Cuddling with Jesus

Wade and Hobbes cuddling.

I can imagine red flags going up for my more progressive readers, fearing I’ve gone evangelical on them with a title like “Cuddling with Jesus.” And my more mainstream readers may fear I’m getting too familiar, even sexual, with our spiritual leader.

But the deity with whom Jacob wrestles in Genesis becomes the deity with whom the Beloved Disciple cuddles during the Last Supper in John. It’s okay for males to wrestle (God was imagined as male, remember) but not to cuddle (Jesus was imagined as God, remember).

In As My Own Soul: The Blessing of Same-Gender Marriage, I pointed out how recent translations have distanced the Beloved Disciple, believed to be John, from Jesus. In the King James Version “the disciple whom Jesus loved” is “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.” The Revised Standard Version describes him as “lying close to the breast of Jesus.” But the New Revised Standard Version and the New Jerusalem Bible have the Beloved Disciple simply “reclining next” to Jesus. As the Beloved disciple moves farther away from Jesus with newer versions, I imagine in the next translation he will be in another room!

In his book, The Man Jesus Loved, Theodore Jennings translates the passage this way:

One of his disciples was lying in Jesus’ lap, the one Jesus loved; so Simon Peter nods to this one and says: “Tell, whom is he talking about?” That one, falling back on Jesus’ chest says to him: “Lord, who is it?”

Imagine watching TV with a group of close friends, some of whom are seated on the floor. Arms may rest on knees, heads lean on shoulders, hands draped affectionately on legs. This would be like the scene of the Last Supper, where the custom would be for everyone to be on the floor with cushions or mats, not seated upright at a table.

This is the casual intimacy between John and Jesus, but it affords John the opportunity, in the understanding of Celtic Christianity, to “listen for the heartbeat of God” with his head on Jesus’ breast. It is a symbol of mysticism, not sexuality, though mysticism is also erotic, understanding “eros” as the force that compels us toward God or another human being.

What prompts this reflection is a recent opinion piece by Stanford anthropology professor T. M. Luhrmann, who suggests the success of evangelical churches is that they promise such a personal relationship with God, but then overstates the case by claiming—mistakenly, I believe—that mainstream Christians do not imagine a God so intimate. (Since writing this I discovered agreement from a Letter to the Editor by Sister Mary Ann Walsh.)

I do believe mainstream Christians have a problem with intimacy. I once heard seminary professor and author Carter Heyward describe their God as a “Gentleman God,” embarrassed by sexual passion, yet too polite and dispassionate to be rabidly anti-gay. And the changing position of the Beloved Disciple may have to do with a fear of homoerotic implications.

But I believe the broader fear is intimacy with God. I’ve noticed that the same translation that has John “reclining next” to Jesus in John 13:23 also translates John 1:18 about Jesus’ intimacy with God as “who is close to the Father’s heart” when the actual text reads “who is close to the Father’s bosom.”

Yet I believe many mainstream Christians’ embrace of contemplation also chooses an intimate relationship with God. And though it may seem new, it has always been with us, from the Desert Fathers and Mothers, monastic communities, and Celtic spirituality to our present day interest in all things spiritual.

My purpose in writing this blog is to encourage progressive Christians, too, to come out of the closet about their intimacy with God, with Jesus, and with the Spirit. Ours may be a different experience, but no less worthy to strengthen our resolve, challenge others’ certainties, and enjoy communion with all we hold sacred and dear.

I posted this on April 24, 2013 and thought current readers of this blog might enjoy it.

Please join me for a five-day contemplative retreat April 27-May 1, 2020 in Cullman, Alabama, through the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary. It is open to the public.

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. Use the search engine in the upper left corner of the blog to find particular topics.

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://www.mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Spiritual Stretching

Our neighbor, Luna, stretching against the edge of our driveway.

Put your hands over your head and stretch. Take a deep breath.

Doesn’t that feel good?

And don’t you vicariously feel good when you see your dog or cat or another person stretch and perhaps yawn?

Many years ago I learned that, to prevent my back from seizing up on me, I needed to do a simple stretching exercise before getting out of bed in the morning.  I also do a coordination exercise a holistic chiropractor once taught me that’s supposed to help me think more clearly. And then I’m ready to, as the camp song goes, “Rise and shine and give God my glory…”

A few summers ago, Wade and I attended a yoga class that was all about stretching and breathing, led by our friend and neighbor José Blanco. It was surprising how challenging and tiring stretching and breathing can be, as well as how wonderful it can feel. Yoga, of course, is a spiritual discipline developed in Hinduism to focus body, mind, and spirit.

A lot of Christians don’t like to stretch. Orthodox literally means “straight thinking,” and many Christians like to keep to the straight and narrow, within the confines of what they consider proper belief and behavior.

Progressive Christians like to stretch our minds. That means we can stay in our heads way too much. That’s preferable to not going there at all. As they say, many people are lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.

Thankfully, stretching our mind may stretch our hearts as well, especially if we can catch our breaths.

Stretching is an antidote to confinement, an answer to tension, a solution for paralysis that is not permanent. It helps tissue lubricants flow, as well as the life-giving, oxygenating, vitality-inducing blood that we need to be nurtured and grow. 

Our spirits and our spirituality need stretching too.

Jesus did not teach yoga positions, but he was still a kind of yoga instructor, because he taught spiritual stretching. His spirituality stretched the religion of those around him to move out of ossification—which means to be make rigid, callous, or unprogressive—to move beyond laws written in stone and temples made of stone.

Anyone who has endured an obnoxious neighbor will know that “loving your neighbor” is a stretch. Anyone who has struggled with an image of an angry or distant God knows that “loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind” is a stretch. Those raised on negative self-images know that “loving your self” is a stretch. Those taught to fear or hate a stranger realize that Jesus’ urging to greet even those we don’t know is a stretch.  And “loving your enemies” is obviously a stretch!

By stretching, a spiritual community becomes expansive and inclusive and nimble. A breath is a stretch, and Jesus was said to have breathed on his disciples his Spirit. That Spirit stretched their ability to share his story in the languages of strangers. That same Spirit has, throughout history, stretched at least parts of the church to welcome those it formerly resisted, excluded, marginalized, or persecuted.

And God’s mystery stretches our spiritual imaginations. In the apostle Paul’s words to the Athenians, God “does not live in shrines made by human hands” but causes us “to search for God and perhaps grope for God.”

Breathe. Stretch.

Doesn’t that feel good?

This was my post on March 12, 2014, and I thought current blog readers might like to read it.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here for more information or to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using 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.

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

"Hey Kids! Look at the Too-lah! Look at the Too-lah!"

Wade looking at the Indian Ocean along 

Plettenberg Bay, South Africa, last summer. (crg)

On a recent visit with my family of origin, I heard the usual stories rolled out by my older siblings, putting me in my proper place as the “baby of the family.” One sibling surprised me by a new take on an old story. Being the youngest, I sat in the front seat of our old Hudson with our parents on a cross-country drive, apparently considered a privileged position by my sister and brother. At one point, given my vantage point, I saw a body of water and turned to them in the back seat, exclaiming excitedly, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!” We long ago decided that “too-lah” must have come from the word “toilet,” then my only frame of reference for a body of water.

On this telling, however, one of my siblings added the word “condescendingly”—that I had “condescendingly” turned to them to announce this wonder. Miffed, I replied, “How can a toddler be condescending?” My other sibling had a different interpretation, that I was simply imitating the tone my parents took to convey something exciting to us kids.

This story came to me as I am currently reading The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. A bookmark not many pages in reminds me I’ve tried to read it before. In the past I’ve made the common mistake of understanding “dark night” as simply a period of suffering externally imposed, but, at the same time, it is a spiritual practice detaching ourselves from anything that is not God (including moving beyond our mental images of God “to the state of the progressives”), while welcoming God’s transforming love of our souls. At least, that’s one way of putting it.

One by one and day by day, as I read the sins or “imperfections” that may come with the spiritual life, I am realizing that I am guilty of each one of them. The first listed is pride, how the contemplative novice may be so excited by what she or he is learning that they prematurely become spiritual teachers rather than doers. That very nearly silenced me as a writer of these “progressive Christian reflections,” much as reading and writing about Zen Masters in recent years almost nudged me to enter their silence.

I realized that my readers may be enduring what my siblings did when I was a child, hearing, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!” I get so excited by what I’m learning, if not always practicing, that I want to write about it.

I overheard a monk acerbically say of spiritual author Henri Nouwen, “I wish he would stop writing about wanting to pray and just pray!” In his book, Reaching Out, Henri offered a kind of defense, which I’ve quoted before:

I found some consolation and encouragement in the words of one of the most stern ascetics, the seventh-century John of the Ladder, who lived for forty years a solitary life at Mount Sinai. In his chapter on discernment, step 26 of his spiritual ladder, he writes: “If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach…For perhaps, being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach.”

A half century ago I visited a progressive Baptist congregation whose pastor offered a good job description of his work. Along with other ministerial responsibilities, he was given time to explore theology and spirituality on behalf of the congregation and share those insights from the pulpit.

So, even if I may not have the exact word for God or the exact words or best practices for the spiritual life, I can still lean over the front seat of the Hudson and shout excitedly to all of you, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!”

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

Vacation & Vocation

A neighbor's peaceful pathway.

Very early one morning I saw a woman doing a walking meditation, such as Buddhists do, pausing after each step taken, perhaps pondering a koan. As I drew closer, I realized the “koan” she concentrated on so intently was, in truth, an iPad. 

Running through the park, I approached a young man sitting in the lotus position, his face downturned in meditation. As I passed by, however, I saw his thumbs busily texting.

On each occasion, the only hope of my original fantasy was that they were tweeting or texting their spiritual directors or gurus!

We all know of such impulses to check tweets, messages, e-mails, and news media! C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters comes to mind, in which Screwtape advises Wormwood, his tempter in training, to put into his ward’s head the impulse to take a break just as he’s about to discover something important to his spiritual progress, thus distracting him.

One dictionary defines vocation as “an impulse to perform a certain function.” Vacation is defined as freedom from such an impulse, a letting go of our compulsions to do things we have always done, a release from doing things the way we have always done them. Thus vacation invites play.

I’ve known too many people, including clergy, who brag about never or rarely taking a vacation. In my view, vacation is a vital balance to vocation, as necessary to one’s work as sleep and nutrition and compensation.

Some of us get away from our work by going away, but others of us get away from our work by going within: inside ourselves, listening to that inner voice that is the root of the word “vocation.”

I’ve been reading a lot about the spiritualities of the desert: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim. The desert is an excellent place to listen for God’s voice, our own voice, the voice of a lover or friend or calling. Distractions are diminished, silence surrounds, we may breathe easier, we may breathe.

In deserts, Moses heard God’s voice, Miriam danced, Elijah listened for “a voice of a gentle stillness,” Naomi accepted Ruth’s vow, Jesus pondered his vocation and found lonely places to pray, Amma Theodora identified acedia (spiritual lethargy), Muhammad received his divine mission. 

Progressive Christians have our wilderness too. We are letting go of religious compulsions to rediscover the God of the desert (metaphorically).

Writing of desert spirituality in Contemplative Prayer, Thomas Merton concluded that “without the disquieting capacity to see and to repudiate the idolatry of devout ideas and imaginings…the Christian cannot be delivered from the smug self-assurance of the devout ones who know all the answers in advance, who possess all the clichés of the inner life and can defend themselves with infallible ritual forms against every risk and every demand of dialogue with human need and human desperation [108-9].”

Perhaps vacation from religious compulsion is also our vocation.

This post appeared on this blog on July 11, 2012.

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 © 2012 and 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Wade's Mezuzah

As you might expect, our home is filled with religious artifacts accumulated over the years, most gifts from thoughtful friends. Like many Christian clergy, I have my share of Communion chalices and bread plates, crosses and icons, most of which live in my home office.

I work on a small desk adorned with a colorful Latin American altar cloth on which a Sacred Heart of Jesus sacramental lies beside my laptop and the Hindu god Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles, sits nearby to solve computer issues.

Two clay Muslim men in kaftans embrace on top of my bookshelves, and Arabic phrases from the Quran beautifully illustrate two round metal plates hanging in another room. A ceramic tile from Israel welcomes visitors before entering our kitchen with the word Shalom in Hebrew.  

Upstairs a Christ Pantocrator placidly blesses an African goddess dancing above a Balinese mask and a Pharaoh judgment scene on papyrus. All are facing a handwoven Tree of Life across the room above our bed.

Well, you get the picture.

But never have I ever thought of having a mezuzah, despite my deep respect for the tradition.

Wade saw it at a booth during the Dogwood Festival here in Atlanta, a booth featuring the delicate art of Israeli artists from Brooklyn. Stavit Allweis and Nachshon Pelig are graduates of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem.

Wade appreciates its spiritual meaning, but more so its aesthetic appeal. It didn’t even cross his mind that, because we’re not Jewish, it might not be “kosher”! So, he purchased it, after carrying on a meaningful conversation with the handsome vendor, one of the artists.

When we came home from the festival we showed it to Jenelle Holmes, our pastor two doors down, and she asked us if we could do a “show and tell” about it as our moment of mindfulness the following day at Ormewood Church. We went online to prepare.

Mezuzah is Hebrew for “doorpost.” It contains Hebrew verses from the Torah, Deuteronomy 6:4-9 and 11:13-21, the first of which begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” The passage ends urging that we write these words on the doorpost of our house.

A mezuzah is traditionally hung on the right side of the door and—I especially love this as good Jewish compromise—tilted because early practitioners differed as to whether to hang it vertically or horizontally.

But Wade wanted it mounted vertically on the more prominent left side of the door, and so, apologies to Yahweh for being loosey-goosey progressive Christians, that’s where it is. We followed the tradition of reciting this blessing in Hebrew as we held it against the spot it was to be placed: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, Who sanctified us with Your mitzvot (Law) and commanded us to affix a mezuzah.”

I always knew that summer-long intensive in Hebrew would come in handy.

You might think this an imperialistic appropriation of a spiritual practice of another culture and religion, but if you saw Wade’s innocent delight and wonder you may excuse us.

And I enjoy the practice of touching the mezuzah as I enter our home, remembering that the Lord our God is one, and that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and might.

This post has a follow-up: It’s a Wonderful Life

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

Ten Minute Christ

A singing bowl from Nepal given me by a 

Buddhist colleague when I completed an 

interim ministry at MCC San Francisco.

I am struggling to write about a book I first mentioned two weeks ago, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, a 1970 book by Abbot Zenkei Shibayama. There are so many stories and insights that I would like to list for you, as I did with the remarkable Cloud of Unknowing. But I feel called to do something more: to somehow translate Zen into progressive Christian experience.

This effort recalls my college class on Asian Religions, taught by Professor Miyuki, a Japanese Buddhist. I was quite proud of my midterm paper for the class, but was dismayed that my professor deigned to give it only a “C.” Having read more about Zen training since, I realize this was the slap in the face that a Zen master might give a disciple, to awaken something in me.

But at the time, my rational, dualistic and discriminating side got the better of me and I met with the professor to explain that everything I had written came from the texts for the class. In accented English, he told me in words that “should” have been my complaint, “You just don’t understand.” In other words, I just didn’t get it.

As the Zen Master Enkan said to a scholar monk of the Sutras (Buddhist scriptures), “Your knowledge is not of any use, is it? It is like a small lamp under the shining sun. It seems to have no light.” As Shibayama explains, “In the face of real experience concepts are like flakes of snow fallen on a burning fire.” He describes words as “just the conceptual shadows of the facts.” As a writer, this is another blow from a Zen master!

So, for my final paper, I simply told a story, drawing from the intuitive, creative side of my brain rather than the rational, academic side. I don’t remember the story, but I remember that my guide in the story, who was also myself, was a little girl.  Professor Miyuki loved it, and gave me an “A,” and I think an “A” in the course as well.

Zen tries to recover the satori, or Enlightenment, experience, believing that Buddhist scholars “tended to place too much importance on the metaphysical or philosophical interpretations of the sutras.” Zen Master Sekito and his disciples were blocked along a mountain path by vines and creepers. The monk ahead turned to Sekito asking for his sword to clear the way, and the Master handed it to him blade first. 

“Stop the nonsense! Let me have the hilt!” the monk demanded. Sekito’s reply was sharper than the edge of the knife. He said, “What is the use of the hilt?” The monk could not utter a word in reply. We are apt to stick to the hilt which is of secondary importance, and miss the Truth altogether (p 26-27). 

This story made me think of how often we Christians “stick to the hilt,” the Bible, our theology, and miss Truth altogether. Scottish theologian P.T. Forsythe held that, “Prayer is to religion what original research is to science.” Spiritual practices open us up to Truth, even in scriptures. As Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplative Prayer, “God’s presence cannot be verified as we would verify a laboratory experiment. Yet it can be spiritually realized as long as we do not insist on verifying it. As soon as we try to verify the spiritual presence as an object of exact knowledge, God eludes us.”

Shibayama suggests, “Zen does not remain simply the core of Buddhism, but it works to deepen and revive any religion or philosophy. For instance, there can be a Christian Zen…”

For four or five years I served as spiritual leader of Midtown Spiritual Community here in Atlanta, a spiritually eclectic group, and their mission statement expressed a desire to have a direct experience of the divine. During the contemplative retreat I co-led a few weeks ago, participants told us they preferred our experiential emphasis on spiritual exercises over academic presentations.

When I served as interim pastor of MCC San Francisco, I occasionally sat with their Buddhist group, following the spiritual exercise of zazen. Shibayama explains that, in Japanese, “za means to sit cross-legged, zen, to calmly concentrate one’s mind.”

He says we are to directly realize that “All beings are primarily Buddhas,” and by this he does not mean simply humans or even all creatures, but all entities, from atoms to galaxies. He tells us that there is another saying in Zen, “If one sits for ten minutes, he is a ten-minute Buddha.”

Immediately my heart flew to the “ah-hah” that if Christians could sit still in contemplation for ten minutes, and realize our own incarnations of Christ, we could be ten-minute Christs! It would give a whole new meaning to the Resurrection and to the triumphal return of Christ to this world—beliefs that are often doubted by progressive Christians.

But, like the Desert Mothers and Fathers, we wouldn’t be doing this for ourselves alone. Buddhism teaches the practice of six virtues: generosity, observing precepts and other good deeds, patience and forbearance, zeal, meditation, and true wisdom. Generosity and good deeds are sometimes singled out. And generosity and good deeds are what singled out the first followers of Jesus and attracted others to our faith.

I’m sure what I’ve written here has stepped on a few toes in Zen Buddhism as well as in progressive Christianity, as I am a faulty and limited blogger. I apologize. But just as Zen wanted to enliven Buddhism, so I think a Zen way of practicing our faith could enliven Christianity.

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you!

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

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

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

Collective Christian Memory

Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” it is said, and a background in literature has taught me that in earlier periods writers often borrowed from one another without compunction or complaint.

But I was shaken, early in my activist writing career, to discover another writer had “borrowed” something I had written for her Methodist curriculum. She put her name as the author because she had “adapted” it. I had felt similarly offended when I noticed Cat Stephens failed to acknowledge on an album that “Morning Has Broken” is an old hymn that he “adapted.”

About the same time, someone told me that a mutual friend had used one of my stories as his sermon. She thought I’d be thrilled, but no, he hadn’t credited it to me, claiming to have “found” it, a rhetorical device to add to the piece’s mystery. What concerned me at the time was that his large high-steepled not-yet-welcoming church might have become more welcoming if they knew it had come from a gay Christian.

Reading a book decades later, I discovered a sentence I knew to be mine, and then another and another, and checked the footnotes at the end of the book to find the author finally attributed a quote from the same article to me in the chapter that followed. When I shared my dismay with another writer, I was advised not to take it too seriously, as it was probably “just poor scholarship.” I never brought it up when I later worked with the author, but ironically heard his own complaint of another writer borrowing liberally from him!

I’ve mentioned on this blog my own failure of attribution when I wrote somewhere, “We know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all.” I had no idea the quote originated with body theologian James B. Nelson because I had not yet read any of Nelson’s work or heard him speak! When I happened on the sentence in one of his early books, I was chagrined, to say the least.

All these examples came to mind when I read two chapters on memory in Oliver Sacks’s last book, The River of Consciousness. He concludes, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

He cites one of his own memoirs as an example, in which we recounts an experience at his family’s London home during World War II. After publication, a brother explained to him that he and Oliver were away at school when the event happened. Another brother had written to them about the incident, but apparently with such great emotion and detail that Oliver had incorporated it into this own memory bank.

Even more memorably, Sacks describes the “plagiarism” controversy surrounding the beloved public figure Helen Keller, just 12 years of age, when a story she wrote paralleled another written by Margaret Canby. Keller did not remember Canby’s story, but realized she was more prone to think a story hers if, in Sacks’ words, it “had been ‘read’ to her, using finger spelling onto her hand.” To Canby’s credit, she defended Keller, writing, “What a wonderfully active and retentive mind that gifted child must have!”

All of this prompts me to compare our collective Christian memory, one that began with the first encounters of Jesus all the way to us “latter day saints.” As we follow the church calendar, reliving Jesus’ life from his advent to his elevation, following him in baptism and Communion and ministry, his story becomes our own, much as Helen Keller’s tactile reception of Canby’s story.

On a television program promoting my first book, Uncommon Calling, an evangelical pastor countered my “revisionism” of the Christian story, as I read biblical stories in the light of contemporary experience. I explained that was the task of every generation, to make sense of Jesus and our faith for the present times. (Though I did not say this, even his fundamentalism was a 19^th century example of this.) Revisionism, I said, was quite traditional!

No less for progressive Christians, who are making sense of Jesus and our faith in a world that has a grander and more accurate perspective of the cosmos, thanks largely to science and Christianity’s intercourse with other faith traditions.

Citing Freud, Sacks explains, “remembering…was essentially a dynamic, transforming, reorganizing process throughout the course of life.  …Memories are continually worked over and revised and…their essence, indeed, is recategorization.”

And so with collective Christian memory in the course of the church’s life. To repeat, “Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.”

Thank you for donations to this blog ministry: 

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 © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. I took the photo during a speaking trip to that welcoming congregation some years ago.

Jesus, A New Adam

Jesus as the new Adam is a trope familiar to Christianity since Paul’s letters to the Romans and Corinthians. It has come to be reinterpreted by others, and perhaps what I present here has already been imagined, as anyone reading this blog knows my knowledge is limited. But I want to offer what meaning came to me as I grappled with the notion of Jesus “dying for my sins” during this recent Holy Week.

I have flat out written on this blog that the God who is worthy of my devotion would never require the death of any kind of scapegoat as a stand-in for me taking responsibility for my own sins.

But I have also written that the sacrificial love represented in the story of the cross mythologically conveys the absolute and eternal depths of God’s compassion. Many theologians have focused on the concept of God dying on the cross rather than “his only son,” taking the onus of a demanding, bloodthirsty God off the table. And anyone who has had a terrible sin to forgive of another knows the suffering such compassion entails.

Longtime readers may remember that one of my Holy Week practices is to read one chapter each day of a short book, The Temple of God’s Wounds, in which the narrator visits a mythological monastery at a turning point in his life. I’ve written that I overlook his transactional understanding of atonement to contemplate other, deeper spiritual wisdom contained therein.

This time I focused on how difficult it is for him (and  for me) to face that which is absolutely holy. I understand better the “mysterium tremendum,” the “terrible” face of God or, as the OED adds in its definition, of existence itself.

During our last visit shortly before his death, an elderly dedicated churchman and beloved professor surprised me by his sudden tears and seemingly non-sequitur confession, saying something like, “I hope dear old Mother Church can forgive me for any embarrassment I’ve caused her.” I don’t think this was prompted solely by his having been a closeted gay man.

Age may make us aware how far we have fallen short, not only of the glory of God, but of the glory of being a child of God, because I found during Holy Week that, along with the writer of The Temple of God’s Wounds,  I felt such a need for forgiveness! Now, I know, as an introvert, that even the good I may do can embarrass me; but I’ve done plenty of things I’d prefer not to have in my eulogy!

I have a depiction, acquired in Egypt, of a Pharaoh being weighed on scales opposite a feather. The tradition was that if the Pharaoh’s heart was heavier than a feather, he could not enter eternity.  Few if any of us could pass such a test!

I have been reading The Islamic Jesus by Mustafa Akyol. A reader and contributor to my blog had asked me if there was a book I was eager to have in my library. Having just read a review of this book, that’s what I asked for. What’s remarkable to me is that the Qur’an, while not supporting Jesus’ divinity, reveres him as a prophet, like Moses and Muhammad. The writer suggests that this was the view of the Jerusalem church and its Jewish Christians led by James, and represented in Christian scriptures by the epistle of James, which does not refer to the divinity of Jesus and famously includes, “Faith without works is dead.” This contrasts with other Christian emphases on mere belief, and specifically belief in Jesus’ divinity and substitutionary atonement.

Thus I realized that progressive Christians have that in common with the early Jewish Christians, not to mention Muslims and Jews. We may or may not hold to Jesus’ divinity, and consider that doing justice and practicing charity and showing mercy are what the Lord (i.e. God) requires of us.

For me as a progressive Christian, Jesus is the “new Adam”—not the innocent and perfect and beautiful (and initially sexless) Ken and Barbie doll of Adam and Eve; rather the tried and tested, unappealing and vulnerable and wounded one, acquainted with sorrows and grief, the bearer of the sins and injustices of the world—political, religious, and personal. Treasonous and blasphemous, betrayable and deniable, because compassion was all he held dear.

Thus he knows the trouble I’ve seen, the trouble I’ve gotten into, and the trouble I’ve caused, not just personally but throughout the world. He is the real human being that Adam and Eve could not even imagine in their innocence and privilege. They were rough drafts, prototypes, not as fully human.

So when Jesus prays, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” it seems genuine, true, and possible.

To support this blog ministry: 

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.  

Spiritual Baggage

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, the last entry of January and every Wednesday of February I’m providing a link to the most visited post of each year. For 2013, that would be Jesus: Introvert or Extrovert? with a close second, What I Don’t Believe, What I Do Believe.

Please imagine you see before you my roller travel bag…

What you see is the baggage I usually carry with me on a speaking trip—at least, the visible baggage. As you can see, this is a piece of carry-on luggage, which is the sure sign of a frequent flier! I happen to agree that there are two kinds of luggage, carry-on luggage and lost luggage.

Now I didn’t pack this for a trip, but rather, to make some points about spiritual baggage. So let’s see what’s inside, quite literally unpacking our metaphor.

First we find another bag hidden inside. This represents hidden spiritual baggage we carry with us even when we claim to be traveling light as progressive Christians. We may discover hidden dogma: hidden expectations, latent prejudices, unintended biases, beliefs that don’t play well with others.

This may not be from any malevolent intent. The hidden baggage may just be part of our mystery as complex individuals. We stumble when we fail to acknowledge the mystery—that there are things about ourselves or our belief systems and our spiritual communities that are still being unveiled.

What have we here? My mother’s purse! We have unexpected spiritual baggage. How many of us have said we were not going to be like our mothers or our fathers only to recognize a bit of their behaviors or their attitudes in ours? This is true spiritually as well. Unconsciously we incorporate in our souls a bit of the souls of those who shaped us, our spiritual ancestry.

And if we have suffered spiritual abuse, we may spiritually abuse others—that is, force our spiritual views on others. This can be a problem whether we are spiritually traditional or progressive.

If we have been encouraged to think independently about our faith, we are more likely to encourage others in their declarations of spiritual independence. Providentially for me, my mother’s purse represents a woman who read widely, regardless of religious viewpoint, while affirming her own faith.

Look here! A pair of jeans, 31-inch waist. Now, how can I say this in a way that’s nice to myself. I am too full to fit into this pair of jeans! Sometimes in our spiritual baggage we find things that don’t fit us anymore: we’ve become too full, too open to fit into such narrow spiritual clothing. Perhaps we’ve simply outgrown it. Now that doesn’t mean we are superior to someone who would fit this pair of jeans. It just means we’re in a different place.

And what’s this? An extra-large t-shirt! Now this is just the opposite. I’d get lost in this. My spirituality may be a little more compact than it used to be. Maybe I’ve been losing some spiritual weight that held me down, or exercising my spiritual muscles so my soul is leaner and stronger. So I don’t need quite so much room or space or dogma anymore.

And here’s a makeup kit! Oh yes, what we might use to paint a smile on our faces even when we felt down, or put drops in our eyes to give us that misty-eyed expression when we wanted to look devotional or penitential or serious. As we learn more and more that the spiritual life is not about artificial highs or lows, we can leave this item behind.

Here’s something that’s harder to give up: a sorcerer’s hat! This is the hat Mickey Mouse wore in the animated film Fantasia as the sorcerer’s apprentice. It represents magical thinking.

  

Many of us have associated magic and superstition for so long with spirituality, that this is very difficult to let go of. Even today, if my car doesn’t start, I may offer a little incantation to God to make it go. But I no longer believe that’s how God works in the world. It’s up to me to have the car serviced, or fix the car myself (fat chance!), to take care of the car so that it will work when I need it.

So it is with the spiritual life. Though there are moments of grace that almost feel like magic, the spiritual life requires prayerful maintenance. We need spiritual mechanics (spiritual guides) and soul manuals (sacred texts and inspirational books). And we need spiritual communities to support us in our soul repair and development and customizing.

What you will not find in my bag is the “sword of truth” or the “armor of God.” I discovered long ago that God has no interest in bloody crusades, burning inquisitions, or violent jihads. To me, God is not manifest in violence but in vulnerability, not so much evident in victory as in compassion.

But look here! Now I have more room for clothes that fit, sacred texts and books that guide, and room for gifts for others. Because when we talk about spiritual baggage, what we really mean is excess baggage, baggage that doesn’t work for us any more, that burdens us, leaving little or no room for new spiritual habits or insights.

The less we carry, the farther we can go. In the spiritual life, there are two kinds of baggage: carry-on and lost. Less is often more in the spiritual life.

Jesus advised, “It is more difficult for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” To soften the meaning of his “hard saying” about the rich, it has been explained that the “eye of a needle” referred to a particular gate through the city walls of Jerusalem which was so low and narrow, camels had to be relieved of their baggage to enter. Though this interpretation is not considered valid by biblical scholars, the metaphor works for the purpose of this post.

We still need carry-on spiritual luggage: those insights that have helped us along the way, the vision that helps us put the puzzling jigsaw pieces of our lives together in a framework of meaning. Admittedly, some of the pieces don’t quite fit together. They overlap or fit awkwardly. But we’ve done our personal best. And we have a spiritual community to help.

Many readers of this blog observe Lent, a period of fasting, or letting go of something. This Christian season, which begins today, may be an opportunity to consider the spiritual baggage we need to lose as well as that which we need to “carry-on.”

Related posts:

Shoveling Manure

“Bad Theology”

Readings for Ash Wednesday (today):

The Soul Feels Its Worth

Cosmic Dust

A reading for this first week of Lent:

“Forgive Them for They Know Not What They Do”

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2005 and 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Summer Christmas

The thought behind last week’s post, “Hevel Happens,” was confirmed by our delivery system sending it to subscribers a day late! Sorry!

I thought of writing this and posting around Christmas, but I am so overcome with something like a convert’s zeal that I can’t wait till then, even though each year summer’s end has the lowest ebb in terms of blog visitors who are not subscribers.  Earlier this season, for example, we enjoyed over 4000 monthly visitors but are now shy of 3000.  So I invite you to share this link/post with as many people as possible!

What excites me is yet another chapter in William P. Brown’s Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World: “Incarnational Wonder,” based on Gospel writer John’s prologue, the first eighteen verses of chapter one. See last week’s post on a different chapter.

What I “got” from it goes a bit beyond Brown’s actual elucidation of this text, though not beyond its implications. I suddenly understood that the “mystery” of Christmas (though of course mystery by its very definition can never be understood, only “wondered” at) is that early Christians finally “got” that God was in the world, in earth, in its creatures and in its matter, and in us—our very DNA.

And this is a tenet that we skeptical, doubting, deconstructionist, demythologizing, progressive Christians may affirm without reservation, I believe. 

“In the beginning was the word [logos].” … Typically translated “Word,” logos comes from Greek Stoic philosophy and refers to the structuring principle of the universe that makes all life possible. … Call it God’s Grand Unifying Principle (aka GUP). But Logos in John is more than a formal abstraction, more than a grand unified theory of everything as pursued by physicists (aka GUT). No, the Logos is embodied. 

The reason I write that my “ah-hah” may go a little beyond Brown’s interpretation is that I believe that, instead of this being the moment at which God entered the cosmos, entered the earth, inhabited “dirt”—that rather, this was the moment when we realized God’s essence or organizing principle or divine life was always incarnated in creation. That may be Brown’s intent as well.

I’ve written in an earlier post that the mystic Hildegard of Bingen believed that the Incarnation was not a result of “The Fall” or sin, but was intended by God from the beginning of Creation.

Physicists and theologians are engaged in similar tasks, discerning and discovering the “structuring principle of the universe that makes all life possible.” Scientists might say theologians are relying on “supernatural” phenomena or beliefs, when the Incarnation might mean there is nothing supernatural about God—that God is as “natural” and integral to the cosmos as we are.

Does that discount a “personal” God? It surely discounts a tribal, nationalistic, or parochial deity, but reveals a deity to be found in our very DNA, our skin, flesh, blood, eggs, sperm, tears, and bones—what could be more personal than that? And that we would attribute to that deity our highest values—love, compassion, justice, equality, shalom, and good stewardship—such as equal distribution of the world’s goods, care for “the least of these,” and respect for our environment—to name a few of those values, touches our deepest felt needs and lifts us to our highest aspirations, and it could be said, those of God.

Process theology posits a God that includes the cosmos, making in effect everything we can see, touch, hear, smell, and taste God’s “body.” Thus God is the ultimate altruist, sharing divine life sacrificially and universally, exemplified in Jesus of Nazareth’s living and dying for others, inviting his followers do the same. That is the path to resurrection, to new life, to new possibilities, to re-creation. Later in the book, Brown explains in his chapter, “Consummated Wonder,” that Revelation is about the earth’s renewal, not rapture, through God’s indwelling presence.

Brown notes that John affirms the darkness cannot overcome the light that is the life of the world and uses “a surprising word for God’s full-bodied embrace of creaturely existence, [that] has little to do with limitation: ‘fullness’ or pleroma in Greek (1:16). It is from God’s outward-extending abundance, from God’s pleroma that God becomes enfleshed. Divine pleroma is like an aroma that fills a room, like the costly ointment Mary used to anoint Jesus’ feet… Or like God’s glory, which ‘filled the tabernacle’…”

These thoughts should make for us the merriest of Christmases!

Related posts:

A Theory of Everything

A Single Unified Force

The Universe in Your Soul

To see my posts that have been re-posted on progressivechristianity.org, click here.

Check out my books by clicking here.

PLEASE donate to this ministry by clicking here! Or send checks or money orders made out to “MCC,” designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area to:

Metropolitan Community Churches

P.O. Box 50488

Sarasota FL 34232 USA

Thank you!

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

Tricked by Grace (My 200th Post!)

This is my 200^th post on this blog, created in 2011 to encourage and enhance the spirituality of progressive Christians. Thanks to 500 subscribers and an additional 3000 monthly visitors from all over the world! And thanks to Metropolitan Community Churches for including it among the denomination’s Emerging Ministries in 2012.

Please consider a gift to support this ministry today, either as an individual or a congregation. Your tax-deductible contributions are its only source of funding. Thanks to this year’s donors of nearly $1200 to date!

A few weeks ago I was reading one of Southern writer Flannery O’Connor’s last short stories, entitled “Revelation,” published posthumously in her collection All That Rises Must Converge. She takes the book’s title from Teilhard de Chardin, whose writings as both a scientist and a mystic she greatly admired.

The story is written from the perspective of an older woman who finds herself in a doctor’s waiting room, looking from person to person, engaging in small talk. Her judgmentalism is in high gear as she silently evaluates their appearance, their interactions and lack thereof, as well as sharing aloud the foibles of people in general with another woman. I was especially put off by her frequent use of the “n-word.”  In that brief story I saw the unabbreviated word more often than I have seen it in recent decades.

Needless to say, I too was frothing with judgment (of the protagonist) as the story came to a surprising twist. Without giving the story away, something happens that upsets her certainty about things, and later, watching the sun set, she has an unsettling vision of what was to come: all the people she routinely judged marching nonetheless toward heaven, “battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.” The story continues: 

And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. 

I cried with recognition. I was her. Flannery O’Connor tricked me, even as grace tricks us all. We think we will be saved by our many words—prayers, sermons, posts—or our many deeds—charitable, political, religious. But it’s grace that really saves us. 

In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah. 

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