my eyes, especially Jeff’s initial heartbreak and now burden of telling his mother. Strangely enough, instead of making me feel gloomy, it made me feel privileged and even uplifted to be a part of it, no matter how small a role I had been given. I felt honored.

The house was not really empty. It reminded me of the home I grew up in, filled to capacity with things: for some, a cluttered look; for others, a lived-in look. Lots of knickknacks and tchotchkes. Sitting in one of the few empty chairs, I looked up and realized I was surrounded by angels. At first I saw a dozen, and then a multitude of the heavenly host maintaining reverent silence. No, it wasn’t a mystical experience. It was a collection of wooden, plastic, porcelain, stuffed, woven, and ceramic angels that covered all horizontal surfaces: shelves, table, cabinet tops. And then I saw the candles, as many candles as angels, everywhere—unlit, of course, but with the promise of light.

And then I saw an identical shape everywhere, on fabrics, as sconces, on tchotchkes, in pictures, hanging in groups on the wall. I recognized the shape but couldn’t remember what it represented. Some were shaped by angels or the candleholders that had arms or leaves. Only later did I discover that it was the Scout fleur-de-lis or trefoil, an iris-shaped insignia whose three parts signify the three parts of the Scout promise of duty to God and country, to others, and to self. This trefoil was so pervasive it served as a house theme, like one of those geometric patterns that architect Frank Lloyd Wright would repeat in one of the homes he designed. It was a fitting graphic for a family devoted to Scouting.

The Scout emblems were all sizes and colors, but those that bore the official colors were blue to represent the sky and gold to represent the sun, and the flame at the base, I have learned, symbolizes love of humanity. In essence, then, it is a religious symbol, and I realized I was in a house of prayer, surrounded by angels, candles, and icons—a good place to reflect on death and life, and more specifically to pray for Jeff and Susan, as Jeff went with church friends and neighbors to the airport to meet and tell his mom, Susan.

I sat there, mostly in an absorbing and friendly silence, for two hours. Friends Michael and Bob brought laundry and we made the bed. A neighbor dropped over. A coworker of Susan’s from the Scout store stopped by, and we chatted for a while. She was my relief keeper of the house. She intended to stay until Susan got home, spending the night if needed, so I left soon after her arrival. I had hoped to be there when Susan returned, to offer a hug, but her passing through customs was an unusually slow process and I had an evening commitment.

One week later I made the same walk with my dogs before sitting down to write this. But I chose to turn down the side street rather than proceed past the house I had spent two hours in just one week earlier. Before reaching that corner, I again passed Jim on his porch. How did the test go? I asked, referring to the one he was to take before proceeding with the surgery. Not good, he rasped, his throat swollen from enlarged lymph nodes. Matter-of-factly, he explained, “They’re not going to do the surgery. The cancer has spread all over and there’s nothing they can do.” I was stunned. Again I committed to keep him in my prayers, again I offered to help if I can, even if it’s just to talk. He expressed his appreciation, and then added, “I have neighbors who are watching out for me, and friends from the church.”

Indeed.

Apologies to all who read the original version of last week’s post. I mislabeled Gov. Wallace's speech. It was "Segregation Forever" not "Integration Forever." I guess I was trying to right a wrong of history unconsciously!

Your donations are this blog’s only means of support. Please follow this link to make your gift: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/ 

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

Copyright © 2004 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

A Warm and Friendly Dream

My dear friend Rev. Steve Pieters brings out the "warm and friendly" in me 

when he took this photo over dinner in L.A. in the fall of 2016.

On his Facebook page he points out the dove on my shoulder!

The morning I am writing this, I awoke at 2:30 a.m., and my mind started bouncing around. I remembered it was my parents’ birthdays, born on the same day one year apart. I gave thanks in prayer for them, then said the Lord’s Prayer, all silently, in my heart as well as my head. As sometimes happens, the prayers “rested” me back to sleep.

And I had a comforting dream.

It began as a funeral, but morphed into a wedding. It began at a church, but morphed into a large living room in a home with family history, not mine, but that of either the bride or groom, and the father of one of them explained what it had meant to the family after the divorce. I knew a few of the people, but in a distant way, as those I might see occasionally. We sat comfortably around the perimeter of the living room on sofas and chairs.

I was the officiant. I felt inadequately prepared, but went with the flow. I’ve written before that I am often working in my dreams, but this was not heavy duty, rather, relaxed and comfortable. To pad the service, given that I had prepared no homily, I began asking the family members about their experience with marriage. The wedding became a kind of group therapy.

As I indicated, the parents of one of the couple were divorced, but both were in attendance and friendly with one another. The other parents had had a long and satisfying marriage. As I encouraged them to speak of their relationships, one of the guests said, not rudely, “Shouldn’t we be about the service? That’s what we came for.” Probably this represented another part of me, schedule and goal oriented, a contrast to the casual part that was enjoying the conversation.

The brother of one of the principals explained that he and his husband, sitting beside him on a sofa, had recently decided to “open” their relationship, and he assumed that I, as a minister, would disapprove. I explained, to the contrary, that I believed every couple had to make their own choices on how to live out their commitment.

“Marriage is hard,” I said, “And a lifelong marriage is tougher still. Isn’t it helpful for married couples to share their experience with the couple being married today?”

And that was how the dream ended. Part way through the dream, I awoke, but fell asleep again, resuming the dream where I had left off, something I don’t recall happening before. Maybe because it was a warm and friendly place.

Of course, with dreams, I usually try to figure out what might have prompted the various parts. Yesterday I read a very satisfying belated Christmas letter from someone I had worked alongside in the church, and it was all about his family, his second wife and her siblings, their separate children and grandchildren. And recently, I had learned a gay couple, friends of ours, had decided to open up their relationship. So that helps account for some of the ingredients.

And the comfortable conversation about all this? Where did that come from?

I’ve written a much visited post about the death of my neighborhood church a few years back, Ormewood Park Presbyterian. I had stopped attending before I began serving other churches. It was not because I did not like the people, it’s that I thought it a terrible waste that we worshiped in the “traditional” pattern, when in fact, I thought we should be talking together about what makes life work for us, what our faith means, and so on.

Now Wade and I have been attending Ormewood Church, a new church start in the same place, in which a part of the service is dedicated to small groups, given a question for the day that relates to the worship. As an introvert, I find this challenging, but as a concept, I find this closer to what a spiritual community should be about. And we’re getting to know our neighbors in a whole new way. No doubt this is the predecessor to the warm and friendly place I experienced in the dream, a place that invites conversation about meaningful things, like marriage.

This will seem a non-sequitur, but I thought of an article I had read earlier in the week by a woman who had anticipated difficulty sleeping in the days following a laparoscopic surgery. She wanted a painkiller, but her doctors in Germany resisted, recommending simple ibuprofen, one telling her that “The pain will guide you. You will know when to rest more; you will know when you are healing. … All you need is rest.”

She explains she knows how to sleep, but not how to rest. Almost Zen-like her anesthesiologist tells her, “Drink a cup of coffee, slowly. And whatever you do, do not get it in a to-go cup. You must sit in one place and enjoy this cup, slowly.”

On my own I am fairly good at “resting in God,” Augustine’s stated spiritual goal, but resting in spiritual community is quite another challenge.

The link in the post takes you to Ormewood Church’s website. For its Facebook page, go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/1568559390105244/

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

Wonder

Luna enjoying our porch swing.

Others have come to the same conclusion, but in the sixty-six years that I have been given, I believe the essential ingredient of a spiritual life is wonder.

It can be found and expressed in many ways: worship, contemplation, compassion, activism, lovemaking, the beloved community, science, art, nature, and the recognition of the commonwealth of God, to name a few.

But the further away any of these get from wonder, they can become tablets of stone, stumbling blocks, millstones round our necks, a dutiful obligation rather than a pleasurable joy.

As I write this, Luna, our neighbor’s cat, is chasing something in our back yard. I have spent happy moments watching Luna from my home office windows as she approaches our yard with wonder, leaping up the tall, central Bradford pear tree, slinking beneath our hedge of privet shrubs, luxuriating in rubbing her back on our weedy grass.

Curious Luna looking through our back screen door.

From our front porch, I’ve enjoyed watching her go on morning walks with her family (yes, really!): a dog named Lexi, children with a literary and a biblical name, Darcy and Micah, their father Chris, a New Testament professor at Mercer University, and mother Jenelle, who is the organizing pastor of the newly-forming Ormewood Church.

Luna runs ahead and lingers behind, depending on what catches her attention in the moment. She exemplifies wonder. And I realize that we human beings know only a little more than she does about the nature of things.

The morning I write this, I greeted them again from our front porch during my prayers, after reading a couple of psalms and Matthew 18, which includes Jesus’ counsel to enter the kingdom as a child, remove their stumbling blocks, find the lost sheep, confront wrongdoing in yourself and in the community, and finally, forgive from the heart, even as we have been forgiven.

Luna helps me with my bulb garden.

Photo by Wade Jones

In silence I contemplated the very tall and old leafy trees before me, the tiny bird chirping on the railing, the runner going by, the found stones that line our gardens, only a little distracted by the passing cars, some of which take the stop sign at the intersection as a mere “suggestion.”

The week I write this, I awoke each morning to NPR reporting on various catastrophes, a high rise fire, several bombings and mass shootings, the investigation of the administration.

Despite all that, I found myself marveling (yes, I realize how antiquated the gerund) that all I saw before me, including me, has evolved.  What impetus organizes seemingly inert matter into living things, thinking beings, and seems to call for beauty and compassion and wonder?

Luna poking her nose under our grill cover.

A couple of days ago, I read how the liver regenerates itself daily as it carries out so many mysteries that ancients thought it was the seat of the soul.  And not long ago I read how disparate parts of the brain organize the various signals from our eyes into what we “see.”

No wonder the psalmist sang this morning, “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of God’s mouth” (33:5b-6).

“Breathe on me, breath of God,” sings the old hymn.  What a sensual yet spiritual request!

“The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”  This popular quote from Irenaeus of Lyons hangs in our hallway, written by the hand of the calligrapher who once graced Mt. Calvary Retreat House in the hills above Santa Barbara before its destruction in the 2008 Montecito fire.

From dust to dust, ashes to ashes, our brief flicker in between is a cause for wonder.

A post in which I describe the “impetus” mentioned above as an “oomph”:

Richard Dawkins Has More Faith than I Do

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