What the World Needs Now Is Grace (Sweet Grace)

Wildflowers in the Swiss Alps, 1973.

Oh, isn’t that sweet? Chris is getting sentimental in his latter years, you might be thinking, out of touch with reality, pining nostalgically for an ideal world of lovingkindness. Next he’ll be composing rhymes for Hallmark cards.

But grace is countercultural, haven’t you noticed? Watch, read, listen, or click the news and you will find much that is ungracious. As a cure and balance, I’ve been paying attention to stories that don’t make it above the fold of the newspaper (for those who remember such a reference), are not “trending” or on the bestseller list:

+A doctor walking twenty blocks through rain to see her 91-year-old Filipina-American patient hours before she died, and the daughters who cared for her.

+A book about Darwin’s understanding that beauty and artful behavior, not just natural selection, influenced the shaping of species. And females had much to say in the process!

+How three friends worked together to prove that upside-down jellyfish sleep, indicating a brain is not required for slumber. (I think not having a brain would help!)

+A columnist’s pilgrimage to the Vatican and a pope who cares about refugees, immigrants, climate change, war and peace.

+Admiration for an unsung Civil Rights activist from the 50s, Rev. Joseph De Laine, involved in Brown v Board of Education.

+Understanding how feminism has positively affected the future direction of philosophy.

+Artists who make a statement with their artwork shortly before they die.

I wanted to title my first book about seeking ordination in the church as an openly gay man, A Profile in Grace. I was tentative about it, though, because it could imply that grace was something I had achieved or was gifted on my own, when my intent was that I, like everyone else, live and love and work by God’s grace. Harper & Row, its first publisher, preferred a title that suggested the story line, and my friend Scott Rogo suggested Uncommon Calling.

But God’s grace is what called me out of the closet and into that uncommon calling, a lifelong ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community, and more broadly, between sexuality and spirituality.

Grace is tough and truthful and transformative and liberating. It requires strength and honesty and change and freedom. When I have encountered or beheld or experienced or witnessed God’s grace, I have become better, happier, more helpful, and more gracious. Grace begets grace.

We may all be profiles in grace. It is in the glory of God’s grace that each of us discovers who we are created and called to be.

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

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.

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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.  

Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair

As the first Jesuit pope visited the United States, the first openly gay Jesuit priest went to heaven. As John McNeill passed through the pearly gates, Saint Peter asked, “Where’s your partner, Charlie?” “Oh,” John said, a little absent-mindedly, “He’ll be along. He just didn’t think he should leave the country while Pope Francis might stop by.”

John tried to begin his talks with a bit of humor, sometimes as offbeat or puzzling as that. “Let me have too deep a sense of humor ever to be proud,” his fellow Jesuit, Daniel Lord, wrote in a “Prayer for Humility.”

And it is with that glee that he insisted his publisher keep his chosen title of his autobiography, Both Feet Firmly Planted in Midair. Both his editor and I tried to dissuade him from the title, lest it be misinterpreted, but he loved that that’s how a former professor characterized him: “There’s goes John J. McNeill, both feet firmly planted in midair.”

John McNeill, SJ, not only wrote but published a book with the Roman Catholic Church’s imprimatur in 1976 that changed many of our lives in the LGBT Christian community, The Church and the Homosexual. 

It was the first such tome since Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition two decades earlier, and appeared more than a decade before John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, though McNeill credits Boswell’s as-yet-unpublished work as contributing to his own.

Soon McNeill’s book would be joined by Letha Scanzoni and Virginia Ramey Mollenkott’s Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? (1978) as prompters for the church to reconsider its views.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual seminarians of the 70s were beside ourselves with hope that these books portended a change that would permit our ordinations and ministries in the church. Having just purchased McNeill’s book, a friend of mine set it down with her school books on a table in Yale Divinity School’s refectory en route to the lunch line. She turned it face down so no one would see the title, then had second thoughts, and boldly turned it face up.

When she returned to the table, a classmate, observing the title, said, “So, is John McNeill a homosexual?” “Why would you ask that?” she inquired, guessing more than she let on. “Well, if he’s homosexual, he’ll be biased.” I can’t recall if she said it or thought it, “Don’t you think a heterosexual would also be biased?”

I had the privilege and honor to get to know John as we shared leadership of a number of retreats at Kirkridge, inhabiting rooms across the hall from one another. On many occasions there and elsewhere, I came to know his steadfast, lifelong partner Charlie Chiarelli. So I was saddened for both to hear of his death last week in Ft. Lauderdale, where they retired some years ago. They have been and will be in my prayers.

It so happens I am reading and using in my morning prayers The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuits, along with a companion text, Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits. I am doing so in preparation for helping with a spiritual formation course on Ignatian Spirituality the week of November 9-13.

Despite an accessible translation, I confess I have had to work hard at translating The Spiritual Exercises to meet my own spiritual needs. Reared a Baptist, I have regularly and often immediately observed and confessed personal sins, and as a Presbyterian and MCCer I learned also to confess corporate and systemic sins, and I don’t think rehearsing these would be spiritually helpful, except for the most obsessive-compulsive among us!

And some of the recommended objects of devotion and reflection don’t match my progressive theology. But I do get Ignatius’s point, that there’s work to be done to eliminate all that gets in the way of God’s presence.

The prayers in Hearts on Fire have been more helpful—for example, I am eager to do a personal retreat focusing on “Testament,” a guided meditation by the well-known Jesuit from India, the late Anthony de Mello, which is, as the book describes, “a creative alternative to examining one’s conscience.”

So, as I prepared to write this, I looked for things I had underlined in my reading thus far that might speak to John’s life, and that’s how the quote about humor above came to be included. But the quotes I want to use now are my own responses written in the margins!

After reading a contemporary paraphrase of the Anima Christi by David Fleming, SJ, I wrote, 

Death is the final praise,

            the final ecstasy

            giving up one’s spirit

            unto the Spirit.

And after being challenged by Ignatius to contemplate hell, something I cannot believe except metaphorically, I wrote: 

Hell is the place of not feeling love.

It can be anywhere and everywhere.

Love gives rise to purpose, meaning, hope, fulfillment—heaven.

Sin is being unloving, unkind—to myself, to others.

And then I added: 

Grief is hell. 

John has now offered “the final praise.” He saved LGBT Christians from hell, and reminded us of God’s love, giving rise to the “purpose, meaning, hope, and fulfillment” of our movement, a taste of heaven, reminding us what sin truly is: “being unloving, unkind” to ourselves and to others. Our grief may be hell, especially for one as close as Charlie, but we pray with Joseph Tetlow, SJ’s version of the Anima Christi, “make my pain pregnant with power.”

There were many times that John’s pain was “pregnant with power.” Being silenced by the church and then ousted from the Jesuits gave him the opportunity to fulfill a greater calling than he originally anticipated when, as a starving prisoner of war during WW II, a slave laborer, at risk of death from a vigilant SS guard, tossed him a potato, making the sign of the cross. John dated his priesthood from the moment of that courageous and compassionate act.

Thanks, John, in turn, for tossing me a saving “potato”!

There will be a gathering at Kirkridge to celebrate John McNeill’s legacy, January 15-17, 2016.

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

Pets as Theophanies

Hobbes on the beach in South Carolina.

Welcome, Pope Francis, to the U.S.A! Click here for posts that mention the pope, including one written by our dog, Hobbes.

I’ve been contemplating the depth of my loss in the death of our beloved golden Labrador retriever mix, Hobbes, this summer. Those who read my earlier posts may tire of hearing about this, but my hope has been in each one to speak to our common experiences, not just of pets, but of grief, loss, and love.

I can see very few stars in our sky over Atlanta. I have no nearby shore to walk and watch the waves rise and fall. Buildings obstruct the horizon in every direction.  There are no mountains to climb in our neighborhood.

Hobbes was my touchstone for nature. Gazing at her I saw the artistry of God. Being with her I also witnessed—in Evelyn Underhill’s words—the “homeliness” of God, God’s everydayness, familiarity, and steadfast presence.

My “congregation” is largely invisible and silent and at a distance: the readers of my blog and of my books. Facebook, e-mails, and letters intermittently give me chances to hear from you.

But Hobbes was my constant companion, particularly needed during times of stress, grief, anxiety, and loneliness. And, at the time of her death, she was the longest intimate relationship I’d had as an adult.

During her walks, she led me beside “green pastures” under the canopy of trees that cover our city, thus “restoring my soul.” If walking with God through the Garden of Eden was denied me, Hobbes was a qualified representative. Wade and I are still taking her longer morning walks.

When Calvin, Hobbes, and I lived in San Francisco, where I served as interim pastor for a little over a year, they led me “beside still waters” of nearby Lake Merced (“mercy” lake) and we played on the shores of Sunset Beach and Fort Funston.

Hobbes and I walked together “through the valley of the shadow of death” with Calvin when he was euthanized in our home there. Early the following Sunday morning, Hobbes and I witnessed a kind of “resurrection appearance” when on our walk we were joined by a collar-free silver-haired Calvin look-alike bounding in adolescent energy, as if reborn. (For more on this story, see chapter 8 of The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life.)

At Fort Funston, a doggy-friendly beach, we once encountered a baby sea lion. Hobbes’s eyes widened with wonder, and I leashed her lest she get too close. Together we watched as it returned to the sea. I walked on down the shore, not knowing that Hobbes, now unleashed, was not with me. I looked back several hundred yards later, and realized Hobbes was awaiting the sea lion’s return, gazing out to sea at the spot we had watched it go back in the waves. She had witnessed dogs go in and out of the water, and I guess she assumed the same of the sea lion.

She never fetched outside like Calvin, but she did love to play fetch and keep-away indoors with her squeaky “mousey.” And she enjoyed it when I got down on all fours, challenging me to chase her by slapping her front paws on the floor while bending toward me, grinning and eyes sparkling with glee. So she also brought me the re-creation of play.

Hobbes would join me, usually on our deck, for my morning prayers, eventually expecting a belly rub on each side. At night and during naps, she often slept on our bed, turning to face the open doorway, our protector as well.

Calvin’s eyes were always happy, but Hobbes’s eyes ranged from happy to wistful to sad, with soulful expressions, and she sometimes watched me longingly, especially in her latter days. At times I wondered if she were my mother reincarnated, so attentive she was to my presence.

Every death of a person or of a relationship reminds me of how imperfectly I have loved, and her death was no different.  In these final years of my life, I understand how imperfectly I have loved people and pets, as well as congregations and the broader church. Thus I am all the more grateful for God’s grace.

Hobbes was a theophany for me, a living, breathing, furry icon of God’s wonder, grace, and love. As a blog reader comforted me, “She was God in Hobbes-clothing.” I will miss her. And she will always be in my heart.

Click here and scroll down for other posts that mention Hobbes, who even made it into The New York Times!

P.S. Since posting this, I discovered that Pope Francis, in his June 18^th encyclical on climate change, wrote, “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.” He ends the encyclical with prayers, including, “Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey toward your infinite light.” Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for his column, “A Pope for All Species.”

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here. Thank you!

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

Jeb vs. Francis

My heart and prayers go out to Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Today’s post was first published in The Huffington Post on Monday.

Just when I had concluded that Jeb Bush was the likely Republican nominee for president in 2016, he said something that dumbfounded me: 

I hope I’m not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope. And I’d like to see what [the pope] says as it relates to climate change and how that connects to these broader, deeper issues before I pass judgment. But I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting in the political realm.  (New York Times, June 17, 2015) 

“Religion ought to be about making us better as people” means to me that it makes us better voters, better legislators, better elected officials—all devising better policies as political actors, thus “getting in the political realm.”

“I don’t get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope” (and presumably his priest) makes me wonder who Jeb’s spiritual advisors are, then, and if Jesus and his teachings even count in his views on public policy.

I’m not saying this is true of Jeb Bush, but many Christians see Jesus and the church simply as their “Get-out-of-hell-free” card in a game of spiritual Monopoly, and view religion as concerned with personal morals rather than economic realities. That’s why they easily claim their religious values when it comes to opposing women’s reproductive rights and same-sex marriage.

But Jesus and his followers proclaimed a gospel that has as much to do with economic concerns as spiritual realities. In truth, conversion anticipated care for “the least of these.” Jesus admonished the one percent to “sell what you have and give to the poor” and, in the Lord’s Prayer no less, just after being given our daily bread, we are to forgive our debtors as God overlooks our own indebtedness. And in his proclamation of God’s in-breaking government, Jesus fed and healed the multitudes as he offered them spiritual wisdom.

As to Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment and the disproportionate effects of human-caused climate change on the poor—this is not just religion speaking, but mainstream science as well.

In Merchants of Doubt, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway “reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change,” according to an article in The New York Times’ Science Times, “And most surprisingly in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people.” They followed the playbook of the tobacco industry in planting doubt about the conclusions of accepted scientific studies: 

The central players were serious scientists who had major career triumphs during the Cold War, but in subsequent years apparently came to equate environmentalism with socialism, and government regulation with tyranny. (New York Times, June 16, 2015) 

There may be a parallel in religion. That the encyclical was leaked before its planned release may suggest the work of similar “central players…who had career triumphs” who resent Pope Francis’s attempts at reform and wanted to embarrass him regarding his ability to manage the Vatican.

Political and religious conservatives claim the rights of religion in the marketplace of ideas and the public square. Why not support the same claim when religion and science come together to save the planet and its poor?

Readers are this blog’s only means of support. To donate, please click here or mail to Metropolitan Community Churches, 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 © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

"All that Is Less than God Is Not Enough for Us"

The morning I write this, religion is all over the morning paper, and not in a good way. Muslim extremists cast a shadow over Islam and the world, French Jews feel unsafe and are considering emigrating to Israel, Mormons are threatening to excommunicate yet another church member who supports ordaining women and same-sex marriage, Scientology has a full page ad decrying an upcoming HBO documentary with a story in the business section describing the controversy, and Duke University withdraws support for Islamic calls to prayer from their chapel tower due to threats. The only positive religious story is Pope Francis visiting the Philippines.

I felt so overwhelmed I couldn’t imagine writing another post for this blog as I intended. My work here seems so inconsequential.

But then I continued reading The Complete Julian of Norwich, a new book and translation by Father John-Julian, OJN, and specifically the 14^th century Dame Julian’s “showings,” the Middle English word for “revelations.” She lived and wrote confined by choice in a one-room anchor-hold which was about the size of my office, and yet she speaks to me and countless others seven centuries later. Her era like our own looked for a personal experience of the sacred.

The past few days I’ve been dawdling over a couple of sections, each about the length of a blogpost, which have profoundly moved me, prompting me to read them again and again. Though I could never hope to write with such authority, I can unapologetically offer readers the insights of this contemplative and mystic.

In one of her “showings,” God holds up something about the size of a hazel nut, explaining, “It is all that is made.” You may grimace at the stretch, but my mind went immediately to the cosmic marble that exploded into the multiverse; in others words, the Big Bang.

She continues, “In this little thing I saw three characteristics: the first is that God made it, the second is that God loves it, the third, that God keeps it. But what did I observe in that? Truly the Maker, the Lover, and the Keeper, for, until I am in essence one-ed to [God], I can never have full rest nor true joy.”

About the world’s distractions, she writes,“For this is the reason why we are not fully at ease in heart and soul: because here we seek rest in these things that are so little…” She concludes, “All that is less than [God] is not enough for us.”

Wow, I thought, this is not only the spiritual quest, but the scientific quest as well. “All that is less than God is not enough for us.” We can’t be satisfied with insufficient metaphors for God, as we have in religion; we can’t be satisfied with incomplete explanations of all that is, as we have in science. Our lifelong quest is for the hidden God, the unknowable, the mystery from whence all that is, is.

According to Father John-Julian, she follows the insight of Thomas Aquinas “that the soul naturally seeks the Good, but is diverted by not perceiving the true good, and settling for less.”

In the section that follows, Julian explains that intermediaries—whether saints, sacraments, even Christ himself—are only efficacious because their source is “the goodness of God,” which is what makes us, loves us, and keeps us. Even so, religion is only efficacious when sourced by God’s goodness.

Some might think it presumptuous to assume benevolence of God or if not God, the cosmos, but giving us life, time, and place, as well as a magnificent outer space to glimpse, is surely not anything less than good.

I doubt she knew the teachings of the fourth century Desert Fathers and Mothers, yet she also understands prayer as changing us, not God, “for the goodness of God is the highest prayer, and it comes down to the lowest part of our need.” It is in this context she describes God as our “Lover.”

To think how I winced when I first heard LGBT Christians pray to God as “Our Lover”!

Because we cannot fully comprehend God, we “remain in spiritual contemplation, with everlasting wonder at this high, surpassing inestimable love which Almighty God has for us...”

She offers a prayer: 

God, of Thy goodness, give me Thyself;

for Thou art enough to me,

and I can ask nothing that is less

that can be full honor to Thee.

And if I ask anything that is less,

ever shall I be in want,

for only in Thee have I all.

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

Hounds in Heaven

My name is Hobbes. I’m a 15-year-old female retriever mix. I’ve watched my human do this over 200 times, so I’ve decided to mark this post myself. It’s taken me a few weeks because I type slower than he does. Be grateful that I have substituted this for the post he wrote, which was just not right for New Year’s Eve: all about the gloom and doom of this past year—y’know, disease, torture, rendition, racism,* guns, rape, climate change, war, you name it.

The occasion? Pope Francis’s statement while comforting a child in the death of his dog: “One day, we will see our animals again in the eternity of Christ. Paradise is open to all of God’s creatures.”** He said this several weeks ago, but as I said, I type slowly and I like to chew on things for a while, the canine form of contemplation.

Paradise would not be paradise for my humans if I wasn’t there. As it is, I bring them a little heaven on earth, if I may say so. Remember, if Eve hadn’t come along, animals were made to be Adam’s companions, and we would never have let them be fooled by that snake. Eden was idyllic for us, too, as Adam and Eve were both vegans before The Fall. We too yearn to return to that Paradise in which all animals, including humans, will get along.

Of course Mr. Pope stirred up controversy, because what he said suggests that animals have souls. How can humans not see my soulful expression in the photo that accompanies this post? And what makes humans think they have a soul and we do not? Isn’t that presumptuous?

My late brother Calvin wrote about his philosophy in a book, Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog. In his chapter “On Evolution,” he questioned that dogs descended from wolves, but never doubted humans descended from apes. He asserted: 

Rather, I believe that I and other dogs were created by God and made in God’s image. We are God’s mirror reflection. That’s why God backwards spells dog. Isn’t that one of the first things you English-speaking humans notice, the spelling thing? And who else but God loves as unconditionally as a dog? We don’t care who you humans are or what you humans do, as long as you take some time to be with us, praise us, worship us, and do our bidding occasionally. Isn’t that godlike? Even when you treat us badly or forget we’re around, the minute you turn about and give us the attention we deserve, we lick your faces and give you comfort. Isn’t that divine? 

Beware, all those who mistreat or abuse animals in this life or allow us to be treated badly by others, because heaven will seem like hell to you, not because we are vengeful (that’s a human thing) but because you will feel so ashamed!

Instead, consider my brother’s hope for the world this New Year: 

Avoid that misnamed “dog-eat-dog” world (after all, we’re not cannibals) and drool over a dog-sniff-dog world in which we smell one another’s delicious scents, see the wonder of all creation, dig out a safe lair for all (especially puppies), perk up our ears at worthy lead dogs, take opportunities to rest and play and nest, and sense the presence of our Mother Dog watching over all of us.

Then together, as one pack, we can sniff out life’s buried treats.

*I have a bone to pick with humans. Why breed so much diversity among us dogs, but resist diversity among yourselves?

** This is Chris adding this editorial note. I didn’t have the heart to tell Hobbes that the quote was subsequently attributed to Paul VI! She loves Pope Francis’s choice of name so very much! -CG

P.S. Since Hobbes posted this, Pope Francis, in his June 18, 2015 encyclical on climate change, wrote, “Eternal life will be a shared experience of awe, in which each creature, resplendently transfigured, will take its rightful place and have something to give those poor men and women who will have been liberated once and for all.” He ends the encyclical with prayers, including, “Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey toward your infinite light.” Thanks to Nicholas Kristof for his column, “A Pope for All Species.”

See Hobbes referenced in The New York Times by clicking here!

Posts that have gone to the dogs:

A Bone to Pick with Scripture

My Dog Ate My Scripture

Let God Rub Your Belly

Miss the Rapture?

What Calvin Taught Me about God

So I can get more treats, please support my human’s 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 pet-friendly denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

This Post Is Irrelevant!

Reading the morning paper, listening to or watching the news, I am only too aware of the many topics I might address on this blog. Ferguson, Missouri, reminds the U.S. that we are far from “post-racial,” and even conservatives are alarmed about “the cartoonish imbalance between the equipment some police departments possess and the constituents they serve” (Rand Paul).

North Korea shoots rockets as Pope Francis visits South Korea, Hamas shoots rockets and Israel retaliates, Russia continues to threaten Ukraine, while Yazidis flee the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. And still unresolved is what could be called another “Children’s Crusade” of Central American children coming across U.S. borders.

Progressive Christians tend to be progressive politically, and might expect this blog to concern itself with political realities, rather than serve up “sentimental nonsense” as an anonymous comment labelled the last post, “A Church and World Re-Imagined.”

I do know that visitors to my blog increase exponentially whenever I am politically “relevant,” but I don’t purposely appeal to that, because my hope has always been to enhance the spirituality that undergirds our actions to make the world a better place.

Presently I am reading a lot of Evelyn Underhill, an English mystic of the first half of the twentieth century. There are so many of her insights I have wanted to share with you, that I hardly knew where to begin. Reading her this morning gave me the concept for this particular post.

Yesterday I read of her emphasis on the “homeliness” (in other words, the everyday qualities) of the spiritual life. She observes, “The Christian’s life is lived in the open, not in a pious cubbyhole.”

“There is nothing high-minded about Christian holiness. It is most at home in the slum, the street, the hospital ward.” She explains further that “the God of our natural life makes of that natural life the very material of [God’s] self-revelation. [God’s] smile kindles the whole universe…”  I especially love that last sentiment.

She accepts her limited role in the scheme of things, rather than “fussing about the things other souls do and feeling despondent because I cannot do them!” She adds, “We are all inclined to be a bit romantic about religion. But God is a realist. God likes home-grown stuff. [God] asks me for a really good apple, not for a dubious South African peach.”

At the same time, today’s readings of Underhill on the subject of retreats suggest we need time with God variously to “give one’s soul a chance,” “to recover if we can our spiritual poise,” and “for realizing our spiritual status.”

Referring to Jesus’ admonition to enter one’s closet to pray, she writes, “It is no use at all to enter that closet, that inner sanctity, clutching the daily paper, the reports of all the societies you support, your engagement book, and a large bundle of personal correspondence. All these must be left outside.”

“By a curious paradox, as our physical universe gets larger, our true horizon shrinks,” she writes elsewhere, so we need retreats “quickening that which has grown dull and dead in us”: 

We forget that awestruck upward glance which is the mark of the spiritual person. Then we lose all sense of proportion; become fussy, restless, full of things that simply must be done, quite oblivious of the only reason why anything should be done. Our prayers become more and more like supernatural shopping lists, less and less like that conversation between one friend and another which is the ideal of Thomas a Kempis. We can’t rest in the Lord; there really isn’t time for that. 

Finally, regarding each time set apart for God, “We do not come for spiritual information, but for spiritual food and air—to wait on the Lord and renew our strength—not for our sakes but for the sake of the world.”

My hope for this blog is not necessarily to be relevant, but to remind us of our footing to be relevant in the world.

Synchronicity would have it that this past weekend I finally found and watched one of my favorite films (1990) on YouTube: Mindwalk, a conversation on the nature of reality (that includes philosophy, science, politics, and poetry) among an expatriate U.S. poet (John Heard), a former presidential candidate (Sam Waterston), and a physicist (Liv Ullman), as they wander around Mont Saint-Michel. Still relevant!

The books I have been reading are Concerning the Inner Life with The House of the Soul, by Evelyn Underhill, and Daily Readings with a Modern Mystic: Selections from the Writings of Evelyn Underhill, Delroy Oberg, editor. I am only providing a link to the first book, as the second one, which I bought used for less than $7 through Amazon a couple of months ago, now ranges from $164-414 on every site I’ve tried!

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Progressive Christian Reflections is an unfunded 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. 

Biblical Potluck

A minister for whom I was to read the scripture for his sermon delayed giving me the reference until, minutes before worship, I asked again. “Oh, I’m glad you reminded me,” he said, “Let me find it.” And he began thumbing through his Bible for the reading with which he seemed to have spent little time.

Another minister once told me he had tried “that meditation and prayer stuff,” but rather proudly announced he had never really “got it.”

A Roman Catholic priest for whom I served as his first Protestant friend began looking at the texts and preparing for his Sunday homilies on Wednesdays rather than Saturdays, he said, because of my influence.

The pastor whom I credit with my becoming Presbyterian in college had an intelligent, deep spirituality that blossomed in solid preaching and social activism. He wrote his sermons in phrases, as if they were poetry, and I am grateful he gave me a few of his manuscripts upon retirement. One especially memorable sermon was about “The One Remembered Line” we sometimes take from a sermon that gets us through the week.

A college religious studies professor remarked to us, his students, that in his first parish job description, he insisted on having twenty hours per week for reading, study, reflection, prayer and sermon preparation. Another professor admitted becoming increasingly hesitant to enter a pulpit, believing more and more that preaching is such an awesome responsibility, something I couldn’t altogether understand then but a feeling with which I resonate with age.

And the activist pastor I first worked alongside after graduation from seminary explained to me that he woke daily at 6 a.m. for two hours of prayer, reading, and silence, having been reared a Quaker.

While “acknowledging his [or her] poverty,” Pope Francis writes, “The Sunday readings will resonate in all their brilliance in the hearts of the faithful if they have first done so in the heart of their pastor.” He quotes Thomas Aquinas that preaching should be “communicating to others what one has contemplated.”

He encourages preachers in the practice of lectio divina, a mindful and prayerful reading of scripture. During the men’s monastic retreat I attended a couple of weeks ago, we practiced lectio divina with John 14:1-14, a text which Jesus begins, “Let not your hearts be troubled.” The phrase I gravitated to was Jesus saying “I will take you to myself.”

When that was the gospel the following week, I, as guest preacher, invited Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church to do lectio divina with the text, providing a copy for everyone, giving a chance for each to share the phrase that spoke to them. I knew this scripture would resonate in the heart of a congregation that faced so many recent challenges.  I explained that, were Sunday worship reinvented, this might be a desirable practice.

Giving it still more thought, it occurred to me that Sunday texts could be assigned much like a church potluck. Instead of last names beginning with A-F bringing salads, they could read the Hebrew lesson in preparation for worship. Instead of main dishes, G-L might contemplate the Psalm for the day, while M-R could reflect on the Epistle lesson. And instead of bringing desserts, S-Z could meditate on the Gospel.  To be fair, a congregation should rotate the assignments. To be honest, I have experienced abundant as well as sparse church potlucks, so it depends on the spiritual investment and generosity of the congregation as to how this will turn out!

Often we want church leadership “to do it all for us,” rather than doing our own spiritual work. But my experience is that people attracted to spiritual formation are eager to do their own work, in the spirit of the apostle Paul’s advice to the church of Corinth:  “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.”

For me, the “punch line” of the men’s monastic retreat came when our leader, Carl McColman, who has written his own excellent and readable The Big Book of Christian Mysticism, recounted once being asked by an interviewer on a program, “If you could recommend only one book on Christian mysticism, what would it be?” To which Carl responded, surprising the host, “Why, the Bible, of course!”

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Related post:

Open Your Refrigerator

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution.Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

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

Multiculturalism Cuts Both Ways

“A People of Many Faces” is one of the more intriguing sections of Pope Francis’s The Joy of the Gospel, having to do with cultural incarnations of Christianity. “We would not do justice to the logic of the incarnation if we thought of Christianity as monocultural and monotonous,” he writes.

Earlier he states, “The history of the Church shows that Christianity does not have simply one cultural expression, but rather, ‘remaining completely true to itself, with unswerving fidelity to the proclamation of the Gospel and the tradition of the Church, it will also reflect the different faces of the cultures and peoples in which it is received and takes root.’” Here he is quoting John Paul II.

The direction of his argument appears to be that Western culture should not impose our cultural values on other cultures, affirming “it is not essential to impose a specific cultural form, no matter how beautiful or ancient it may be…we in the Church can sometimes fall into a needless hallowing of our own culture, and thus show more fanaticism than true evangelizing zeal.”

Quoting John Paul II once more, he encourages us “to work in harmony with indigenous Christians,” because no culture or tradition has a monopoly on Christian expression.

Progressive Christians would applaud that and have tried to apply that in attempting the globalization of our respective denominations and traditions. In my view we do so at the risk of compromising our own cultural values. The equality and rights of women as well as of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender women and men immediately come to mind. 

The faltering Anglican Communion over women priests and gay bishops and the recent disappointment of the United Methodist General Conference to change its policies on LGBT Methodists serve as examples of the imposition of the values of other cultures, failing to respect Western and specifically American culture, which have “evolved” on both issues.

A step further: the logic of Pope Francis’s argument would also culturally contextualize conservative Christians’ reliance on church tradition regarding the place of women, the definition of marriage, and the treatment of sexual and gender minorities.

“We cannot demand that peoples of every continent, in expressing their Christian faith, imitate modes of expression which European nations developed at a particular moment of their history, because the faith cannot be constricted to the limits of understanding and expression of any one culture.” And here again the footnote doesn’t cite the progressive Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, but John Paul II’s apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Asia.

Countless books, articles, and dissertations have been written that document how church tradition on issues of concern to progressive Christians has been held captive to previous cultural understandings, misunderstandings, and prejudice. The competition between the less egalitarian and more dualistic Christianity of Rome and the more progressive Celtic Christianity is but one example of how Christian cultures collided early on.

The Bible counters culture well: “Behold, I am doing a new thing.” “You have heard it said of old…but I say to you.” “If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!” “For freedom Christ has set us free.” “Do not call unclean what God has called clean.” “God shows no partiality.” “Why should my liberty be determined by another’s scruples? If I partake with thankfulness, why am I condemned for that for which I give thanks?”  

“New occasions teach new duties,” as the hymn “Once to Every One and Nation” proclaims. We may learn from other cultures, but multiculturalism cuts both ways. Other cultures may learn from us.

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Posts referencing Pope Francis:

A Common Touch

Whose Resurrection Was It Anyway?

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. Please click here to make a tax-deductible contribution.Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month. For specific topics, use the search feature in the upper left corner of the site.

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

Whose Resurrection Was It, Anyway?

Christian scriptures make a point of saying that Jesus appeared only to believers after his burial. They may not recognize him at first, such as Mary Magdalene supposing he was the gardener, or they may have doubts, such as the story of Thomas, or he may become known to them only after offering him hospitality, such as the travelers on the road to Emmaus.  

A vision of Jesus is only possible with a willing “suspension of disbelief,” a participation in the story, a welcoming of “the anointed one” in our hearts and our minds and our lives, our church and our neighborhood and our world.

Last month, at a Benedictine monastery in Cullman, Alabama, I picked up a book, The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis’ first apostolic exhortation, and began using it in my morning prayers. I have found it uplifting because, while Pope John Paul II emphasized the repeated biblical phrase, “Be not afraid!”, Pope Francis finds the central message of scripture to be “that your joy may be full.”

His emphasis is on evangelization, bringing good news over doctrine and rules. To quote Francis, “Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, [Christians] should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but ‘by attraction.’”

He points out that “there are Christians whose lives seem like Lent without Easter,” later writing that in our preoccupation with the day-to-day business and preservation of the church, “a tomb psychology thus develops and slowly transforms Christians into mummies in a museum.”

This is what could have happened to those who followed Jesus had they dwelt on their absolute grief and dejection and disappointment. Mary Magdalene might have remained at the cemetery and the other disciples might have remained behind locked doors for fear of “the powers that be.”

But somehow, mysteriously, mystically, they recognized that Jesus was still with them, showing compassion as he did to Mary, breathing Holy Spirit upon his disciples.  If only we could hear Jesus speak our name, as he spoke Mary’s, if only we could feel Jesus’ breath and take that breath as our own, infused with his Spirit.

Of course we can.

I gave this post the rather cheeky title, “Whose Resurrection Was It, Anyway?” because Christians often forget the resurrection is not all about us—it’s all about Jesus. We get caught up in our fears of death, and want the promise of living eternally, and the resurrection seems to fulfill that promise. But the first Christians were not concerned for their own longevity.

In Jesus, the first Christians had witnessed the kingdom of God in their midst. His words and his deeds, his love and his hope, were alive in them. It wasn’t their lives they were interested in preserving, not even the life of the church—as witnessed by countless martyrs to Christ’s cause—it was the life of Christ they wanted to take into themselves, a life that gave them an eternal perspective, a spacious and gracious perspective that could love and transform the world.

Jesus wasn’t about simply redeeming us. Jesus was about redeeming the world, reconciling the world to its maker, to its lover, to its inspiration. The followers of Jesus, the first Christians, “got” that, and that’s what we need to “get” as well. They saw themselves as the Body of Christ resurrected for the world.

Just as Jesus, they discerned we were all children of God. And just as Jesus, they had the “ah-hah” that we were all God’s beloved children—even before conversion, even without conversion, thus we could love our enemies, we could love those who persecute us, we could love even those who mocked and tormented and tortured and executed Jesus in the most painful and humiliating way: the cross.

“Forgive them for they know not what they do,” Jesus prayed to God from that cross. And to his disciples on Easter he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

If we plan on retaining anyone’s sins, we’d better be prepared to have our own sins unforgiven, because Jesus taught his followers “if you forgive others their trespasses, your God in heaven will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will God forgive your trespasses.”

Pope Francis calls the church “to be like the father of the prodigal son, who always keeps his door open so that when the son returns, he can readily pass through it.”

If people are going to see the resurrected Christ today, they’re going to have to see it in us. They’re going to have to see it in those who follow Jesus, sharing and showing and celebrating his compassion and mercy, not just personally and spiritually, but politically and incarnationally, economically and globally.

“Do not hold on to me,” Jesus urged Mary. Jesus can’t be confined, whether to a tomb, to a church, to a doctrine, or even to this world.

But Jesus can be located—in our hearts, in our midst, in our service to the community, in our work for justice and equality and peace. Jesus can be located in the stranger and in “the least of these.”

And with God’s help, Jesus may even be located in church.

This is taken from my Easter sermon for Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC.

You are its sole source of financial support. To donate, click here. Thank you!

You are encouraged to use a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite, catalogued by year and month.

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