Cosmic Dust

Please join me for “The Passion: In Arts, Texts, and Music: A Contemplative Retreat for Lent” 9 a.m. – 12 p.m., this Saturday, March 8, 2014 at Columbia Theological Seminary.

“Dust thou art, to dust thou shalt return.”

Being Ash Wednesday, today many of us will hear these words while receiving ashes on our foreheads in the sign of the cross. It reminds us of our mortality, our finite lives, and thus calls us to appropriate humility in the face of the infinite.

But I wonder if there’s another way to observe this day and the season of Lent which it inaugurates by considering where those ashes come from. I don’t mean their traditional origin in last year’s Palm Sunday palm fronds that are burned to ashes and mixed with oil to create an adhesive mix, but a deeper origin.

What if we think of the ashes as cosmic dust?

We are made of the stuff of stars generated billions of years ago that evolved into living things that eventually produced our species, providing a lineage that goes all the way back to the origins of the universe. And our human lineage goes back to the first beings that looked and thought and felt like us as well as future beings we will never know and who will learn and do and think greater things than we can imagine.

And within this lineage is our own personal lineage whose flesh we more directly share, parents and grandparents and ancestors, children and grandchildren and descendants.

Today’s ashes, today’s cosmic dust, may remind us not only of being finite creatures, but of our seemingly infinite relations with the cosmos, with this planet and our sun and moon, with all of earth’s creatures, with humankind past and present and future. And so it may remind us of the importance of our lives: to live them well, to love abundantly, to give extravagantly.

For those of us who try to follow Jesus, Lent and Holy Week is especially a time to honor his life well lived, his sacrificial and atoning love, his gracious generosity.  It’s a hard act to follow, but we are called to do no less.

For we, too, are cosmic dust.

This Sunday, catch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

Each Wednesday of Lent, I will provide links for the following six days, should you wish to use this blog as a Lenten resource for reflection.

Thursday:      The Right Word

Friday:            Acts of God and Acts of War

Saturday:       We’ve Got the Whole World in Our Hands

Sunday:          Shoveling Manure

Monday:         Spiritual Freedom

Tuesday:        Redeemed from the Pit

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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. 

"A Trust beyond Betrayal"

Readers, happy second anniversary! This weekly blog began on February 16, 2011. Below today’s post I’ve listed the “top ten” posts, those most visited since “Progressive Christian Reflections” began. Contributions to this ministry are welcome. Thank you!

The presentation I refer to in this post is now available on YouTube (18 minutes).

A campus is often a fearful place to speak. I am more likely to be challenged for my religious views than for my sexual orientation. But early in the 20^th century, Martha Berry founded a Christian school for enterprising rural boys in northwest Georgia that has blossomed into a co-ed college that welcomes religious values. Invited to speak by Berry College as a gay Christian to (as it turned out) 160 students and members of the faculty and administration, I feared that conservative and fundamentalist students might play “gotcha” with scripture or outright condemn me.

Instead, I was asked questions by those truly seeking answers, those who actually listened and tried to understand my point of view, even when they disagreed. During the reception that followed, the conversation continued, and one young man asked me to elaborate on something I had said toward the end of my presentation: “As is often true in the spiritual life, along the way I have let go of things and beliefs and practices I no longer need to have faith in God, that can even get in the way of complete trust in God.” And I explained that’s why I embrace progressive Christianity, letting go of incomplete and confining images of God—why the second of the Ten Commandments forbids such images. I concluded, “I like to say that the less one believes, the more faith is required.”

This last sentence had puzzled the student, and I tried to explain this phenomenon further, but unsatisfactorily, in my own judgment.

In preparation for teaching a weekend Spiritual Formation course on the Christian writer Henri Nouwen at Columbia Theological Seminary, I am re-reading the three books I’ve assigned to the class. One is Can You Drink the Cup?, a distillation of the spiritual life written in Henri’s final year of life. Reflecting on the crucifixion, when Jesus felt most abandoned, Henri writes, “Jesus still had a spiritual bond with the one he called Abba. He possessed a trust beyond betrayal, a surrender beyond despair, a love beyond all fears.”

This would have been a fine example to illustrate my point “that the less one believes, the more faith is required.” Stripped of his believing disciples and adoring multitudes and even religious certainty, betrayed and denied and offered up to death by his own, tried and judged and tortured by the religious and political establishment, accused of blasphemy and treason and arrogance, and finally lifted up on a cross of shame, suffering, and death, Jesus “possessed a trust beyond betrayal” in his spiritual intimacy with God.

Progressive Christians have voluntarily followed Jesus’ sacrificial model, letting go of the trappings of religious certainty—the so-called “fundamentals,” including biblical inerrancy, as well as restrictive orthodoxy and religious exceptionalism—to nakedly trust in God as our spiritual hope and in Jesus as our spiritual guide as we quest for truth and justice, kindness and inclusiveness.

Lent, which begins today, Ash Wednesday, is a good time to let go of all hindrances to “a trust beyond betrayal,” whether doubts or sins or untenable beliefs.

May I suggest reading posts from this blog (using the archive in the right rail of the blog site) as a possible daily exercise for this season of preparation for Holy Week?

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.

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