Means of Grace

I took this photo of Howard Rice leading a retreat 

for the Lazarus Project and West Hollywood Presbyterian Church 

at Mt. Calvary Retreat House in Santa Barbara in the 1980's.

At the risk of copyright infringement, I cannot resist quoting an entire passage from Howard Rice’s book, Reformed Spirituality: An Introduction for Believers. It summarizes everything to be said for the spiritual life in Christian terms, and I am quick to add that Howard practiced what he preached:

God is love, and the experience of God’s love is one that meets our basic need for love so that we can be free to love others. Without receiving love, we cannot love others, no matter how hard we try. That is why spiritual experience is so linked with self-giving love for others. The heart of the experience of God is an inner knowing that “I am loved, loved beyond comprehension, beyond my earning or deserving.”

This deep knowing of the soul is the shattering of the otherwise inexhaustible need for love, which drives us to keep ourselves in the very center of the universe and to evaluate everything on the basis of how much it meets our needs. The person who knows love is able to love; the person who has been in the presence of the Divine Lover is filled to the brim with a sense of satisfaction of that need and can let go and share love. That is why truly great mystics are always such powerful figures and are often revolutionary.

They have a vision of how things might be that is not blurred by fear of what might happen to them. They are powerful because their vision has broken down their need for being loved. They have been liberated from their own inner needs, and they are empowered to go out and challenge the powers of evil in the world. They know, from their own experience, that the power of evil within them has been broken by the power of God’s love [p 166].

Rice goes on to explain the two-fold range of such love. One is to care for those closest to us, neighbor and family. The other is to care more “long-range,” to be involved in transforming structures so that those structures may care for others, what John Calvin would call “the most remote person” and what Jesus called “the least of these.” The first is personal. The second is political.

You can see how this echoes the early monastic movement, the Desert Mothers and Fathers who went out into the wilderness of the Middle East in the third and fourth centuries to pray. They pursued their spiritual disciplines not simply to save themselves from being corrupted by collaboration with the empire, but to be able to reach out to save others from the “shipwreck” they saw as civilization.

What Christians from the Reformed tradition often overlook is that the history of Christian spiritual practices from the centuries since Jesus is our history too, as the split between Catholic and Protestant only just occurred in the 16^th century, long after the spiritual contributions of such figures as Arsenius, Benedict, Catherine of Siena, Claire, Francis, Hildegard, Ignatius, Julian of Norwich, and Syncletica, to name a few in alphabetical rather than chronological order. And the split between Eastern and Western Christianity occurred in the 11^th century. So we share with Catholic and Orthodox traditions more combined history than separate histories.

Howard Rice’s book reminded me of this when he surprised me with the notion that John Calvin actually used the Benedictine spiritual practice of lectio divina, contemplating a sacred text meditatively.

In an appendix to Monk Habits for Everyday People, Dennis Okholm explains Protestant resistance to monasticism:

+ It implied a two-tiered or class system of Christian community that was believed schismatic.

+ Monastic vows seemed to contradict justification by faith alone.

+ “Idleness,” a mistaken belief that monks were not doing their part as Christian ministers.

Howard Rice notes a central distinction of Reformed spirituality: a desire for union with Christ as the way to union with God. He notes that what we call spirituality Reformers called piety, a word that today carries self-righteous connotations.

Rice writes of Reformed congregations, “The familiar vow once used when people united with the church was the promise to make diligent use of the means of grace,” the use of spiritual practices to be receptive to, not to earn, God’s grace.

And the endgame was still the same. In the words of Richard Baxter, “to prevent a shyness between God and thy soul…”

I am pleased to announce that my friend Connie Tuttle has had her delightful book published, A Gracious Heresy: The Queer Calling of an Unlikely Prophet. I wrote about it in a post five years ago, Nativity Stories. My blurb describes it as “containing extraordinary stories extraordinarily well told.”

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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. 

"There Is Simply Too Much to Think About"

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. 

–William Wordsworth, 1802

The world is too much with us, and there has never been so much world.              –Saul Bellow, 1959

To say that the world is too much with us is meaningless for there is no longer any us. The world is everything. … What is happening everywhere is, one way or another, known to everyone. Shadowy world tides wash human nerve endings in the remotest corners of the earth.  –Saul Bellow, 1975

And think of us now, forty years later, awash in the internet, 24/7 news cycles, and countless means of communication!

Forgive me, Martin Amis, for stripping these quotes out of your recent profound and complex review of the late novelist Saul Bellow’s collection of non-fiction, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, edited by Benjamin Taylor. But I wanted to share with my readers that what you identify as a literary problem is also a spiritual one with which most of us are familiar.  I daresay you might agree.

You identify “distraction,” “noise,” and “crisis chatter” as themes of this “pruned and expanded” version of Bellow’s 1994 collection, It All Adds Up. My readers bear witness to those themes in everything from the media to politics, as well as some expressions of worship and religion. But, as you write, quoting Bellow: 

“It is apparently in the nature of the creature to resist the world’s triumph,” the triumph of “turbulence and agitation”—and Bellow’s corpus is graphic proof of that defiance. 

Just, as you say, channeling Bellow, the writer must not lose “eternal naïveté,” always seeing as if for the first time, the reader should welcome George Santayana’s understanding of “piety” as “reverence for the sources of one’s being.”

What you describe as Bellow’s implication that “the essential didactic task is to instill the readerly habits of enthusiasm, gratitude and awe” without falling prey to over-interpretation of literary texts should be heard by all who interpret sacred texts.

What has checked and chastened my own earnestness when it comes to things religious and academic are family members, friends, lovers, congregants, and colleagues whose common sense often makes me laugh at my own seriousness, even if I simply think what they might say!  As you finally quote artist and critic Clive James: 

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing. Those who lack humor are without judgment and should be trusted with nothing. 

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

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Piety on Parade

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

“Be careful not to parade your piety in public to attract attention; otherwise you will lose all reward from your Father in heaven.”

Jesus said this. I’ve thought of it often as I’ve posted 60+ posts on this blog, Progressive Christian Reflections, which could be viewed as my own little piety parade!

This week I’ve been revisiting the Sermon on the Mount as well as Henri Nouwen’s most intimate journal, The Inner Voice of Love. A few days ago I read the above verse and all of Jesus’ sayings about doing one’s spiritual practice in private—you know, not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing in almsgiving, praying in your pantry rather than on street corners, not “babbling as the gentiles do” in prayermaking, and avoiding a dismal face while fasting. That is, if you’re doing it for God rather than human praise.

Then I opened Henri’s journal to his next entry, and, lo and behold:

“You have to let your father and father figures go. You must stop seeing yourself through their eyes and trying to make them proud of you.”

I LOL at the juxtaposition of seeking “reward from your Father in heaven” with “you have to let your father and father figures go.” Henri’s father survived him by a number of years, so he was bold to put this in print. Indeed, The Inner Voice of Love was coincidentally released on the day of Henri’s death.

The entry is entitled with a “spiritual imperative” to himself, “Stop Being a Pleaser,” in which Henri reflects, “For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. … But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you.”

I thought of the would-be follower of Jesus who implored him, “Let me first go and bury my father.” Jesus’ response sounds harsh, “Let the dead bury the dead,” until you learn that there’s not a corpse awaiting burial, but a very live father to whom the son is beholden until the eventual day of his death. Jesus would not win the hearts of the so-called “traditional family values” crowd by his implication that the commonwealth of God supersedes family obligations.

That’s what Henri is getting at. He only needs to please God.

But I realized as I reflected on all these “father” connections that, though I may have begun my spiritual practices to please God or parents or others, that now I do it to please me, to give myself pleasure. So long an outsider, it gives me pleasure to come inside God’s sanctuary—safe space—in contemplation. I’m not looking for another’s approbation, even God’s—as if God needed me to do this! And I share such thoughts not for reward but to model possibilities for others.