Banning Goldfish Bowls

Not long ago the city of Monza, Italy, banned the use of traditional goldfish bowls because their curved sides obscured a fish’s take on reality.

Makes me wonder, what next? Churches, with their stained glass windows? Theaters, with their only “window” being a stage? Possibly observatories and laboratories, with their high-powered lenses? All of these could be said to offer a distorted view of reality!

In their recent book, The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow use this curious anecdote as a beginning point to contemplate whether any of us have an accurate view of reality. We all may be looking through a curved lens, so to speak.

But, they add, a goldfish could still accurately predict movements outside their sphere, and that’s part of the scientific quest. They later explain that our brains are continually modeling the outside world, despite a hole (and therefore blind spot) where the optic nerve is attached in the middle of each retina, which emit pixelated messages that our brain constructs into a three-dimensional whole.

The field of vision is one place where the academic quest of deconstruction would not be helpful to understand the whole! Notice the breadth of possibility in this metaphor.

Last night I watched again The Fountainhead, based on Ayn Rand’s novel. My interest in its philosophical take on the world has been piqued by American legislators and business leaders who share Ayn Rand’s views on the individual, the absurdity of self-sacrifice, the absoluteness of the self.

I “get” the need to do one’s work, no matter the consequences. I’ve tried to do that my whole life. That’s what keeps me focused on my writing. But I extend that first sentence by adding, “no matter the consequences to me.” I am constantly aware of the consequences for others, because a writer usually has readers in mind.  I care about readers, what words may inspire, challenge, and provoke. And, as a minister, I am keen on helping rather than hindering others on their spiritual paths, trying to discern what’s true, good, and beautiful. I’ve been blessed by readers, editors, copyeditors, and publishers who help me in that process.

The Fountainhead depicts an architect who does not want his work compromised. Admirable, in a way. But then, who is he building for? Will his structure take into account the humans who will inhabit it? And how does he know that without consultation, both with them and with other architects? Collaboration is key.

But then, that’s the “collectivism” the character deplores.

Last night I also watched the final episode of The Newsroom, Aaron Sorkin’s accomplished depiction of cable news. In this last season, the news network has been acquired by a young high tech mogul intent on increasing its revenue, viewership, and appeal to younger viewers. He does so by making every viewer a contributing “journalist” regardless of qualifications and without checks and balances for truth, privacy, and sensationalism, wreaking havoc.

This is the kind of collectivism I deplore.

During a “Big Chill” kind of weekend with former classmates, I learned that several were surprised I didn’t go into filmmaking. We had grown up together in L.A.; they knew I liked to take photos, make movies, and write. One told me he even watched movie credits looking for my name. I explained that, had my calling not been elsewhere, I would not have liked writing for Hollywood because everyone “in the industry” thinks they’re writers, and what’s on screen often bears little resemblance to the original.

As I reflect on my education, I wish I had been given more experience working in teams. What has helped make up that deficit is my vocation in the church and more broadly, the spiritual community. Spirituality is inherently collective, even for spiritual hermits, for all of us pray and write and care as one.  And we have the spiritual resources over the ages of the many who have gone before us.  That’s a core truth of spirituality: we are not alone, we are bound to one another. The apostle Paul thus depicted the Christian spiritual community as the Body of Christ.

That’s why I’m puzzled that some current aficionados of Ayn Rand claim a Christian identity. Rand was consistent in her individualism: being an atheist, she was not bound to a concept of spiritual relationship or community.

The more I read and the more I watch documentaries on the scientific quest, it’s clear we’ve gotten where we are because of collectivism in science as well. The recent PBS/BBC series, How We Got to Now, demonstrates this well.

To paraphrase Saint Paul, “For now we see through a goldfish bowl dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now we know only in part; then we will know fully, even as we have been fully known.”

Related Post:

Ayn Rand Was Consistent

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or 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!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

Forgiveness and Neighborliness

I will be leading a FREE virtual Advent retreat online beginning Nov. 22 entitled, “Nativity Stories.” All are welcome!

I recite the Lord’s Prayer daily, and often the most challenging phrase for me is the second part of “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Though I’ve received everything I have from a generous and gracious God, it’s hard to let go of grudges and wrongs and the feeling that others owe me something or that somehow I have unfairly missed out.

Or if I pray, “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us,” I think about how often I impinge on God’s territory by profaning the sacred, by judging or pre-judging others, by invading the space of one of God’s creatures, by polluting God’s property: earth, water, and air; or by playing God—a role which, in all modesty, I play rather well. 

To the poor who followed Jesus, “forgive us our debts,” must’ve sounded pretty good. It sounds pretty good to us today, weighed down as we are with loans, credit cards, church pledges, expectations from elderly parents or children of any age or our beloved pets, not to mention Comcast bills.

To the sinners who followed Jesus, “forgive us our trespasses” or “sins” must’ve sounded pretty good. It also sounds pretty good to us today, burdened by moral failings, hurt we’ve inflicted on those we love most, toes we’ve stepped on or boundaries we’ve crossed, injustice we’ve ignored.

Thank God, there’s a lot of forgiveness in the Bible, and, according to Old Testament professor Walter Brueggemann, longtime oracle of Columbia Theological Seminary, forgiveness may involve money, land, power, politics, morality, and religious pretensions.

Religious scruples are what the late-converted apostle Paul often addressed. Paul when he was Saul was a Torah fundamentalist who followed every jot and tittle of the Law of Moses, not simply the Ten Commandments on which it’s based, but all the interpretations, applications, court rulings, and explications of Mosaic Law.

As we know from our own Christian tradition, no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous legalist, traditionalist, or fundamentalist. As an aside, Brueggemann also points out that no one can claim the moral high ground better than a self-righteous liberal, progressive, non-literalist such as myself. All of us tend to equate God’s views with our own, what Brueggemann calls “the cunning little secret of certitude.”

And that’s the tension in the early church—legalists wanting other Christians to follow the Laws of Moses, including dietary restrictions and Sabbath observance, and others who experience freedom in Christ as to such spiritual beliefs and practices. Paul comes down on the side of freedom in Christ, but urges all Christians to respect and regard one another’s positions. Paul is truly a recovered fundamentalist, but doesn’t twist others’ arms to come to 12-step meetings of Legalists Anonymous.

“Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?” Paul rhetorically questions the Romans, and then observes, “It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

Christians have entered into a covenant with Jesus and with one another that requires the interweaving of our lives, beliefs, and practices. Every strand is needed to create the fabric of our spiritual community, one that hopefully reflects Jesus’ meaning for our neighborhood and for the world.

Discussing the Ten Commandments in his book of essays, The Covenanted Self, Brueggemann affirms that the first three commandments about Yahweh give rise to the other seven, which all have to do with living in community, being good neighbors, and loving the neighbor as oneself.

In awe of God, we are called to, in a sense, privilege the neighbor to be truly neighborly and faithful to God. We are to consider their needs, their beliefs, their practices above our own needs, beliefs, and practices. It’s like what is said about marriage, each partner must give 150%. 50% doesn’t cut it, not even 100%. But if we strive to give 150% we are more likely to make a marriage or a spiritual community work.

That requires forgiveness—forgiving that the other is not all we expected, forgiving mistakes and ignorance and insensitivity, forgiving wrongs and inabilities and limitations. And forgiving ourselves these things as well. We are not perfect people. We are forgiven people.

Our model is Jesus, of whom our Christian tradition says that he emptied himself to be a servant. Jesus emptied himself into the neighbor, Brueggemann asserts, and urges us to “imagine that neighborliness is more important than good economics or good politics or good morality or good orthodoxy.” While accepting that challenge, I would add that truly good economics, politics, morality, or orthodoxy must be based in neighborliness.

In Living Buddha, Living Christ, the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells the story of a woman who invoked the name of the Buddha hundreds of times a day for ten years, but “was still filled with anger and irritation.” Noticing this over the years, a neighbor knocked on her door and called to her. Annoyed, she struck her meditation bell hard to make it clear she was chanting. The neighbor called again and again, and finally the woman shouted, “Can’t you see I’m invoking the name of the Buddha? Why are you bothering me now?”

The neighbor responded, “I only called your name twelve times, and look at how angry you have become. Imagine how angry the Buddha must be after you have been calling his name for ten years!”

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

Inventing Jesus

I once wrote on this blog that if Jesus had not existed, we would have had to invent him. And according to Reza Aslan’s bestselling Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, we did. That is, the Jesus we all know and love.

You might recall I bought the book on my birthday earlier this month when I was stuck for ten hours in the Cincinnati  airport, diverted there for repairs to my plane. I heard about it via an offensive Fox news interview gone viral on the internet in which Aslan was asked repeatedly why a Muslim would write about Jesus.

The controversial thesis of the book is that the historical Jesus was in reality a revolutionary unopposed to violence, one whom early Christians transformed into a more agreeable and thus more acceptable (to Rome) figure of peace and love. Many of you know that Aslan is not the first to assert this, something Aslan confirms, as he considers his well-written and informative narrative the sum of biblical scholarship to date (others disagree).

A Christian Century review by professor Greg Carey serves as a corrective to this view of Jesus, explaining that “Jewish resistance did not always imply violence.” I would add that I think Jesus would have been far less memorable if he were a conventional revolutionary.

And Carey points out what I noted reading the book that “Aslan sometimes regards the Gospels critically, and he sometimes takes them at face value, but I cannot discern the criteria by which he makes such decisions.” Finally, Carey takes Aslan to task for “the played-out model that Paul ‘invented’ Christianity,” and for “posit[ing] a Jewish Jesus tradition that did without the idea of Jesus’ divinity.”

Which brings me back to inventing Jesus. What we have, I believe, are stories and teachings of one who had and has a transforming effect on people for the better, a transformation variously called healing, saving, liberating, redeeming, reconciling, forgiving, and atoning. Doesn’t mean that these people didn’t mess up—we have church history and our own lives to prove that. But we needed and need someone like Jesus to remind us that we are all children of God, with all the privileges and responsibilities. And that’s divine in my book.

What Henri Nouwen wrote about the Eucharist in Creative Ministry seems pertinent here: 

We will never fully understand the meaning of the sacramental signs of bread and wine when they do not make us realize that the whole of nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality far beyond itself. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist becomes a “special problem” only when we have lost our sense of His presence in all that is, grows, lives, and dies. … Bread is more than bread; wine is more than wine: it is God with us—not as an isolated event once a week but as the concentration of a mystery about which all of nature speaks day and night (p 102-103).

The Jesus of faith reminds us that God is always with us. To paraphrase Henri, the presence of God in Jesus becomes a “special problem” only when we have lost our sense of God’s presence in all that is, grows, lives, and dies.

For a rabbi’s more extensive review of Zealot, click here.

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

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

Spiritual Arboretums

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went to the Garden of Love,

And saw what I never had seen:

A Chapel was built in the midst,

Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

And “Thou shalt not” writ over the door;

So I turn’d to the Garden of Love,

That so many sweet flowers bore,

And I saw it was filled with graves,

And tombstones where flowers should be:

And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

And binding with briars my joys and desires. 

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

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

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

Mary Oliver captures an aspect of the contemplative life: 

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. 

The Body of Christ

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

One of my favorite images in the Bible is that of our spiritual community, the church, as the Body of Christ. And this past weekend the Metropolitan Community Church of the Blue Ridge in Roanoke, Virginia, gave me an opportunity to reflect on this image with its members and friends.

Generally I do not move in academic circles, so I’m not sure if it’s still the fashion to identify one’s “social location” at the beginning of a presentation or paper as it was a few years ago. It humbles anyone who might claim to write or speak for one and all, because everyone’s perspective may be limited by their social location. (I must admit to faith in the discernment powers of readers and listeners to decide what speaks to them and what doesn’t without such disclaimers!)

I mention this because I believe one of the consequences of the metaphor of the church as the Body of Christ is that it has helped Jesus transcend his particularity, his social location as a first century Palestinian Jewish male living under Roman occupation. In the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians, the Body of Christ is Jew and Greek, slave and free. In our own words we could say that the Body of Christ is now of every race and place, of every age and culture, of every condition and class, gender and sexuality, of every vocation, education, experience, and skill set.

Jesus transcended his particularity, his social location, by leading and loving us into this community. And we transcend our particularity, our social location, by living and loving in this community. The Body of Christ stretches around the globe and reaches backward and forward in time. Now I think that’s cool!

The problem is, others don’t. They want to silence or censure or shutout those with different perspectives. The classic definition of “liberal” suggests a willingness to consider all views. Church historian Martin Marty has pointed out the liability of being liberal: when liberals rise to places of influence in denominations, they leave conservatives in place. But when conservatives do the same, they ax the liberals! Thus, over time, mainline denominations are being skewed to the right.

One of the points I made in my presentation on progressive Christianity this weekend is that Christian fundamentalists and biblical literalists claim they are the “traditional” Christians, when in truth, they are relative newcomers to the tradition. I believe that much of what today is called “progressive” Christianity is really good old mainstream liberal Christianity.

I have been re-reading Kenneth Leech’s Soul Friend, and in his chapter, “Prayer and the Christian Spiritual Tradition,” he writes:

Frequently…expressions such as “traditional theology” and “traditional spirituality” are used in ways which indicate ignorance of the tradition in its diversity. We are in a situation of breakdown so that what often passes for orthodoxy is simply a current convention, and the most deeply rooted orthodox teachings are seen as some novel theory.

So, while listening to the conservative members of the Body of Christ, progressive Christians must never believe that our positions don’t have multiple roots in Christian tradition!

And when conservative members of the Body of Christ question whether we are members of that body and resist listening to us, we must remind them of Paul’s words to the Corinthians about failing to recognize the Body of Christ:

Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup in an unworthy manner will be answerable… For all who eat and drink without discerning the body, eat and drink judgment against themselves.

In context, Paul is talking about discerning the Body of Christ in each other, not in the bread and the cup. When we fail to see the Body of Christ in one another—and I would add, in the stranger as well—we are held accountable.

I delight in the concept of our spiritual community as the Body of Christ because it celebrates diversity while resisting divisiveness.

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Spiritual Freedom

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

Paul reminded the church in Galatia that he had been very religious. He wrote, “I advanced in [religion] beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.” What that meant was following to the letter every religious law and performing every required religious ritual. But what that also meant for him was intolerance of any who did not rigidly adhere to the same laws and rituals—thus his persecution of the freewheeling sect who were followers of Jesus.

But then Paul had a spiritual experience. It was a spiritual experience that did not conform to his tradition. As is true throughout the Bible, personal experience is thus counted as a sacred source, alongside religious teaching and ritual. Our lives are sacred texts that we may consult alongside scripture and tradition. Spirituality is not something imposed by external requirements, such as circumcision. Spirituality is something inspired by internal freedom, a circumcision—transformation—of the heart.

The apostle Paul addressed a crisis in the life of the congregation in Galatia in which some of its members were trying to impose traditional rituals and requirements on its converts. “For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery,” Paul virtually shouted at them. But freedom itself can be inhibiting, when we face so many possibilities! What do we preserve and what do we transcend? How do we make the choice? Who makes that decision?

From childhood I remember an episode of a TV program called Crossroads in which two angels come to a village. The angel in the white suit claimed to have come from God, as did the angel in the dark suit. The villagers did not know which angel to believe, so they challenged them to engage in a staring match. Two chairs were set opposite one another on the main street, and a wide circle was drawn around them, lest someone get in the way of their spiritual warfare and be harmed.  The angels sat in the opposing chairs and stared intently into each other’s eyes without blinking.

Unaware of what was going on, a little girl playing nearby chased her ball into the circle, to the alarm of the villagers. Suddenly she was struck down by the spiritual powers wrestling for control. But before she fell to the ground, the angel in the dark suit turned to catch her before she hurt herself, breaking his gaze at the angel in the white suit.

“Ah, now we know which angel is from heaven,” some villagers concluded, “The angel in the white suit did not look away.”

But other villagers wondered allowed, “But wouldn’t an angel from heaven be more concerned for the child’s welfare than with winning a stupid contest?” And so the villagers were divided between the angel with power and the angel with compassion.

It has been said of our own era that the most needed spiritual gift is an ability to discern the spirits. The Galatians were similarly torn between the traditions of their spiritual ancestors and their newfound Christian freedom. So Paul gave them a way to test the spirits in their freedom: “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.” But lest we focus on judging others, Paul continued, “All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbor’s work, will become a cause for pride.”

A conservative Christian once remarked about a festive gathering of progressive Christians, “You do seem to have better parties.” The progressive Christian to whom he spoke laughed, observing, “There may be a theological reason for that!”