Dancing Queen

Dancing Jesus icon.

Okay, I can’t get it out of my head. Dancing Queen. This past week, Wade and I watched some escapist fare to overcome the world’s angst over the pandemic, the murders of black people, and who is in the White House. We watched both versions of Mamma Mia! on two consecutive nights. And I listened to my CD of Abba as I did my blog business last Wednesday.

That day’s post quoted my spiritual mentor Henri Nouwen about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: “It seemed as if nobody could party better than these oppressed people.” That’s true of LGBTIQ people as well. Henri had a taste of that when I once took him to a popular West Hollywood disco, Studio One.

In the middle of marchers dancing during an apartheid protest in South Africa, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu was asked by a news reporter why dancing was so important. Tutu continued his dancing, gave the reporter a puzzled expression, pleading, “We’ve just got to dance.”

Wade and I watched the fa-bu-lous Global Pride 2020 24-hour marathon this past Saturday that often moved me to tears of joy and gratitude, as well as grief and pain for those who never lived to see it. (An aside I can’t resist: a gay friend of mine had to keep re-taping a McDonald’s commercial because he kept putting too much emphasis on the word “fa-bu-lous”!)

I still remember when I thought I was the only one.

And I remember an early Pride festival in my home city of Los Angeles. Friday night, at the entrance, fundamentalist Christians had positioned themselves with damning signs, including “TURN OR BURN!” which the band just inside the festival fence mocked by playing “Burn, Baby, Burn!” from Saturday Night Fever.

Another aside from “the old days”: MCC founder and Pride activist Rev. Troy Perry liked to explain that fundamentalism was an ideological “ism” that included nothing “mental” and nothing “fun.”

It was the Saturday of a subsequent Pride festival that a friend and church member brought his ten-year-old son along. When I arrived, I noticed the dance tent was crowded with a circle of attendees watching a couple dance in the middle of the tent, clapping their approval to the beat of the music. As I approached, I realized it was my friend’s very white little boy dancing extraordinarily well with a very tall black man. I kidded my friend, “Your son has fulfilled your fantasy of having the eyes of everyone on the dance floor riveted by your dancing skills!” When the father died of AIDS years later, I probably told that story in his eulogy.

I have often taken my emotions into my dancing, whether expressing joy or grief. That’s true of many of us in the Queer movement. My first long-term boyfriend and I used to dance till we were sweaty and shirtless.

A friend who died of AIDS a few years after graduation from Columbia Theological Seminary here in the Atlanta area had a rather traditional Presbyterian memorial service. But at the end, to our delight, he had requested the postlude, “Dancing Queen.” We left with a smile on our lips.

Thanks be to God for all the dancing queens of our lives!

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

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

Reformation of My Heart

Our friends and
neighbors Cathie
and CJ's hearts.

Like last week’s post, this entry from my book reflecting on the spiritual writings of Henri J. M. Nouwen might help us cope with the worldwide pandemic.

It makes no sense to preach the Gospel when I have allowed no time for my own conversion. –Henri Nouwen, The Primacy of the Heart, p 4.

Recently, during a retreat, someone described himself as a “square peg trying to fit into a round hole,” a metaphor with which many participants identified. But one retreatant who worked at a nineteenth-century historical site pointed out something new to us. In constructing a wooden building of that time, he explained, you wouldn’t want a round peg in a round hole because it could expand or contract, depending on temperature and moisture. It was actually better to have a square peg in a round hole to maintain the grip between the pieces.

In trying to fit into monastic life, Henri was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. He was an extrovert with an introvert’s calling. But the monastic life had a grip on him even if it wasn’t a complete or comfortable fit. This might also be your experience. Not all of us fit a monastic life, but maybe that’s all the better for its firm grip upon us. We are all called to monastic reflection, that is, moments we set aside for contemplation. If we can do this daily, we are all the more blessed.

Retreats are how we are most likely to fit the monastic way of life into our busy lives. It is there we may listen to sacred texts and to one another in new ways, as well as listen to our own hearts, our own centers, and to the God of our hearts. Unprovidentially, many of us want our retreats as full and busy as our everyday lives, and we anticipate a schedule of uplifting, stimulating talks, or we bring many books to read or plan many tasks to accomplish. But we need to find idle time lest we be distracted by time-bound idols.

In a previous book, Reformation of the Heart, I described two insights offered by participants in two different Henri Nouwen retreats I led the year following his death, one at Kirkridge in Pennsylvania and the other at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. At Kirkridge, a physical therapist explained that a wound has to heal from the inside out. At Ghost Ranch, a ceramic artist told us that, in spinning a pot, the shape of the inside determines the shape of the outside. So it is with the human heart. Our wounded hearts must heal from the inside out. And the gospel we proclaim is shaped by how we allow the good news of God’s love to shape our own hearts.

The truth is, however, that healing and love occur in the everyday events of our lives as well as on retreat or in what I call in my workshops “monastic moments,” brief opportunities to look inward. Healing and love may come to us in conversations with our friends, in caring for others, in serving a just cause, in catastrophic personal or public events, in life’s many interruptions, irritations, distractions, sorrows, and joys. Yet to have ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to feel, we need moments of quiet reflection to allow those many ways in which we experience healing and love to consciously convert our hearts so that we may be healers and lovers, better proclaiming the gospel.

+Heal my heart, so I may offer healing. Love my heart, so I may love.

I invite you to register and attend an online course/retreat I will be leading in September as part of the Spirituality Program of Columbia Theological Seminary entitled, “An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality.”

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Creating Space

Fashion for social distancing?

When I first heard of social distancing to limit the spread of COVID-19, I thought we could bring back hoop skirts to keep others at a six-foot distance!  😉

“Creating space” was a common phrase among therapists and pastors alike when I was in seminary in the mid-70’s. Creating a welcoming environment for another was the intent of the metaphor. A form of this is what is now called “safe space,” and in olden days called “sanctuary.”

Our counseling professor illustrated this with a juvenile court assignment of a child who resisted any verbal interaction with him. The boy would simply wander around the office looking at things, playing with various items. Finally, Dr. Brown told him that he would be assigning him to another therapist. Upset, the boy insisted, “But I like coming here.” Asked why, the boy explained, “Because you’re the only grownup that leaves me alone!”

In the present pandemic of easy contamination, when we can’t “kiss it and make it better” nor offer “warm hugs” of comfort, creating space becomes all the more vital, as in “life-giving” or “life-preserving.”

A couple of years ago I wrote a blogpost about the hugs exchanged within our former congregation in greeting and departing and passing the peace.  What I’ve since discovered in our new church start is that younger people are less so inclined. There are still huggers, of course, but I’ve learned the discomfort of some who prefer another form of greeting, and rather than appear a sort of old vampire grasping for youth, I restrain my touchy impulses. Since then we have also learned a lot about avoiding touch from the “Me Too” movement.

Now the coronavirus has taught us, as the song by The Police goes, “don’t stand so close to me.”

Continuing my re-read of Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life in preparation for what may become an online spiritual formation course, I read this sentence of Henri’s on Monday as an example of such hospitality: “It is like the task of a patrolman trying to create some space in the middle of a mob of panic-driven people for an ambulance to reach the center of the accident.” “First responder” could easily be substituted for “patrolman.”

I thought of Henri’s own creation of space in his campus office when he removed shelves of books lest a visiting student feel overwhelmed in the belief the student had nothing to offer this well-read professor.

I also thought of my first Presbyterian pastor’s explanation of what constitutes social action. Christian compassion, Dr. Morse said, is expressed when you tend to a person’s wounds as you wait for an ambulance. Social justice is expressed when you subsequently investigate why it took so long for the ambulance to arrive.

Nowadays this would include finding and filling the gaps in our systems of medicine—exactly what’s needed in our present crisis. Obviously this would include examining political and economic solutions.

Henri harmonizes the German word for hospitality, Gastfreundschaft, meaning “friendship for the guest” with his own native Dutch word “gastvrijheid” which means “freedom of the guest”: “Hospitality wants to offer friendship without binding the guest and freedom without leaving him or her alone.”

Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. … It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. Reaching Out, 51.

I stumble over political “dividing lines.” I have a friend who seems to support President Trump no matter what. Yet my friend also once supported President Obama. As the present administration dismantled protections and services that might have helped the U.S. in this pandemic and now stumbles incompetently while blaming everyone else, “dividing lines,” like Trump’s infamous wall, makes me stumble. 

Creating space for the other is far from an easy task. It requires hard concentration and articulate work. It is like the task of a patrolman trying to create some space in the middle of a mob of panic-driven people for an ambulance to reach the center of the accident. Reaching Out, 51.

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"Where Is Everybody?"

A church friend made us face masks.

Sheltering in place during the COVID-19 pandemic has, for me, alternately prompted feelings of loneliness, boredom and its more pronounced version, ennui, as in, “What’s my motivation?”

To distract myself one afternoon this past week I clicked on the original Twilight Zone series and happened on to its very first episode, titled “Where Is Everybody?” It’s about a man wandering around an unfamiliar town looking for its inhabitants. He has no memory of who he is himself, yet has a sense that someone is watching him.

To happen onto this guy’s predicament as I am missing friends and family and various activities, I felt like I was in The Twilight Zone as he asks, “Where is everybody?”

Last week I had another Twilight Zone moment watching an episode of Amazing Stories. A woman wakes up from a six-year coma and mysteriously has the urge to call a phone number, which happens to be mine, area code and all, but with the “555” exchange used in fake theatrical phone numbers. (Cue Twilight Zone theme now!)

I am rereading Henri Nouwen’s early work, Reaching Out: Three Movements of the Spiritual Life in preparation for leading a spiritual formation course on Nouwen in the fall. A contemplative retreat I was to co-lead next week has been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic, so I’m not sure whether the Nouwen weekend will be held, cancelled, rescheduled, or moved online.

The first movement Henri describes, “From Loneliness to Solitude,” certainly seems to fit the moment.

More so then than now, I was lonely when I first heard the lecture that became “From Loneliness to Solitude.” A fellow student at Yale Divinity School played me his recording of the first presentation in the class that he was taking from Henri. Having left behind family and friends and a boyfriend as well as my home state of California, I was extremely lonely.

Henri’s words spoke directly to my experience: “We look for someone or something to take our loneliness away. But then we realize that no one and no thing can ever take our loneliness away—we must allow it to be transformed into a creative solitude.” For Henri, that transformation was possible in the presence of God.

That was easier to hear and believe in my hopeful early twenties than it is as I approach 70 years of age and share a demographic particularly vulnerable to the pandemic, an age and demographic that already translates into many lost family members, colleagues, and friends over the years. But I have found it to be true, over and over again—and look, this post is a concrete example of creative solitude! Thank God I have all of you to write for, many who may be experiencing something like this.

For me, a creative solitude means a more gracious reaching out, not one that grasps but one that welcomes with open hands.

In Nouwen’s words, “The movement from loneliness to solitude…is the beginning of any spiritual life because it is the movement from the restless senses to the restful spirit, from the outward-reaching cravings to the inward-reaching search, from the fearful clinging to the fearless play.” (Reaching Out, p 23)

Henri quotes a student, “…then time loses its desperate clutch on me. Then I no longer have to live in a frenzy of activity, overwhelmed and afraid for the missed opportunity.”

Then sheltering in place may become sheltering in peace.

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A Wedding and a Funeral in Trump Territory

Wade dancing with the bride.

I call it “Trump territory” rather than “Trump country” because I doubt any state wants to be characterized by how it voted in the last presidential election. Nor do its citizens. And “territory” sounds less permanent than “country,” suggesting things may change. And I am writing this post not to diminish Trump voters in Indiana and Louisiana or even my own state of Georgia, but to recognize we may share more values than pundits might admit.

I am writing this because when Wade and I visited Indiana for his mom’s memorial in September and Louisiana for our friend’s wedding in October, both held in picturesque rural chapels, we seemed to find the same welcoming people we enjoy in our own neighborhood and our own spiritual community here in Atlanta.

Now, we weren’t talking politics in either venue, but how people respond to a married gay male couple could be considered a sort of litmus test of values. And we seemed warmly received in our grief in Indiana and our celebration in Louisiana. What that says to me is that death and marriage are universally held as profound and important enough to, as they say in theater, “suspend our disbelief” in one another’s voting records and ideologies and, as they say in the church, “bear one another’s burdens and share each other’s joys.”

In a May visit to family and friends in California, one of my hosts was one of “those” puzzling Obama-Trump voters, but we had enough to talk about without pushing one another’s buttons over politics. As many of us anticipate family gatherings over Thanksgiving and Christmas, it helps to consider what we share than how we differ. Fox News does not need to share a turkey with MSNBC. If ceasefires can sometimes work in the Middle East, then they might work—if briefly—at our dinner tables.

My reading for both trips to Trump territory was Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. As I read the section on the movement from hostility to hospitality, tears came to my eyes. I was about to offer my morning prayers, but I realized my tears were my prayers.

My tears came from my youthful ideals that seem so unrealistic in our present political divisiveness. My first sermon in my home Presbyterian church as a college student was entitled “Conflict and Unity within the Church.” That congregation was so divided politically that the liberals sat on the left side of the sanctuary and the conservatives on the right! My sermon declared that maybe the church could be one place political sides could come together and have meaningful conversation.

Someone in the church sent a copy of my sermon to a newspaper columnist who wrote about it, doubting the possibility of what he called “an umbrella church.”

Off I went to seminary and bumped into Henri Nouwen, whose spirituality course in which I enrolled my first semester became the book Reaching Out. He said and wrote, “If we expect any salvation, redemption, healing and new life, the first thing we need is an open receptive place where something can happen to us. … To convert hostility into hospitality requires the creation of the friendly empty space where we can reach out to our fellow human beings and invite them to a new relationship.” (p 54)

“An open receptive place” to me is the very definition of sanctuary.

Regular readers know what store I place on the history of how I came by a book. A Roman Catholic priest who has remained a lifelong friend gave me his copy of Reaching Out in the mid-70s. The copy I’ve currently been reading is the one I gave my mother, writing inside the cover, “To Mom, What Henri shared with me I now share with you—with much love, Chris.”

Because it speaks to our current divisiveness, I’ve decided to use Reaching Out as the text for “An Open Receptive Place,” a new course on Henri I’ve been invited to lead for Columbia Seminary’s spiritual formation program September 17-20, 2020.

Life can teach us that although the events of the day are out of our hands, they should never be out of our hearts, that instead of becoming bitter our lives can yield to the wisdom that only from the heart a creative response can come forth.

If any criticism can be made of the sixties, it is not that protest was meaningless but that it was not deep enough, in the sense that it was not rooted in the solitude of the heart. When only our minds and hands work together we quickly become dependent on the results of our actions and tend to give up when they do not materialize. In the solitude of the heart we can truly listen to the pains of the world because there we can recognize them not as strange and unfamiliar pains, but as pains that are indeed our own. There we can see that what is most universal is most personal and that indeed nothing human is strange to us. … It would be paralyzing to proclaim that we, as individuals, are responsible for all human suffering, but it is a liberating message to say that we are called to respond to it. (p 40-41)

Henri then talks about compassion, quoting Thomas Merton alluding to the solitude of the desert of the first Christian contemplatives: “What is my new desert? The name of it is compassion. There is no wilderness so terrible, so beautiful, so arid and so fruitful as the wilderness of compassion. It is the only desert that shall truly flourish like the lily.” (Merton, The Sign of Jonas, p 323.)

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

Souls "Flung Up to Heaven": Maya Angelou and Hildegard of Bingen

This week I am co-leading a contemplative retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. Four years ago on this site, Dewey Weiss Kramer gave an uplifting course on Hildegard of Bingen for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program. I decided to adapt today’s post from my reflections on that experience.

I am writing this in the wake of the news of the death of Maya Angelou, and this propinquity prompts me to note Hildegard and Angelou’s shared recognition of our musical and lyrical needs spiritually, as well as the role that deprivation plays in appreciating those needs. Both Hildegard and Angelou played many roles in life, and both were strong and savvy women, unflinching in challenging injustice as well as carving places for themselves in patriarchal systems and cultures.

Angelou took the wistful title and theme of her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, from a poem by African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.  As a poor African American girl turned woman from the backwaters of the South, Angelou knew deprivation on multiple levels.

Hildegard, from a wealthy family in Germany, used her privilege to create and defend a group of women religious, but wrote some of her most profound words and theology when her community was deprived of singing in worship by church hierarchy.

I fantasize about the harmony that these giants, Hildegard and Angelou, might make now that both have been “flung up to heaven,” in the words of the title of the latter’s last book, A Song Flung Up to Heaven.

At nine years of age, Maya Angelou chose to go mute for five years after naming her rapist and believing it was her words that killed him. It could be argued that her six memoirs that followed, perhaps all of her writings, were born out of that silence, a kind of self-imposed spiritual discipline that emulates the contemplative silences of the monastic life.

Silence may have allowed her to listen closely to those around her, better able to capture their choice of words and phrasings; to see life for what it was, better able to be a truth teller in a world of denial and deception; to deeply smell and taste and touch the world, better able to depict scents and flavors and textures; and then to conjure her worldly, earthy, and cultural experience in lyrical but accessible language.

Similarly, Hildegard’s contemplative life empowered her to describe her visions, coaching artists in their design, then to interpret “their truth,” their meaning spiritually and theologically, in her rudimentary Latin, the mystical language of the time.

And, of great interest to this writer, Hildegard listened to the music of the soul, creating her own forms of spiritual music that did not follow the conventions of the day, thus creating an ethereal, unearthly music, music that serves as a haunting reminder of the harmonies inherent in Eden (not far from that of angels) and in the unfallen first human creature, of whom she said, “If he had remained in his original state, the weakness of mortal man would not have been able to endure the power and the resonance of his voice.”  I have some sense of this, having heard Maya Angelou speak and read her work with a musical, resonant, majestic intonation.

We are blessed that Hildegard and Maya both found their voice.

I am one of those persons of whom Hildegard writes “sighs and moans upon hearing some melody, recalling the nature of celestial harmony.” Maybe these are echoes of the sound of Eden, as Hildegard suggests, or premonitions of heavenly bliss, or “the music of the spheres.”

I hear that music in lyrical writing, whether poetry or prose. That’s why I was so taken with Hildegard’s prayer, “O ignis Spiritus Paracliti,” which, even without music, sings to me, especially that phrase, “O sweet savor in the breast.” Like the Lord’s Prayer, it would be a worthy part of every liturgy.

Harmony comes from the integrity of body and spirit that I experience with Hildegard in the sacrament of music. Augustine’s reservations about the sensuality of music is the very thing that draws me to it as an instance of the Incarnation of God. Music is the Word made flesh—again.

“The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God,” Hildegard affirms.  Just as for Hildegard encountering one of the Trinity is to encounter all of the Trinity, in my view, to encounter an instance of Incarnation is to encounter all Incarnation.

That’s why Hildegard’s understanding that Incarnation was not the result of The Fall but intended from the beginning makes sense to me, especially as she views Creation itself as an incarnation of God, its fecundity, its greening (viriditas)—in my words, a divine impulse, a holy “oozing,” and the soul’s melody.

And the soul’s melody is not just human, it is in every creature, every atom, in the whole of the cosmos—nothing is truly inert in Hildegard’s view, everything is a “sounding icon” and “vibrations” of God’s self in everything.

As I wrote in Communion of Life:

Our original sin

Is not the seizing of forbidden fruit,

But failing to see

The infinite in the finite,

The luminous, sacred essence

Of the garden;

Failing to revere

The life that gives us life;

Trampling on the taboo,

Sequestering, quantifying,

And qualifying the holy—

The heart of our garden.

Forgive us, earth,

Be merciful in our willful ignorance

As you are gracious in your altruistic nature.

Hold us accountable, and then,

Hold us.

Reading this you will understand why I was so taken with Hildegard’s fresh understanding of human alienation, that the first human transgression was refusing the white flower, the fruit of humility offered by a benevolent God: “Its scent comes to the human’s nostrils, but he does not taste it with his mouth…for he tried to know the wisdom of the Law with his intelligence…but did not perfectly digest it…or fulfill it in full blessedness by the work of his hands. … He did not seek God either by faith or by works.”

  

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An Early Christian #MeToo and #TimesUp Movement

Reading Laura Swan’s The Forgotten Desert Mothers as the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and the like-minded #TimesUp movement (that also includes equal opportunity for women and minorities) were getting underway, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with the women who, alongside the Desert Fathers, went out into the desert to pray, only to be overlooked and overshadowed by a patriarchal version of church history.

I am re-reading Swan’s book in preparation for co-leading a contemplative retreat with Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program director Debra Weir, which I referenced  in last week’s post. It is one of two texts we selected for the course, the other being Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Prayer.

It does not in any way diminish their genuine religious devotion to be struck by how many of the women evaded sexual abuse, forced or arranged marriages, and culturally-expected duties of women in the fourth and fifth centuries by pursuing their callings/vocations. And though, like MeToo and TimesUp, it was often women of privilege and wealth and education who initiated the exodus from mistreatment and exploitation, the monastic communities they founded became refuges for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, orphaned, abandoned, mistreated, and homeless.

Meeting recently with Debra for planning our retreat, I told her I was in awe how much the women sacrificed to follow the Christian way of giving up their possessions, land, and financial resources to the poor, denying themselves even the simplest luxuries like beds, food, and other-than-simple clothing for the sake of their spirituality and their sense of justice.

Some of them cross-dressed to escape and avoid detection, joining male monastic communities as supposed eunuchs, or traveling to distant and unfamiliar places where they were unknown. Others simply resisted their family’s wishes and practiced their asceticism in the family home or on family-owned property. Many led their family members into Christian faith and practices themselves.

Unlike their male counterparts, fewer of their sayings have been preserved in the church’s memory, but what is preserved is their benevolence, their service to others, saintly attributes, and sincere devotion.

Quoting Joan M. Petersen, “Their delight was in self-control; their glory was to be unknown; their wealth was to possess nothing… Their work…consisted only of attention to the things of God, prayer without ceasing, and the uninterrupted chanting of the Psalms.” The “things of God” included the upbuilding of the Christian community and its ministry to the world in the name of Jesus, serving “the least of these.”

Decades ago John Boswell taught me that LGBT people of earlier times were drawn to monastic communities for similar reasons. These were places where they were not expected to marry, and where they could find opportunities to serve the greater good. Though Boswell recognized the church had a patriarchal bias in terms of its leadership and teachings and history, he questioned the impression that it was only men who shaped the church and its theology. Men who dominated the culture and religion, he observed, were reared by women, taught by women, related to women, influenced by women, sometimes married to women, and served in spiritual communities alongside women.

One of multiple examples of this was how Gregory of Nyssa, considered one of the early Christian theologians, was absolutely influenced and inspired by Macrina the Younger, his elder sister, who encouraged his baptism and his memorialization of her community’s monastic way of life in the Short and Long Rules. Macrina was following in her grandmother’s footsteps, Macrina the Elder, who worked closely with the local bishop. According to Swan, he and his brother Basil “acknowledged [Macrina the Younger] as the primary influence in their theological education, and each finally embraced ascetic and monastic observance.”

When the church became entwined, sometimes strangled, by the culture of the Roman empire, the Desert Mothers and Fathers sought to “re-member” the Christian community’s countercultural roots. After all, its teacher, Jesus, was executed by Rome; it faced accusations of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6); its acts of compassion contradicted a worldview of self-interest; and it suffered persecution for refusing to bow to the gods of Rome, including the emperor, considered a god. Christians then were considered “atheistic” because they believed in only one God!

#MeToo and #TimesUp are countercultural movements that resist a world in which women are demeaned and exploited. In a church that has often followed the culture’s lead in the treatment of women, these movements should remind us of our own countercultural roots in which we are “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female…for all of you are one… (Galatians 3:28).”

Related Post: “Peace! Be Still!” 

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Henri Joins the Circus

Henri catching the wing of a windmill.

I invite you to Be Still! Be Loved! Be Grateful!, a Spiritual Formation course that I will be leading at Columbia Seminary in Decatur, GA, on Henri Nouwen’s life, ministry, and writings Sept. 22-24, 2016 following the 2oth anniversary of his death Sept. 21, 1996. A technical glitch tried to put some registrants on a waiting list, but there are still openings.

Attending an international Nouwen conference in Toronto this past June and doing further reading in preparation for the course, I’ve been thinking about the research Henri did for a book he never wrote about the Flying Rodleighs, trapeze artists in a German circus. He wanted it to say something about the spiritual life in more universal (rather than religious) language. So, last week, this children’s story came out of me!

Once upon a time there was a wide-eyed boy named Henri. He lived in Holland during a great war. His hands were large, his ears were large, he was clumsy and awkward, and he felt like a clown.

And so he went to clown seminary. He devoted himself to learning all the gestures a clown must use, flapping his oversize hands like birds, extending them at arms’ length in welcome, clapping them rapidly together as if offering multiple expressions of gratitude for everything and everyone he encountered.

He stuck his neck out, squinted his eyes as if to see better, turned a big ear to hear clearly, bowed grandly but deferentially, and stood on tippy-toes to accentuate his already great height when making a point. And he had a huge, goofy grin that revealed his absolute delight at encountering you.

Henri found a costume that accentuated his vocation, and learned how to apply garish makeup that sometimes covered his true feelings.

So Henri joined the circus, following the poet e.e. cummings’ famous advice: “damn everything but the circus.” He travelled hither and yon, over hill and over dale, as the circus wagons kept rolling along.

He stumbled and fumbled and tumbled and somersaulted his way into people’s hearts. “He is just like us,” they said, sometimes smiling in recognition, sometimes deeply moved as his familiar foibles and limitations tugged at their heart strings. His disabilities mirrored our disabilities. 

But Henri had a secret wish: to fly through the air with the greatest of ease. Sometimes his height allowed him to catch an arm of a windmill, common in Holland’s countryside, and the uplift took his breath away. He could see great distances and imagine himself flung to the heavens before crashing to earth in a pile of hay, cushioning his fall.

And then Henri met Rodney, a trapeze artist. Rodney was strong and graceful, beautiful and amazing. He was everything Henri wished to be, and  HE COULD FLY! Boy, could he fly, doing doubles and triples midair without a care in the world.

“How do you do that?” Henri asked Rodney, appreciatively. “Being absolutely present in the moment,” Rodney explained. “I let go of everything that can hold me down: my cares, my doubts, my fears, even yesterday’s mistakes. And I trust. I trust the Catcher, and I trust the net. Gravity is not my enemy; it is the friend that brings me home. I can go up toward the skies knowing I will come home. I surrender to the moment and soar, knowing gravity will keep me down to earth.”

Then Rodney added, “It’s the same thing you do when you stumble and fumble and tumble and somersault into people’s hearts—except you do it grounded. Your gravity is compassion. Your home is the heart.”

Henri was stunned. He had never thought of his work in this way. Rodney’s words lifted him up, and Henri felt like this man on the flying trapeze.

My book about Henri:

Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy

Click here for my posts that mention Henri, and scroll down.

Tax-deductible donations to this blog ministry may be given 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 © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

The Scandal of Particularity

"Quick, Chris! Take a picture!" Henri said gleefully.

Former and present seminarians will recognize the phrase “scandal of particularity.” In Christianity, it has to do with the question of incarnation: why was a transcendent God manifest in a first century Palestinian Jewish male named Jesus?

But the phrase came to me as I read again Henri Nouwen’s description of Adam, the core member to whom he was assigned as assistant when he joined L’Arche, an international and ecumenical community for people with disabilities (core members) and their assistants who create a kind of family for one another, enabling all to live up to their potential.

“His heart, so transparent, reflected for me not only his person but also the heart of the universe, and indeed, the heart of God.” Henri wrote this in his posthumously published book, Adam: God’s Beloved. Like Jesus, Adam manifested God, indeed “the heart of the universe” to Henri.

I was reminded of this while reading Michael Ford’s Wounded Prophet: A Portrait of Henri J. M. Nouwen in preparation for a weekend spiritual formation course I will be teaching in September. I had read the British edition when the book was first published a few years after Henri’s death in 1996, but am now reading the U.S. edition. I didn’t read it earlier because I assumed it was primarily the same book, but after nearly two decades, it reads fresh and even more insightfully than the first time around.

Henri continued, “After my many years of studying, reflecting, and teaching theology, Adam came into my life, and by his life and his heart he announced to me and summarized all I had ever learned.”

Any of us who have fallen in love, given birth to a child, cared for a loved one, or even simply taken care of a pet or a garden might similarly testify. Roman Catholic training for the priesthood had denied Henri what is called “a particular friendship,” so, in a way, Adam could be said to be Henri’s first permissible “particular friendship.”

Anyone who met Henri knew, though, that when he was attending to you, you were the only person in the room, just as we would expect of the warmest pastors, politicians, and “client-centered” therapists.

His challenge was seeing himself also reflecting the heart of the universe, the heart of God.

As early as his 1966 book, The Genesee Diary: Report from a Trappist Monastery, Henri’s spiritual director John Eudes Bamberger had advised him to take as his koan, “I am the glory of God,” telling him that if the glory of God were not manifest in him, where then?

Henri was still struggling with that concept in The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom, a journal released thirty years later on the day he died, September 21, 1996. In that journal kept eight years earlier, he had adjured himself, “Claim the God in you.”

Henri wrote of an experience common to many of us. It is hard to bear the responsibility of being a child of God, a child of the universe. Many of us treat it as “above our pay grade.”

A recent New York Times science article sought to correct the misimpression that “the universe started someplace,” saying that “The universe didn’t start at a place, it started at a time, namely 13.8 billion years ago. … When we look out, we look into the past… At the center is the present. … So where is the center of the universe? Right here. Yes, you are the center of the universe.”

Lest this sound like the teaching of EST (for those who remember it) or some other New Age* narcissistic notion, the article goes on to say essentially that we each have our own take on the universe, and that only together can we piece together our knowledge of reality.

The early Christians “got” this when they came to see one another as the Body of Christ. Working together, we can be Christ in the world, claiming the God in us, manifesting the heart of God. God is no longer simply to be found in a first century Palestinian Jewish male, but in every body, every time, every place, every culture, every religion, every race, every nation, every condition.

Try this mantra on for size: “I am the glory of God.” That should humble us, expand our consciousness, and enlarge our compassion.

Give God the opportunity to be particular in you.

*I don't mean to imply all New Age spiritualities are narcissistic. Many are just the opposite!

Consider joining me for a spiritual formation course on Henri Nouwen on the twentieth anniversary of his passing: Be Still! Be Loved! Be Grateful! Three Imperatives of the Spiritual Life, September 22-25, 2016.

The Henri Nouwen Society is hosting an international conference on Nouwen in Toronto June 9-11, 2016. Click here for more information.

Donate $100 to this blog or set up regular monthly giving of $10 and receive a signed gift copy of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy. Limited supply.

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

Henri, Vincent, and Compassion

Henri giving Chris a cross from El Salvador

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, the last entry of January and every Wednesday of February I’ve provided the most visited post of each year. For 2015, that would be Progressive vs. “Biblical” Christianity.

My friend, Nouwen biographer Michael Ford, invited me to write this piece about Henri Nouwen for a retreat he is leading on the spiritual writer this week.  It so happens that details of my own spiritual formation course on Nouwen September 22-25, 2016 were posted last week. It tends to fill up, so register early!

When Henri Nouwen proposed a course on “The Life and Ministry of Vincent van Gogh” at Yale Divinity School for the spring semester of 1977, his fellow academics were stymied, expressing concern: “But he was an artist.” “Wasn’t he crazy?” “Didn’t he kill himself?”

I took that seminar and it was my last formal course with Henri, though our friendship would continue through the rest of his life. We viewed photos and prints of van Gogh’s paintings, read his voluminous Letters to Theo (his patron brother), and biographical materials. A limit of a dozen or so students allowed an intimate, conversational format.

Many parallels drew Henri to Vincent. They preferred using only their first names. They were from Holland. Both were prolific. They shared compassion for the poor, the outcast, the marginalized, and the underprivileged. They each exercised unconventional ministries. Both were problematic as well as prophetic for the church. Either could be intense. And both were extremely lonely.

I did not know that Vincent had begun as a conventional Calvinist minister to the coal miners of the Borinage, and that his ministry scandalized the church because he did not keep a “professional” distance—descending into the mines with them, chatting with them at their kitchen tables, giving them his possessions, including his own bed to a sick woman.

This led to his dismissal from his pulpit by the church hierarchy and a long idle period trying to discern, “What next?” He decided to take up painting, hoping that his work would offer the same consolation that the Christian faith once did, even as Henri’s books about our very human challenges consoled his readers.

Unlike Vincent, who only sold two paintings in his lifetime, Henri’s books soon touched millions, either directly or indirectly through their influence on Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant pastors and lay leaders throughout the world.

Henri’s classes helped countless students discern their true vocations, not just in ministry, but determining what kind of minister they were called to be. As the final paper for that course I wrote a fictional story about a woman in transition, ministered by two versions of van Gogh’s Madame Roulin and Her Baby, which I spent time contemplating, first in Philadelphia and then in New York City.

Writing that story was the most fulfilling paper I produced in all three years of seminary, because it brought together compassion (my required muse) and creativity, as well as my callings as a writer and minister.

I am grateful to Henri and Vincent for their spiritual guidance. Vincent once wrote that Jesus was an artist whose medium was human flesh. Both Henri and Vincent followed in his footsteps as soul artists.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“Woman, Behold Your Son. Son, Behold Your Mother.”

Click on their names to find other posts that refer to Vincent van Gogh or Henri Nouwen.

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!

Donations of $100 or more either at once or over 2016 will receive a signed gift copy of my book, Henri’s Mantle: 100 Meditations on Nouwen’s Legacy.

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

Folding the Labyrinth

Some people do a spiritual practice called walking the labyrinth. My version of this spiritual practice is folding the labyrinth.

A facilitator’s role in spiritual formation programs at Columbia Theological Seminary is not as a presenter but as a maker of everything from coffee to morning and evening prayers—as well as unfolding and folding the fabric labyrinth.

The spiritual formation program is my “local church,” where I encounter fellow believers in search of spiritual understanding and practices, all those things I have wanted to share with congregations and participants in retreats and workshops.

I am not one who “gets” walking the labyrinth, however. But at the end of a recent class I realized I really “get” folding it.

I know that spirituality is to be experienced in community, but when I have tried to fold the labyrinth with another, I find conflict and distraction. “No, I think it should go this way.” “Shouldn’t we read the directions again?”

I prefer to follow the folds in the fabric. I read the directions long ago, but I find the easiest and surest way to fold the labyrinth is by letting its creases guide me.

Virtually everything else I do as a facilitator is done with others, from reading assigned texts in preparation, working with a presenter’s theme and imagining attendees’ responses to and participation in the morning and evening prayers, ensuring the availability of coffee, tea, water, meals, and snacks as the class proceeds, enjoying presentations and conversations with participants.

But folding the labyrinth I prefer to do alone. After all, walking the labyrinth is also done in solitude. While attendees are meeting in their small groups for the last time, I fold and reflect in silence. Though the outcome is always the same, I take satisfaction when the wrinkles are smoothed out and the labyrinth is folded into a shape compact enough to fit in its box.

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. This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

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