The Fundamentalist Memory Hole

Aristarchus, in the third century B.C., clearly established a heliocentric picture of the solar system that was well understood and accepted by the Greeks. … Yet Ptolemy, five centuries later, turned this on its head and proposed a geocentric theory of almost Babylonian complexity. The Ptolemaic darkness, the scotoma, lasted 1,400 years, until a heliocentric theory was reestablished by Copernicus.

–Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness, p 204

Christian fundamentalism (which has parallels in other religions and ideologies) arose at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century in America and Great Britain in reaction to liberal theology and modernism. One might say it is parallel to Oliver Sacks’s above description of the regression that misguided science for centuries, imagining a solar system with Earth rather than the Sun at its center.

My post last week described a scotoma simply as a blind spot, but it can be more than that. It can be what Orwell called a “memory hole” which sucks acquired knowledge out of the room, an amnesia of, in the case of fundamentalism, a spiritual tradition that experienced a diversity that recognized scripture as an element of faith but not its sole author. Biblical literalism was at odds with earlier and subsequent ways of interpreting scripture.

This is my beef with fundamentalism—not that it isn’t a useful way to reclaim the biblical story, but that it claims to be the ONLY way to read scripture, dismissive of our own progressive Christian interpretations.

I am glad to have been raised as a Christian fundamentalist and biblical literalist: it gave me a knowledge of the Bible and a certainty and guidance I needed as a child and youth. But I ultimately found it confining, not only of me personally as a gay man and a political liberal, but of me spiritually, bereft of much church tradition and teachings and reflections of the church doctors and saints, theologians and mystics.

That upbringing also resisted science and culture and other faiths, though more so today than when I was growing up. More than ever today, fundamentalism sucks acquired knowledge out of the room, even that of fellow Christians like myself who remain faithful to Jesus without fear of hell or certainty of heaven, without subscribing to all Christian doctrines, and while trying to welcome insights from science and other cultures and religions.

I know the pain that fundamentalists feel when challenged, or when disappointed in those who do not similarly “believe,” as I felt that as well. Unlike some progressive Christians, I try not to express animus toward fundamentalists or fundamentalism, save when they try to theocratize our politics and political institutions. I am truly a liberal in the classic sense, trying to welcome as many viewpoints and perspectives and knowledge as possible.

And I agree that scriptures have to be taken seriously, even authoritatively, but not literally. A literal interpretation, I believe, actually does a disservice to scripture. It can miss the depths and richness and complexity of the biblical conversation about the meaning of it all.

And, as Jesus said of the Sabbath and the fundamentalism of his day, the Bible was made for humankind, not humankind for the Bible.

For Black History Month in the U.S., I invite you to read and/or circulate Black Lives Matter and Black Museums Matter. For more such posts, use the search engine on my blogsite or click on the following words to search for “black” or “Civil Rights,” and scroll down for multiple posts. 

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

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

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

Pentimento and Palimpsest

We watched the film Julia this past weekend. Vanessa Redgrave as Julia is at her most beautiful, I think, in this film. It’s a film about writers and lovers Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, and Hellman’s adventure, after her play The Children’s Hour opened  on Broadway, smuggling Julia’s money into Berlin to save Jews during the Nazi madness. The authenticity of the story has been questioned, but it’s a high-minded tale worthy of truth or fiction, much like scripture.

Released in 1977, it brought back a flood of memories of my own past. “The longest sentence in the world,” Hellman once wrote, “begins with ‘I remember…’” I graduated from Yale Divinity School that year, was midway through serving on the two-year Presbyterian Task Force on Homosexuality, and began as founding director of The Lazarus Project, a first-of-its-kind ministry of reconciliation between the church and the LGBT community at the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles. I was also one of a handful of openly gay candidates for ordination in the Presbyterian church. Both the support of colleagues and the interest of the media seemed to assure me of a promising outcome of my activism and ministry.

Monday was my day off, which of course was virtually nobody else’s day off, so I “recreated” alone, running on the beach, reading in a park, and sometimes going to the movies. That is how I came to be sitting in an almost empty Westwood movie theatre to see Julia by myself. But before the movie started, someone behind me leaned over a row of seats and tentatively called, “Chris?”  It was Troy Perry, founder of MCC, seated next to a friend and sometime bodyguard, and he invited me to join them, which I did. At the end of the movie, just like my mother, I was crying. Troy turned to me supportively but chided with a smile, “Oh Chris, you’re so sentimental!”

I recalled this as I cried once again at the end of Julia. Wade is used to me by now, so was unsurprised. But I was crying not just for the lost innocence depicted in the film, but for that moment that Troy and I shared in a Westwood movie theatre, just as our dreams were taking off—his founding an LGBT-affirming denomination and me hoping to help change the Presbyterian church.  So much seemed possible then!

This week I took Hellman’s paperback Pentimento from my bookshelves, the memoir of which “Julia” is one chapter. By the bookstore receipt that I obviously used as a bookmark, I purchased it on Halloween (Oct 31), 1974, for $1.95. The other book on the receipt, I imagine, was her memoir An Unfinished Woman, which has gone missing. I know I didn’t read these for any class, and I’m not sure what prompted my purchase. But I remember how much I enjoyed these memoirs.

“Pentimento” is the term for a painting that fades, revealing another painting behind, of which the artist is said to have “repented.” Hellman uses it as a metaphor for memory and memoir, explaining, “Perhaps it would be as well to say that the old conception, replaced by a later choice, is a way of seeing and then seeing again.”

Another favorite writer, Gore Vidal, entitled a memoir Palimpsest, which he thought of as an architectural term, but discovered its original use had to do with paper or parchment “which has been written upon twice; the original writing having been rubbed out.” Vidal observes, “This is pretty much what my kind of writer does anyway. Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought, erasing some but not all of the original while writing something new over the first layer of text.”

That’s what I find myself doing these days, remembering and re-membering. And that, to me, is what scripture (and scriptural interpretation) is. It’s a remembering and a re-membering. In Hellman’s words, “an old conception, replaced by a later choice…a way of seeing and then seeing again.” And in Vidal’s words, “Starts with life; makes a text; then a re-vision—literally, a second seeing, an afterthought.”

That’s also the process of the spiritual life.

Related posts:

Better to Follow than to Arrive

“I Love to Tell the Story”

Mark your calendars, L.A!  I will be offering a lot of “I remember’s” speaking during the 11 a.m. Sunday service October 13, 2013 of the West Hollywood United Church of Christ, formerly known as West Hollywood Presbyterian, as part of its year-long celebration of its 100^th anniversary! This is where I served a decade as founding director of the Lazarus Project.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in your congregation’s or group’s newsletter, including the blog address: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

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

A Bone to Pick with Scripture

By her mere presence, sleeping at my feet as I write this, our dog Hobbes reminds me to lighten up after my last post’s earnest struggling with the Book of Revelation. For me, she truly is one of those “thin places” of Celtic spirituality through which I glimpse heaven on earth.

And I repeatedly witness that she does the same for others. When she rides in the car with me while out running errands, she often elicits a smile from those we pass. For a moment they transcend their stress and preoccupations and the traffic and enter a place of joy, good humor, and tenderness, like a child glad to be given a new stuffed animal. At first I think they are smiling at me, and then I realize it’s my passenger of the canine persuasion sitting attentively in the front seat.  I don’t mind basking in the overflow of goodwill she generates.

A neighbor along our route home after walking in Grant Park has two bumper stickers on his truck: “I BELIEVE IN DOG,” says one, and “DOG IS MY CO-PILOT” says the other. And it’s true, I do believe in Hobbes, and she is definitely my anamchara, or soul friend, also from Celtic Christianity. She’s a very good listener, puts up with my singing, and is always looking out for me.  In turn, I take pleasure in her snoring, her big round eyes (alternately wistful, pitiful, or ecstatic, working her wiles), her sloppy wet ear kisses, and her nosing the doorknob when it’s time to go out.

That’s why I was shocked, toward the end of  Revelation, to discover it said of the New Jerusalem come down from heaven, that “Others must stay outside: dogs, fortune tellers, and the sexually immoral, murderers, idolaters, and everyone of false speech and false life” (22:15). And there was no footnote explaining the reference to dogs in the New Jerusalem Bible I was reading!

I immediately thought of what I remember as an old Twilight Zone episode, a story that not long ago found new life on the internet, about a man who refuses to enter heaven’s gate without his dog, only to find the true heaven’s gate further down the road and that the gate he resisted entering was, in fact, “the other place.” The true heaven welcomed man and dog.

In her early life, when I was out of town, Hobbes’s favorite dog sitters were both transgender. One was a Muslim, and I had to be careful scheduling around the holy month of Ramadan, when he could not be around a dog during daylight hours. Religion sometimes considers dogs “unclean,” and I wondered if that were the origin of the taboo in Revelation.

So I checked the Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version. It, too, listed “dogs” as unwelcome in the New Jerusalem, but this time a footnote clarifies it meant, “impure, lascivious persons,” though it also references Philippians 3:2, where dogs referred to those who insisted on circumcision—in other words, those who were religious purists, the fundamentalists of their time.

Hobbes’s companion, Calvin, who passed on in San Francisco when I served a church there as an interim pastor, wrote “On Dogs in Scripture” in his book Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog. Calvin noted that dogs were “not positively portrayed in the scriptures of various religions,” but “associated with depravity, paganism, heresy, enemies, and the lowest of the low.” Then he pointed out, “Jesus said not to give us what’s holy, but agreed, at least, that we had a right to eat the crumbs that fall from our master’s table.” He continued:

This last reference must serve as the can-opener [Canine for hermeneutic, or method of interpretation] to reveal God’s intentions with regard to dogs. Canine prejudice abounded when most religious canons were written. Surely this admittedly fleeting reference to our right to whatever falls from our masters’ tables gives dogs new status in scriptural dogma. Only those who don’t like us would use the other scriptures against us. And, reading scriptures as a whole, it’s clear that God is usually on the side of the underdog, and there’s nothing more ‘under’ than us dogs! (60-61).

Calvin sat in the back seat of the car when Hobbes joined our family. But he took a back seat to no one when it came to biblical interpretation.

For more excerpts from Calvin’s book, click here.

Other posts about Hobbes or Calvin:

My Dog Ate My Scripture

Let God Rub Your Belly

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Photos and words 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.  

My Dog Ate My Scripture

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

On the eve of our flight to San Francisco so that I might serve as interim pastor in 2006, my late dog Calvin (himself an author) devoured most of a huge hardbound thousand-page concordance of the Bible. He ingested so many biblical references that he was still exegeting them on the grassy lawns of Park Merced for days after our arrival!

The last time Calvin dined on one of my books, it was Out of Solitude by Henri Nouwen. He was evidently put out that I was giving him too much solitude while preparing for my first seminar teaching Henri’s life and writings. He literally took the edge off that book, or I should say, edges and corners—because I now have a rare round and unbound edition. Shortly after that he ate one of two pages of detailed notes for one of my own books.

And to my amazement, during my first interim ministry in Atlanta, Calvin carefully removed the Sunday sermon from my bag on the floor and, when I returned home, nothing was left of either the file folder or its contents. I could honestly tell the congregation that my dog ate my homework! Thank goodness he wasn’t computer savvy, as I was able to print out another copy.

I no longer believed in a jealous God, but I now believed in a jealous dog! As Jesus with the mindful Mary and distracted Martha in Bethany, Calvin preferred my full attention, “the better portion.”

Jesus warned that many of us think we will be heard for our many words. What is heard above all else—by creature and Creator—is presence.

In Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel about St. Francis, a respected professor describes a visit in his dreams from a much beloved but recently deceased student:

He was dressed in a strange kind of robe. No, it wasn’t a robe, it was hundreds of strips of paper sewn together round his body—all the manuscripts he had written during the course of his studies, and on them were all the problems, questions, the philosophic and legal perplexities, the theological concerns: how to be saved, how to escape from the inferno, to rise to purgatory, and from purgatory to paradise…He was so weighted down with papers, try as he might he could not walk. … “Guido, my child,” I shouted at him, “What are these papers round you, these scraps that are preventing you from walking?”

“I’ve just come from the inferno,” he answered me, “and I am struggling to climb to purgatory. But I can’t. The weight of paper is preventing me…”

Calvin was my personal “hound of heaven” reminding me of the better portion.

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Chris will be leading "Claim the God in You! A Midsummer Retreat” in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13-15, 2012, hosted by the MCC of the Blue Ridge. Various events may be attended singly or together. See details on Facebook.

Tax-deductible donations to this ministry may be given online through the blog site or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo area, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Thank you for your support!