Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: Spiritual but not religious

Showing posts with label Spiritual but not religious. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Literalism vs Spirituality

St. John the Divine in rainbow colors, NYC.

Happy 90^th birthday today to progressive Christian author Bishop John (Jack) Spong, who has helped Christians better understand our faith with the help and support of Christine Spong.

The following post appeared on July 16, 2014.

The trend of people identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is sometimes a rejection of biblical literalism, religious fundamentalism and official orthodoxy. To me that can be a good thing, and, in my reading of a recent translation from Middle English by Bernard Bangley of the book, The Cloud of Unknowing, very traditional.

The anonymous author encourages readers to discard what’s not helpful in the book, and so I freely disagree with the writer’s rejection of physical and sensual experience as unspiritual, even ungodly. This 14^th century English monk must not have met the 14^th century English nun, Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “In our sensuality, God is…”

The beliefs of the church regarding creation, incarnation, and resurrection all support a hallowing of bodily experience. As James B. Nelson and a diverse group of other contemporary Christian body theologians have affirmed, we know God through our bodies or we don’t know God at all. Nelson goes so far as to add, “Pleasure is the strongest argument for the existence of God.”

Yet I wholeheartedly embrace The Cloud author’s understanding that literalism interferes with our spirituality, and he offers many examples. I once wrote that we do a disservice to religion when we treat matters of faith as matters of fact.

For example, the writer cautions against taking the ascension of Jesus literally. As a college professor of mine once said, “If Jesus had ascended at the speed of light, he still would not be out of the known universe.”

The Cloud of Unknowing asserts that “the spatial references are only symbolic. … The spiritual realm is always near, enveloping us on every side. Whoever has a strong desire to be in heaven is already in heaven, spiritually. Measure the highway to heaven in terms of desire rather than miles. … Love determines a soul’s location.”

Earlier the writer explained, “Similar in nature to heavenly bliss, divine contemplation already participates in eternity.” I once wrote that people we recognize as living saints are those who experience God’s commonwealth here and now. Spiritually they have found heaven in their desire to love and serve others. Heaven for me is where God’s will and human will coincide. Saying the Lord’s Prayer (“on earth as it is in heaven”) is a way of aligning ourselves with that greater purpose. That’s why Jesus could say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” or “among us.”

There are many pearls of wisdom about the spiritual life in The Cloud of Unknowing. Here are a few quotes I underlined in my copy:

+ Remember your spiritual needs rather than your spiritual achievements.

+ Continue until your prayer life becomes enjoyable.

+ You only need a tiny scrap of time to move toward God.

+ Loving contemplation destroys our tendency to sin more effectively than any other practice.

+ The essence of contemplation is a simple and direct reaching out to God.

+ Judging others, pronouncing them good or bad, is God’s business. We may evaluate behavior, but not the person.

+ Christ taught us in Matthew’s Gospel that spoken prayers are best when they are not too long.

+ A little prayer of one syllable pierces heaven because we concentrate our entire spiritual energy into it.

+ The person in great distress will continue calling for help until someone hears and responds.

+ The little word “God” can flood your spirit with spiritual meaning without giving attention to particular activities of God.

+ I desire to help you tighten the spiritual knot of warm love that is between you and God, to lead you to spiritual unity with God.

+ Love functions as your guide in this world, and it will bring you to grace in the next.

+ [After meeting our physical needs,] sensuality urges us to take more than we need, encouraging lust.

+ The important consideration is not what you are, or what you have been, but what you want to be.

Finally, this anonymous monk seems to echo the axiom that spiritual guides remind us of what we already know:

Writers used to think that humility required them to say nothing out of their own heads, but to corroborate every idea with quotations from Scripture or the [Church] fathers [and mothers]. Today this practice demonstrates nothing but cleverness and education. … If God moves you to believe what I say, then accept my ideas on their own merits. (p 99-100)

Given its encouragement to surrender certain knowledge of God for intimacy with God, I can’t help but think The Cloud of Unknowing would be a great text for the “spiritual but not religious” crowd. As they say in recovery programs, religion is for people afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for people who have already been there.

My dear friend and longtime supporter of this blog, the Rev. Steve Pieters, will be featured as a character in a film about televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker due out in September of 2021. Her interview with him on national television opened many evangelical hearts to people living with AIDS and more broadly, the LGBTQ community. Watch the trailer.

My final post on my blog “Progressive Christian Reflections” will occur on June 30, 2021. More than ten years of posts will remain available to you on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and I encourage you to enjoy them. I regret that I never created an index of post titles, but the search engine in the upper left corner of my blog can help you find posts of interest by typing in a subject, topic, name, scripture reference, religious season or holy day. Or you may work through them by year and month listed in the right column.

Though they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to be read meaningfully at any point in time. You may continue to contact me at my email address used by the delivery service or by leaving a comment on a particular post. FeedBurner has announced it will discontinue all subscription services sometime in July, the occasion for my timing. It has been a pleasure writing this blog, but now, I believe, is a time for silence, something I considered when writing the Zen series.

I assure you I am well, content, and thankful to God for this extension of my ministry. Thank you for your interest, comments, correspondence, and contributions. I am grateful to Metropolitan Community Churches for recognizing this blog as an “Emerging Ministry” and ProgressiveChristianity.org for reposting many of my reflections, as well as the dozens of Facebook pages that allowed me to provide links to particular posts. I am grateful for the free services of Blogspot, Google, Facebook, and the delivery service, FeedBurner. I am grateful for artist and friend Becki Jayne Harrelson and my husband Wade Jones for their technical and moral support.

To date, the blog has had 511,000 visits, a count that does not include almost 500 free weekly subscribers. Once donations were possible, the highest annual income ever was $2,000. Subscriptions have always been free and the blog non-monetized (no ads). Permission has always been granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Donations may still be made through the links provided at the end of this post. Thank you!

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Learn about Chris Glaser’s life and gay activism in the church.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Christmas for the Spiritual but Not Religious

This is an excerpt of my sermon for Emerson Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Marietta, Georgia this past Sunday, December 9. Many thanks to my friend Jeffrey Jacoby and the worship committee for the invitation! I found the congregation vibrant and friendly. For the bulletin cover I created The Centering Thought: “What if everyone had told me I had a spark of divinity in me when I was born?” For the Chalice Lighting, I wrote:

Light comes into the world

through every baby born.

May we do everything possible

to let that light shine,

openly, honestly, imaginatively,

so other lights may be inspired

with wisdom, compassion, and awe,

bringing our world out of the shadows

and into the rainbow that is light’s spectrum.

You don’t have to listen to me to recognize over and over again how Christmas has become culturally relevant—just watch the Hallmark Channel and Netflix Christmas movies, Christmas mixes on radio stations, as well as media reports of compassion and kindness toward the under-appreciated and underprivileged that are more plentiful at this time of year to know that the spirit of Christmas can lift everyone’s boats, regardless of belief.

It’s believed that the observance of Christmas that we have come to experience in the West was expanded by Charles Dickens’ story, “A Christmas Carol,” a favorite of mine—so much so that last year a commercially well-received film about Dickens’ creation of the story was entitled, “The Man Who Invented Christmas.” In all his novels, Dickens promoted social justice and equality while casting a critical eye on the treatment of the poor in England. As a child, he himself had spent time in a poorhouse that incarcerated those without resources, and his writing of “A Christmas Carol” prevented him and his family from sharing a similar fate.

Every Christmas season there are some Christians who gnash their teeth at the “commercialism” of Christmas. “Let’s put Christ back in Christmas,” they say, verbally and on their bumper stickers, without realizing the success of Christmas marketing is that the story of Christmas is so universal. Its “good will to men and women” and “peace on earth” and “joy to the world” speak to people of every faith and of no religion at all.

Christmas has become about more than Jesus. It’s about the lifting of the human spirit. It’s about kindness and compassion and the glory of being alive!

Years ago, the late sociologist, novelist and Catholic priest Andrew Greeley reported from his scientific surveys that the reason Christians are more likely to attend church in this season is simply because they love the nativity story, not because they hold to the theological assertions of the church about who Jesus was.

This is a very important point—even Christians themselves are not necessarily drawn by theological propositions, but by how the Christmas narrative touches their hearts: an unwed pregnant Mary threatened with scandal, a reluctant Joseph, a sweet baby in a manger, whose life is threatened by the government and whose family has been displaced by governmental policies, a star of hope overhead drawing sages from afar, and more angels and dreams per cubic foot of any biblical story, influencing Mary and Joseph, shepherds and wise men, and still others. This was the original Christmas pageant!

Like all mythological stories, there are parts of the Christmas tale that are fanciful or exaggerated, unbelievable or unverifiable. Those who told these stories wanted to convey meaning rather than history. They were looking backward from their experience of what Jesus had achieved in his life and ministry, his extraordinary teachings, his healing touch, his compassion and grace, his humility and faithfulness. The Christmas narrative was devised in hindsight, what should have been the world’s welcome of one who would transform so much of the world.

Yet the few stories of Jesus’ birth are found in only two of the four gospels. Notably, the first gospel about Jesus written, Mark, included none of these stories—either because they were already well known or, more likely, because they were unknown to Mark or unnecessary to Mark’s story. The last gospel written, that of John, also contains none of these stories. John is the most mystical of the four gospels, and the author’s interest is in explaining the cosmic purpose and nature of Jesus. He grandly describes Jesus as God’s Word made flesh, an embodiment of God’s hope for the world.

It is the gospel writers of Matthew and Luke who give us the nativity stories of how Jesus was born. You will probably recognize parallels in this story to our world today.

Jesus was born in troubled times. As part of the Roman Empire, his people and his country of Palestine were not allowed control of their own land. His parents, though poor, had to deal with the unequal tax plan of a demanding ruler—Caesar Augustus—requiring their migration from the ghetto of Nazareth to Bethlehem, where his pregnant mother and doting father ended up homeless.

But they, like all parents, believed there was something special about the baby born to them in a cave used as a stable. Maybe he might be the one to deliver his people from bondage to Rome, like their ancestor Moses delivered them from Egypt in the exodus. Maybe he might be the one to unite his people from their partisanship, like their ancestor King David united the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel. Maybe he just might be the one to save the whole world. You know how parents dream!

So Mary sings of their vision for their child who might possibly transform life as they knew it:

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

[God] has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts,

Bringing down the powerful from their thrones,

and lifting up the lowly,

filling the hungry with good things,

and sending the rich away empty.

Talk about ending income inequality! Talk about removing unjust, arrogant rulers! Talk about empowering the marginalized!

No wonder King Herod, a collaborator with their Roman oppressors, was terrified that he might be displaced, and tried to destroy the child. Joseph, Mary, and Jesus would have to flee for a while to Egypt, migrants fleeing the terror of their homeland.

No wonder that poor shepherds had a vision of an angel declaring, “I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day a Deliverer.” Then a vision of a multitude of angels singing, “Peace on earth, and good will among people!”

No wonder that astrologers from the East came from afar at the sight of a new star in the heavens! They believed the world’s fortunes were about to change.

No wonder that poor shepherds and privileged magi alike came to his crib to pay him homage, the latter with gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Ultimately, what the Christmas story affirms is the vital importance and necessity of spirituality in our world. Almost every founder of a spiritual path has such stories told about them, either of their birth or of their lives. Those we might name as saints from old or saints of our own time have wondrous stories told about them as well.

And I daresay that everyone here has stories of wonder to tell—how you came to be here, in this world and in this congregation. If only we all had been told when we were born of our divine spark, of our sacred worth, of how we participate in divinity, what a different world it would be!

That, I believe, is the Gospel of the Unitarian Universalist tradition. You value all spiritual paths and everyone’s spiritual life.

As Tiny Tim, the most vulnerable and marginalized character in Charles Dickens’ story, “A Christmas Carol,” might say in the spirit of Christmas, “Bless us, everyone!”

Related post: Put Yourself in the Nativity Story!

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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Literalism vs. Spirituality

I will be preaching during the 11 a.m. worship of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church in Atlanta this coming Sunday. And please “like” my recent Huffington Post column. Thanks!

The trend of people identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is sometimes a rejection of biblical literalism, religious fundamentalism and orthodoxy. To me that can be a good thing, and, in my reading of a recent translation from Middle English by Bernard Bangley of the book, The Cloud of Unknowing, very traditional.

Earlier the writer explained, “Similar in nature to heavenly bliss, divine contemplation already participates in eternity.” I once wrote that people we recognize as living saints are those who experience God’s commonwealth here and now. Spiritually they have found heaven in their desire to love and serve others. Heaven for me is where God’s and human will coincide. Saying the Lord’s Prayer (“on earth as it is in heaven”) is a way of aligning ourselves to that greater purpose. That’s why Jesus could say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” or “among us.”