At Most a Lighthouse Can Beam an Instant

A friend caught my surprise when the congregation

applauded my ordination at Christ Covenant MCC, October 2, 2005.

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.

 

This post originally appeared as “New Year” on January 1, 2014.

Please visit my website: https://chrisglaser.com  

My final post on my blog “Progressive Christian Reflections” will occur next Wednesday, 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 512,000 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! 

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

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

Personal gifts may be made safely by clicking here.  Thank you!

"Nothing Soft about the Quest for a Significant Life"

 

Why I Write This Blog

[Four years into writing this blog, I posted this on February 11, 2015.]

On this week’s fourth anniversary of the beginning of Progressive Christian Reflections, I am reminded that motivations are myriad for doing anything. “What’s my motivation?” actors ask to play a given scene, as if a single motivation suffices for any human action. We are more complex than that! (Read Dostoyevsky!) The reasons I’ve given in the past for writing these reflections still apply, but every week, actually every day, I find new reasons.

Today’s reason is being stunned and stumped by a cover essay in a recent New York Times Book Review entitled “Among the Disrupted” by Leon Wieseltier, a contributing editor for The Atlantic and recently resigned literary editor of The New Republic, which was “disrupted” by a new boss wanting to go digital.

I am stunned by insights I agree with and stumped by things in it I don’t quite understand. I have read it multiple times, each time underlining phrases and sentences that give me an “aha” moment or that I need to puzzle over. If I read it many more times, the whole essay will be underlined. (I can’t read without a pen in hand, btw!) It stirred controversy, judging by letters in response and an article in the Observer.

If I had to summarize it in 25 words or less, it’s about our contemporary confusion of technology with meaning. As the author suggests, “The character of our society cannot be determined by engineers.” [2021 interjection: one of our dearest friends is an engineer! -crg]

Ridiculing “transhumanism,” the notion that computers and the internet “will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity” overcoming distinctions “between human and machine,” Wieseltier instead questions if we are just having another wave of posthumanism:

The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university, where the humanities are disparaged as soft and impractical and insufficiently new.

The late Charles Townes, the Nobel laureate physicist behind the maser and laser who was also awarded the 2005 Templeton Prize for contributing to our understanding of spirituality, “saw science and religion as compatible, saying there was little difference between a scientific revelation, like his maser brainstorm, and a religious one,” according to The New York Times. Quoting from a 1966 essay:

“Understanding the order of the universe and understanding the purpose in the universe are not identical, but they are not very far apart.”

The parallel in my field are those who study, research, and teach religion “objectively” outside any personal faith. We need such “engineers,” as long as we take what they say with a grain of salt, which, as I mentioned quoting Colossians a few weeks ago, means with “spiritual understanding.” Early Christian catechumens were taught the meaning of baptism and Communion only after they had received those sacraments, because it was believed they could not comprehend what they had not first experienced. Spiritual understanding is an inside job.

Wieseltier asserts, “Aside from issues of life and death, there is no more urgent task for American intellectuals and writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology in individual and collective life. All revolutions exaggerate, and the digital revolution is no different.” 

We live in an internet world “in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. … Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements.” 

Wieseltier’s solution is to “regard the devices as simply new means for old ends. … The new order will not relieve us of the old burdens, and the old pleasures, of erudition and interpretation. … Never mind the platforms. Our solemn responsibility is for the substance.” 

His answer is a welcome of humanism and the humanities, concluding, “There is nothing soft about the quest for a significant life.” 

I would add a welcome of spirituality and religion, also because there is nothing soft about a quest for a significant life. 

Entertaining these concepts and welcoming this conversation are additional reasons I write this blog.

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

Tax-deductible donations may be made safely to the “Chris Glaser Archive” through the Tribute Gift section of The Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion. 

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From Loneliness to Solidarity

Greetings from the center of U.S. politics the day I write this, election day in Georgia January 5, 2021. I won’t know the results of our two senatorial elections determining the balance of the U.S. Senate until after you read this, perhaps not until l-o-n-g after you read this. I schedule each post on Tuesdays for publication on Wednesdays at 5 a.m. eastern time and, considering the volume of mail-in votes to be counted and the possible vote-twisting of the losers, delays are likely.

My senior status gave me the opportunity to vote weeks ago, Wade driving me to the only drop-box near us in downtown Atlanta where we had deposited our presidential votes in November. Wade voted before Christmas during early voting. We both received numerous texts, emails and voicemails reminding us to encourage everyone we know to vote, not to mention the television and radio commercials that bombarded us.

When I first moved to Atlanta, I was surprised that, unlike my home state of California, I did not get a non-partisan sample ballot automatically in the mail, explaining the candidates and the propositions. We still don’t receive sample ballots, non-partisan or otherwise, but now we receive mailings from various campaigns.

A Trump-voting relative asked in jest if we were exhausted voting so many times in the presidential election, and I kidded back about how much time it took to fill in all the extra ballots for Biden. “The real work,” I explained, “Was erasing all those filled-in ovals for Trump!”

I hope I don’t see this reported on social media or a certain network or Q-Anon as reality!

“This is Reality!” was a common refrain from the first Presbyterian pastor I worked alongside, the Rev. Dr. Ross Greek, in the late 70s and early 80s at what was then the West Hollywood Presbyterian Church. Reared a Quaker, his political instincts were left-of-center, and he had finely tuned a litany of societal wrongs which he punctuated with the response, “This is Reality!” waving his index finger for emphasis.

It was this left-leaning pastor who inspired our ministries with the Flower Children of the 60s on Sunset Strip, advised conscientious objectors, halfway-housed former prisoners and those with mental health issues, championed the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, welcomed LGBTQ people who provided worship for gay jail inmates and sack lunches for the homeless, and initiated a transition program for sex workers.

When California defeated a 1978 proposition that would have banned LGBT school teachers and any teacher who advocated gay rights, my personal “pride parade” was dampened by Ross’s dismay at the reinstitution of the death penalty and the election of a conservative governor.

Using the lyrics of Judy Collins, I’ve seen politics “from both sides now.” As a 13-year-old I volunteered at Goldwater headquarters. By the next election, I supported Senator Eugene McCarthy who opposed the Vietnam war, and progressive has been my persuasion ever since. Education helped, but frankly, I believe I simply grew into the kind of person Jesus called me to be.

Jesus may have called you to be a different kind of person, but that, I believe, is why we are part of the same Body of Christ, to consider one another’s values and needs and hopes and beliefs, to pray for one another and call one another to serve God’s commonwealth.

President Trump caused me to pray daily for the president and vice president and all of our leaders in this nation and the world—praying for compassion, wisdom, knowledge, truth, and justice. I pray the same daily for our electorates as well, as our leaders reflect our own limitations and possibilities.

I pray too for humanity’s deliverance from the pandemic, giving thanks to God for scientists and chaplains, the medical profession, frontline workers, healthcare workers and volunteers, grocery clerks and stockers and pharmaceutical workers, mail carriers and delivery persons.

Coping with the isolation of the pandemic, our congregation is enjoying a January series, “From Loneliness to Solitude,” based on the first movement of the spiritual life described in Henri Nouwen’s book, Reaching Out. This has prompted me to name this post, “From Loneliness to Solidarity.” That, I believe, is our ultimate goal in spirituality, to feel a solidarity with all that transcends partisanship.

  

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Copyright © 2021 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Contemplation in Science

Anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s book, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, which I referred to two weeks ago, reminded me of the role of contemplation in the scientific quest.

I’ve written before about Einstein’s famous “thought experiments” by which he developed explanations for natural phenomena, comparing them to the imagination Saint Ignatius felt was needed in the contemplative life.

In a chapter entitled “Plants as Brains,” Narby reports the work of Anthony Trewavas, a biologist at the University of Edinburgh, which he summarizes:

Plants have intentions, make decisions, and compute complex aspects of their environment. … When attacked by herbivores, some plants signal for help, releasing chemicals that attract their assailants’ predators. … When a plant is damaged, its cells send one another electrical signals just like our own pain messages [p 83-4].

Trewavas prefers to use the word “compute” to “think” when applied to plants [p87] and disputes the long held scientific position that plants are passive because they do not move, explaining “it requires an equating of movement with intelligence. Movement is an expression of intelligence [p85]” speculating that “plant communication is likely to be as complex as within a brain [p93].”

I will leave all of that for scientists to hash out. What interests me as a contemplative wannabe is Trewavas’s process developing such thoughts, “I find it’s only by long periods of doing nothing but think that suddenly facts start coming into your mind [p90].”

Half of Narby’s book consists of detailed footnotes that undergirds or sometimes questions his text. I find these details occasionally hard to understand, as I am clearly not a scientist, but I can appreciate their gist. I’m not a footnote kind of guy, but I find these footnotes awesome and well worth the read. It’s there that I found these thoughts from W. I. B. Beveridge, written in 1950 under the title The Art of Scientific Investigation:

The most important prerequisite is prolonged contemplation of the problem and the data until the mind is saturated with it. … The mind must work consciously on the problem for days in order to get the subconscious mind working on it [p 206].

Diversions and distractions are to be avoided, but idle time can be useful and fertile. This made me think of Vincent van Gogh’s idle time after being dismissed from his pastoral position by church hierarchy dismayed at his lack of social distance from his parishioners. It was then van Gogh thought he might take up drawing and painting, hoping his paintings would have the same consoling effect the Christian faith once offered.

Beveridge continues:

Most people find intuitions are more likely to come during a period of apparent idleness and temporary abandonment of the problem following periods of intensive work. Light occupations requiring no mental effort, such as walking in the country, bathing, shaving, traveling to and from work, are said by some to be when intuitions most often appear… [p207].

That’s the way I work, by spending a little “idle” time that allows thoughts or feelings, patterns or analyses to “bubble up.” In college I read process philosopher Henri Bergson, who suggested that along with rational thought we needed intuitive thinking. Intuition may simply be the subconscious mind offering an insight or solution from its hidden depths.

To me, that’s the gift of contemplation in the spiritual life as well.

 

For Thanksgiving in the U.S. tomorrow, please see last week’s post: Thanksgivings

My friend and blog reader J. Barrie Shepherd is offering a holiday chapbook:

A Poetic Pandemic Christmas Pudding “a plump and spicy concoction of words, phrases and images to evoke the many flavors and aromas of the yuletide feast. P.S. Add brandy to ignite.

Proceeds go to food pantries in his area of Maine. $10 per copy plus $2 postage. Send check made out to J. Barrie Shepherd to 15 Piper Road – K325, Scarborough ME 04074. Copies will be signed and can be inscribed by request. Or order though his email: barrieshep@aol.com.

Donations to Progressive Christian Reflections may be given safely by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

The Church and World Re-Imagined

A recent editorial about our new nuclear arms race, “The World Can Still Be Destroyed in a Flash,” on the 75^th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings reminded me of my post on August 13, 2014.

Last week’s anniversaries of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki reminded me of a deeply moving visit to a church that had faced a difficult transition.

Nearly 30 years ago I led workshops for a congregation in the state of Oregon. The next day, the pastor who was hosting me took me to “his” church—not the congregation he pastored, but the one he attended when he just wanted to be on the receiving end of ministry. As we drove through the hamlets and villages of the state, he told me how this church experienced a crisis when its sanctuary burned down to the ground and they had to decide what to do—whether to rebuild or buy another property.

My new friend continued his story as we drove into what appeared to be a motel and parked in its parking lot. The church decided, he said, to practice what it preached, and instead of building some grand new sanctuary with the insurance money, to purchase this motel instead. Services were conducted in what had been the motel’s large lobby, and its rooms were made available to the homeless.

As if that were not enough, the speaker that day was a survivor of Hiroshima, it being the 40^th anniversary of the bomb being dropped on his city. Some of you may know that Hiroshima was not so much a military target as a spiritual target, intended to strike a demoralizing blow to the Empire of Japan.

As the gentle, elderly man rose to speak, I was mindful that my father, en route to Japan during WW II, was said to have been saved from actual combat by the dropping of the bomb. Eventually my father saw the devastation of Nagasaki firsthand, debarking from his troop ship in its harbor. Soon, as part of the occupying forces, he was welcomed into one family’s life in another part of the country, to whom my family sent packages of goods long after his return to California. At the same time, a Japanese-American family down the street from us, who became friends, had been among those sent to a so-called “relocation center” during the war.

The dignified survivor stood behind the pulpit. He carefully pulled his notes from the pocket of his suit jacket, and unfolded the silk scarves in which they were wrapped. The effect was that of unveiling the Holy Grail.

He spoke of being a child in school when the blast occurred; of hearing planes overhead and taking cover; of being burned by the flash and bloodied by flying glass, yet having somehow survived radiation poisoning. He described losing family and friends, either immediately or eventually. He told us of the physical devastation to the city and to his own body.

Yet he did not speak of recrimination. He spoke of redemption. Having seen the horror of war, he had devoted his life to peace. And that was his gospel to us that morning. Peace. Peace on earth, good will toward all. In that former motel lobby, I both saw and heard the gospel of peace and redemption.

Click here to see the original post with additional relevant links.

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!

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

A Flower's Tears

The flowers I was contemplating.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post last week that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Last Wednesday and today I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and this one from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s pastoral sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem:

A flower’s tears

are the dewdrops

that drip, orb by orb,

as sun rises.

A flower’s tears

are the raindrops

that stream, string by string,

as storms rage.

A flower’s tears

are the petals

that drop, one by one,

as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

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!

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 God of Anticipation

“Waiting patiently in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life,” Simone Weil famously said, a quote I have used several times in my writings. But I wonder if she would be satisfied with this translation. In her “Spiritual Autobiography,” a letter to a Roman Catholic priest, she declares that the Greek word for “steadfastness” is “more beautiful” than the Latin word for patience, derived from the word for suffering. And one of my favorite biblical descriptions of God highlights his/her/their “steadfast love.”

Perhaps “waiting steadfast* in expectation is the foundation of the spiritual life” is a better rendering of her insight. “Steadfast in expectation” sounds like “anticipation” to me.

I stretch this quote because of an “aha” I’ve recently experienced. God is a God of anticipation for me right now—anticipation of the end of the pandemic, but also anticipation of the end of my life.

We see this God of anticipation in our biblical tradition.

“I will be what I will be,” Moses hears from the blazing wilderness shrub as Yahweh commissions him to deliver a message to Pharaoh to “let my people go.”

“Behold I am doing a new thing,” Yahweh says through Isaiah.

“Follow me,” Jesus invited.

“I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, you will be guided into all the truth,” Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper. “I go to prepare a place for you, that where I am, there you may be also.”

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth,” Jesus said in his final parting.

“I saw a new heaven and a new earth,” the mystic John testified of God’s future. “See, the home of God is among mortals.”

The kingdom or commonwealth of God is even now revealing itself to us. I witness a parallel in the Tao of Taoism and the “thin places” between heaven and earth in Celtic spirituality.

Recently I was quite taken with an ending of a prayer of an MCC pastor and leader that went something like this, “in the names of how you have been experienced in the past and the names of how you will be experienced in the future.”

Anticipation lifts us up. Etty Hillesum, who died at Auschwitz, wrote in her diary that she thought of God as her best self. My own experience is that simply the thought of God lifts me to my better self.

Undoubtedly a spin from my Process theology view—as I reflect on the universe, I see a process that anticipates life, that anticipates sentient beings who make the universe aware of its very existence, how it came to be, its possible meanings, as well as its hope for deliverance from its own destructive elements, whether viral as in a pandemic, or human when we disregard one another and our environment.

That process is how I am thinking of God in these difficult days.

*I chose not to use the seemingly more appropriate word “steadfastly” because it applies to the following phrase “in expectation” rather than the previous word “waiting.”

Recent posts that offer hope during our pandemic:

The Pandemic’s Monastic Opportunity

The World Is My Cloister

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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.”

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2002 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

Let's Give Up Despair for Lent!

Cross at a construction site in our neighborhood today.

My imperative title is not intended to apply to those enduring clinical despair or depression that require professional help and/or medication. I’m thinking of those of us suffering “ordinary” despair from the political situations in which we find ourselves: demagoguery, racism, nativism, extreme partisanship, polarization, disinformation, manipulation, corruption, and so on.

Rarely do I write a post the day before I put it on my blog, but here I am, doing just that. If you only read the title you know what I’ve been thinking about for weeks as we begin this holy season of Lent today, Ash Wednesday. Lent reminds us of the interval of our lifetimes from cosmic dust to dust, our own “brief but spectacular” moments to shine in this universe. (Thanks to PBS for that phrase.)

Context is important. I’ve been watching a series on Netflix called The Universe that reminds me how fabulous and fantastic, fearful and far-flung the universe is as well as how opportune it is for these short-lived bits of human flesh (me and you) to wonder in amazement and awe and gratitude to even be a tiny part of it!

In preparation for a contemplative retreat I’ll be co-leading (to which you are welcome) I’ve been rereading Kathleen Norris’s book The Cloister Walk, looking forward to conversations about its many spiritual subjects. Synchronicity would have it that today she writes about despair, though in a different way than I expected.

Norris quotes early Christian spirituality historian Benedicta Ward, “For all sins, there is forgiveness. What really lies outside the ascetic life is despair, the proud attitude which denies the possibility of forgiveness.” Norris elucidates:

As for designating despair as an aspect of the sin or “bad thought” of pride, I find it enormously helpful. Among other things, it defeats my perfectionism, my tendency to give up when I can’t do things “just right.” But if I accept the burden of my despair, in the monastic sense, then I also receive the tools to defeat it. I have a hope that no modern therapeutic approach can give me (p 129).

Quoting another scholar, Douglas Burton-Christie, Norris explains that the first Christian monks believed scripture “possessed the power to deliver them from evil. They believed that the Word of God has the power to effect what it says.”

So, in our political morass, we are not defenseless. But we do need to consider and confront our all-or-nothing perfectionism which we apply not only to ourselves, but to our political candidates and parties. I was astounded to learn recently that in the last U.S. presidential election, tens of thousands of Bernie Sanders’ supporters voted for Donald Trump when the Democratic party chose another nominee. (See New York Times columnist David Brooks’ February 6, 2020 column, “How Trump Wins Again.”)

Whomever you support, don’t despair! Please volunteer and/or donate to campaigns you believe in, not forgetting that “down ballot” choices are also vital. Or, if politics is not your thing, please volunteer and/or donate to programs, centers, and causes near and dear to your heart.

Despair is a luxury we cannot afford in these troubled times!

I was invited to be among the contributors to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

I will again be co-leading “Beside Still Waters: A Contemplative Retreat” with Debra Weir April 27-May 1, 2020 at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama. It is open to the public, and some limited scholarships are available. Three readable texts are recommended to prepare but are not required to have been read by opening day.  Here's the link: 

https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd

Spiritual Skinny-dipping

Rarely am I given an opportunity to skinny-dip these days, but I used to love it. The sensuality of slipping into the waves on the shore or into a pond or pool awakened my body not only to my physical senses, but to my full-bodied communion with earth.

The photo above, taken in Hawai’i in 1985 by my friend George Lynch, was modestly posed and, for this purpose, even more modestly edited!  But I use it to illustrate a story of mysterium tremendum, what happened just before I swam back to stand on the rocks surrounding this natural pool at the base of the towering waterfall in the background.

For me, stripping and stepping into an unknown body of water such as this was an act of both courage and vulnerability. I didn’t know what else might be in the water and to what I might be exposing my most personal parts; yet it was thrilling and enlivening to do so. The depth of the pool and whatever currents hid beneath the gently rippling surface were also unknown to this less-than-expert swimmer.

Three times I swam toward the base of the waterfall that spewed from rocks some fifty feet above, each time a little closer, and three times I returned to the shore without daring to swim beneath the roaring, hard-falling water. This was reasonable, given that the water might have knocked me out.

But approaching the danger, I was filled with an exquisite, fearful awe; my mysterium tremendum. It had parallels to leaving behind religious fundamentalism and biblical literalism, or taking on public speaking and activism as an introvert, or coming out of the closet, or making love for the first time. There was something sacred and awesome beyond each seeming terror.

For those of us who are stripping ourselves of unnecessary religious constraints, baptizing ourselves in progressive Christianity, we approach in awe and terror a different God. Does God really love us unconditionally? Does God really live “in our neighborhood,” in our house? Can God forgive without demanding such a price as the sacrifice of Jesus or the damnation of unbelievers? What currents or creatures lurk beneath the surface that may threaten our most personal selves?

“Wonder calls us to disorientation, unsettling pathos that it is, and to new orientation,” William Brown writes in the concluding paragraph of Sacred Sense: Discovering the Wonder of God’s Word and World, borrowing Walter Brueggemann’s categories.

C’mon in! The water’s fine!

This was my post on September 16, 2015, and I thought current blog readers might like to read it.

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Photo copyright © 1985 by George F. Lynch. Used by permission. Copyright © 2015 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Why Must Politics Intrude on Our Faith?

Photo by Bassam Khabieh for Reuters and The New York Times.

A few days after Christmas [2014] I picked up our morning paper and, before I put on my reading glasses, I saw on the front page a child on a sled in the snow, confirmed by the caption that began, “Heavy sledding…” I wondered where in the world the photograph was taken.

As I drew the paper closer and put on my reading glasses I was stunned by my mistake. This was no child laughing as he rode a sled through snow—no, this was a child crying out in pain, being carried on a stretcher over a caption that read not “heavy sledding” but “Heavy Shelling…” as in “Heavy Shelling Reported Near Damascus.” What I imagined was snow on the boy’s clothing must have been debris from the blast.

I felt much the same way when I read the Gospel lesson for the Sunday following Christmas. After spending Christmas Eve hearing and singing about the holy infant Jesus, so tender and mild, enjoying a silent and holy night in which all is calm, all is bright, I found Matthew’s text about the slaughter of the innocents disturbing and violent (2:13-23).

Here Jesus had just been born to Mary and Joseph, and was lying in a manger, sleeping in heavenly peace, visited in Matthew by three spiritual sages from another country who brought gold and frankincense and myrrh and, in the Christmas carol, Silent Night, visited by shepherds enjoying the “radiant beams from his holy face” that meant “the dawn of redeeming grace.” The only thing that had disturbed their silent night earlier had been angels in the heavens singing “alleluia to our King; Christ the Savior is born.”

Why, oh why, must this beatific image be shattered by political realities? Escaping from King Herod, who, if he can’t find this baby that threatens his political power, chooses to slaughter all the innocents—infants the age of Jesus, causing wailing and lamenting in his birthplace of Bethlehem. And why, upon their return from Egypt, must Mary, Joseph, and Jesus go into hiding once more, this time in Galilee, to escape the even more heinous son of Herod, Archelaus, who had ascended the throne upon his father’s death?

Why can’t we just have a nice little Christmas? Why can’t we all just get along? And why must politics intrude on our faith, disturb our praise and worship, interrupt our contemplative mantra of “peace on earth, goodwill to all”? Why must we read of slaughtered innocents and wailing mothers? Why must I pick up a newspaper and see such a disturbing scene as a terrified child in pain after the president of Syria has bombed his hometown?

If we learn nothing else from the subsequent life of Jesus, it is that spirituality is never an escape—it is always an engagement with reality. Jesus’ prayer “forgive us our debts” meant a lot to his poor, impoverished fellow Israelites. “Thy kingdom come” meant the end of the Roman Empire. If a Roman soldier compels you to carry his gear one mile, carry it two miles, because “Loving your enemies” is a revolutionary act.

“Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, but give to God that which is God’s.” “Don’t be like these Pharisees…,” rather, “consider the lilies of the field.” Whether waiting for the bridegroom or your master or the owner of the vineyard, be strategic in your preparations. “Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” “If a town (or church) does not welcome you, shake its dust from your feet.” “Sell your possessions and give to the poor, and come follow me.”

“Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice.” “Let the one without sin cast the first stone.” God’s “house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples, but you have made it a market place!” All of these quotes bring to mind real world applications of Jesus’ gospel.

And then there’s the cross: a political execution awaiting our “holy infant, so tender and mild.”

So I wrote this prayer for the children of the world:

In the name of Jesus who lifted children to his lap

and said “of such is the kingdom of heaven,”

we pray for the children of the world:

We pray for those who live in poverty,

            from our own neighborhood to those in hidden corners of the world.

We pray for those who live in danger

            of abuse, exploitation, violence, war, and disaster.

We pray for those who live in hunger and thirst,

            those who starve and those who are malnourished,

those enduring droughts and those whose water is polluted.

We pray for those who suffer illiteracy or disease, those who are refugees,

those who are illegal immigrants, those with disabilities,

those who are oppressed, those whose religion, culture, tribe, or nation distort their view of themselves and the world.

Your child, Jesus, suffered with all the children of the world

“because all are precious in his sight.”

In the name of Jesus who lifted children to his lap

and said “of such is the kingdom of heaven,”

we pray for the children of the world. Amen.

I posted this on January 15, 2014 and thought new blog followers might like to read it. Have a meaningful and hopeful new year!

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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.