A Comfort Dream

Good neighbors!

As last week’s post published at 5 a.m. last Wednesday, I was awaking from what I would call a comfort dream. A beautiful Southern California day found me walking a favored walk, along the steep cliffs that line the coast in Santa Monica, overlooking the beach far below. It was here and on the sands below that I occasionally sorted out life as a young man—not to say I resolved everything or anything, but it gave me a place to walk and run, think and pray. Now living in Atlanta, this is the West Coast feature that I miss the most.

It was the place I began to reconcile my sexuality and my spirituality, my love of nature and my love of God. My first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Man’s Struggle to Serve the Church, described it as a welcoming and gracious sanctuary for all of me in a way the church was not yet. 

Harper & Row changed the subtitle I had, A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church because the publisher feared that in those “early days” of the movement “gay Christian” might sound like an oxymoron! After four printings, the book was passed on to Westminster / John Knox Press, which accepted the original subtitle.

In the dream I enjoyed something along the Santa Monica business strip that was not and is not there: a several level store called Pickwick’s, a beloved old Hollywood bookstore where I used to enjoy browsing and buying books to read. I still have Pickwick bookmarks, which were inserted in every book I purchased there. I was introduced to Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in high school. It was among the countless books that encouraged my own writing vocation.

I forget who it was who said this—a writer, no doubt—that heaven should be a beach with a big library. I would add at least a wine bar, and there was a bar near the gay beach in Santa Monica, the S. S. Friendship, once frequented by writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, who lived up Chautauqua Canyon, named no doubt for the adult education and social movement in the U.S. in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

So, in my dream, I was essentially in heaven. I believe it was Gertrude Stein who said of readers, “They have no need of heaven, for they have had books.”

Anyway, in the midst of our pandemic and the stress of the U.S. election process, my dream offered much needed comfort. That it came just as my last post was published seemed somehow auspicious. In that post I wrote of the integrity of science and religion, of nature and spirituality: calling us to remember we’re all in this together as inheritors of billions of years of evolution from the Big Bang to the common wealth and the common responsibility we share.

As if an incarnational exclamation point on this scientific and spiritual truth, Friday afternoon close friends/neighbors/members of Ormewood Church “res-erected” Wade’s and my mailbox after being dashed to the ground by falling trees a few weeks back, an urban version of rural barn-raising followed by socially-distanced wine on our deck.

In the meantime, Vicki, our mail carrier, had kindly walked the mail to us on our front porch or to the mailbox’s temporary location leaning against a Japanese maple that survived the earlier onslaught.

Photo by Cathie McBeth.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Grunion and Grace

Photo thanks to Haris Lakisic at Grunion.org

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With a pickup load of high school friends I traveled to a beach designated a likely site for a grunion run. Grunion are silvery fish that come ashore at this time of year along the Southern California coastline to lay and fertilize thousands of eggs (per couple!) in the sand before they catch the next wave out to sea.

Hundreds of people were gathered on that beach that night, excitedly awaiting the spectacle. Many had buckets for our catches, as I recall, though I’m not sure we intended to do anything with the fish afterward. But the grunion never showed. Maybe the noise and campfires of the partiers signaled them this was not a good place for their mating ritual.

Another group did catch one lonely grunion, however, and generously turned it over to our group so we didn’t go home empty-handed. We all piled into the back of our old pickup for the return home, not entirely disappointed, as the whole point was to spend time together as friends on the beach under a starry night.

Flash forward more than a decade. Back in California after seminary in New Haven and a campus ministry internship in Philadelphia, I was serving a ministry that challenged the church’s long held grudge against LGBT people.

Given the earnest nature of my work, I was held in balance for a while by a very funny boyfriend. Bob Barnes had joined the migration of would-be comics from the Midwest (Ohio, specifically) to try his luck at onstage improv comedy. He could make me LOL before that was a texting cliché.

For example, watching on television the flamboyant and lisping evangelist Ernest Angley lay hands on followers who announced their particular need of healing, one approached wearing a loud red plaid blazer with neon green pants. “Oh God, give me taste,” Bob  mocked.  Once, receiving Communion, the priest eyed him suspiciously. “You Catholic?” he questioned. “From cradle to grave,” Bob quipped without missing a beat. Bob’s friends, also comics, referred to me as “the Pope” because of his upbringing.

Bob also had a romantic side. We had dinner one evening at a popular seafood restaurant beside the beach on the southern end of Malibu. Afterward we walked alone along the shore as the waves crashed at our feet. We began noticing silver flashes, which at first I speculated to be plankton in the sand, a phenomenon I’d experienced before in which I could kick the sand with my foot and see phosphorescent sparks, reminiscent of Disney animation of fairy dust from a wand.

Then we realized it was grunion coming ashore, a few at first, and then by the hundreds. The crashing waves were full of them and then the beach was covered with writhing, copulating grunion as far as we could see in the moonlit night. Bob and I shared a look of absolute delight as we stood there, transfixed by this natural wonder that neither of us had ever seen and would never see again.

The last time I saw Bob was when I spoke on a college campus in Ohio, where he had returned, now living with AIDS. For our visit, he had put together an elaborate platter with a variety of cheeses and roasted vegetables, my first time eating roasted garlic. We had a wonderful visit, his easy smile and laughter, as always, uplifting my spirit. After his death I would learn from his partner that they had spent his final days in a treatment facility along the shore where they could hold each other watching the sun set over Lake Erie.

When I decided to write this post after reading a recent article on grunion, I intended to suggest that Bob and I had an experience of grace that night serendipitously happening onto grunion running ashore, contrasting it with the unsuccessful effort with my high school friends to witness such a miracle.

But as I finish this post, I realize everything mentioned was an experience of grace: my friends in youth gathered in anticipation; my opportunities participating in ministry and in a movement; the smiles and laughter that Bob gave freely and prompted easily; the remembered glowing sparks of plankton in sand; our dinner and walk and conversation along the shore as well as the silver flashes of flopping grunion; our last visit and the platter Bob so painstakingly prepared; the lover that held Bob in his final days and the sunsets they shared; and now, my memories of all of these.

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

New Year

I miss a custom I created for myself when living in Southern California. New Year’s Eve parties left me wanting some more meaningful way of observing the passing of an old year and the welcome of a new year. I did not want to “pray in” the new year as we did in my Baptist church with us kids keeping one eye open to see the sanctuary clock silently clap its hands together on the number 12.

But the ticking of a clock or the descent of a ball in Times Square felt artificial, so I began watching the sun set as I walked along the beach in Santa Monica every New Year’s Eve. I would spend the time revisiting the events of the past year and imagining what the new year might bring, thanking God for the good and the bad as well as the possibilities. It was something I could do alone, well before the parties. And it felt more natural.

This bit of shoreline is the sanctuary where, in college, I ruminated on my sexuality, spirituality, and call to ministry. This is where I thought I’d like to be reincarnated as a seagull so I could stay near the shore and see my friends on the beach occasionally! This is where I stumbled onto a gay meeting place long before I knew about gay bars. This is where, on a day off from my church work, I would do a long run and work out on the outdoor gymnastic bars.

This is a walk I’ve shared with many friends, including some of you, and others you might know, such as John Boswell, Isabel Rogers, and Malcolm Boyd. This is the walk that Henri Nouwen declined, insisting instead that we sit down on my sofa and “have a really good talk”!

This is where I walked weekly on Thursday evenings with a partner to share whatever was on our minds and hearts. This is where we walked one Easter after worship, ending up at Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s hangout, the S. S. Friendship, bumping into an old friend there whose partner we learned had died the previous week, who gave me the Easter message I needed to hear, “He died in my arms. I felt him leave his body. That’s why I’m sure I’ll see him again.”

This is where I took my mom and her dog for her last walk along the shore a few weeks before she died, where she mischievously chose an ice cream cone over lunch. And this is where at least some of my ashes will be scattered.

Though I live far from that shore now, I go there often.

There is no lighthouse there, but in college I composed this poem using the metaphor, which feels all the more apt in later life: 

To Be the Sea

The sea beside, I stand alone,

By seasons, wait and search

To be discovered and to discover

In boundless quest.

The sea has all at any time—

No search nor wait.

At most a lighthouse

Can beam an instant

Before bowing to the sea.

The photo is an accidental double exposure taken by Beth Extrom, a friend from seminary who gave me the negative because I loved the picture so much!

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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. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite. Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.