Thanksgivings

As we huddle in our homes, alone or with immediate family and/or pets, fearful of the usual gatherings that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s bring because of the coronavirus, it may be more of a challenge to feel gratitude this year.

Whenever I feel cause to complain, as happened in the calamity described in last week’s post, I immediately think of all those people who have far more to complain about throughout the world. It makes me feel that I have no right even to mention my “suffering,” as if I am whining like a child in a grocery store denied a treat.

The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen declared that we should not compare sufferings, saying, “Your suffering is your own.” I am not so sure, but in the moment of loss and deprivation and pain, the focus is on your suffering or my suffering or the suffering we witness daily in the news. Our individual experience of suffering opens us to understanding the suffering of others.

Many of us believe that to be a spiritual person is to practice compassion, literally “suffering with” one another. It is a practice, not always a feeling, though the practice may lead to feelings as well as actions to assuage the suffering.

Jesus was the first spiritual founder to teach me this. But it’s also true of the Talmud and the Buddha and the Quran and the Vedas, to mention a few spiritual paths that sensitively deal with suffering.

Our sufferings could be, as I’ve written in other contexts, our “wounds with a view,” our opportunities to be thankful for the people and things, events and opportunities we are missing for now as well as our window onto others’ suffering.

Some of us are missing people who will never return, but we can yet be grateful that they have touched our lives, our bodies, our dreams, our hopes. I am the sum of all who have touched me, and I celebrate them whenever I think of them with love and joy and gratitude and whenever I touch others with love and joy and gratitude.

Despite our loss of five wondrous trees at the end of October, two from our neighbors’ yards and three from our own, the month began rather well observing Wade’s and my birthdays, our anniversary, and the anniversary of my lifelong-sought-for ordination. Our pastor Jenelle and her husband Chris (also a pastor) secretly hung the banner above on our front porch as a surprise from our Ormewood Church friends. (Their daughter tried to help, but she kept giggling, I am told.)

Our friends and neighbors Sonja and Jody and Cathie and CJ gathered with us for a socially-distanced outdoor dinner celebration under colorful parasols in Sonja and Jody’s yard. People driving by thought it was a fabulously festive new restaurant opening. (See photo below.) They also rescued us and Wade’s chili when we lost power on Halloween.

We received cards and calls and messages from family and friends. For all our “cloistered” experience, we never felt absolutely alone. And in a day and age of cellphones and flatscreens and tablets and laptops, we had Zoom church and conversations and plenty of programs to watch. Think of historic pandemics with none of these outlets (or maybe I should call them “inlets”)!

I had my blog to write and readers to correspond with while Wade worked online from home. I also led an online retreat on Henri Nouwen for Columbia Seminary’s Spirituality Program, synchronistically based on his book Reaching Out.

And God was always to be found as I daily prayed for humanity’s deliverance from this virus as well as for the election of compassionate leaders.

My hope is that we all make the most of our Thanksgivings!

That's Wade to the right.

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

Mary Trump's "Frankenstein"

Watching Mary Trump’s interview by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last Thursday about her book on the shaping and misshaping of her uncle, the President (Too Much—Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man), I remembered a post I wrote on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein October 26, 2011. Our society has minted a number of “Frankensteins” who are underdeveloped in compassion, the trait that unites us with God. As I wrote then:

The Christian teacher Abelard of the twelfth century explained the atonement this way: witnessing Jesus suffering on the cross awakens in us that which makes us one with God: our compassion. Compassion is our link to divinity. To witness suffering—whether firsthand or through the media—may draw out our divine urge to hold and help the vulnerable.

My concern in re-presenting this reflection is not, per se, political, but rather, to remind us how “Frankensteins” are made, not born. I take the Celtic Christian view of original innocence—that yes, we may be marred by sin, but we are not sinful at birth, as the concept of Original Sin would have it.

From my 2011 post:

A few years ago I watched for the first time the Kenneth Branagh film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  It prompted me to read Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, discovering that the film reflects many of its insights. The creature who has been given his creator’s name in the public mind is not the monosyllabic grunter of gay director James Whale’s 1931 film classic (whose own story is the content of another worthy film, Gods and Monsters), but an eloquent philosopher on being a creature abandoned by his creator and rejected by fellow creatures.

Asking for a mate “as hideous as himself,” the creature explains to his creator, Victor Frankenstein, “If any being felt emotions of benevolence towards me, I should return them an hundred and an hundred fold; for that one creature’s sake, I would make peace with the whole kind!” His creator writes, “His words had a strange effect upon me. I compassionated him, and sometimes felt a wish to console him; but when I looked upon him, when I saw the filthy mass that moved and talked, my heart sickened, and my feelings were altered to those of horror and hatred.”

Branagh’s movie version of the creature’s words captures the sinister consequence of being denied: “I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.” And only then concludes, “For the sympathy of one human being, I would make peace with all.”

I concluded my post with this pastoral illustration:

I attended an ordination in San Francisco which featured two pastors giving “the charge” to one who would be serving as a chaplain and director of a Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) program at a local hospital. The Presbyterian pastor gave an eloquent but long commendation whose content I do not remember. The MCC pastor gave a memorable two-point counsel. “The people you’ll be serving,” she said simply, “Basically want to know ‘Am I alone?’ and ‘Am I loved?’”

“For the sympathy of one human being, I would make peace with all.”

We are all creatures. We each have love in us the likes of which can scarcely be imagined and rage the likes of which can hardly be believed. If we cannot satisfy the one, we might indulge the other.

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 © 2011 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

Risking the Brokenness of the Body, Part 2

The chapel at Mount Calvary Retreat House overlooking Santa Barbara

When I was finishing my first book, Uncommon Calling, I took my typewriter and my manuscript to Mount Calvary for two weeks. Here I worked on the final chapter, recounting the painful defeat of efforts to obtain ordination of gays and lesbians in my denomination and describing the meaning of that defeat for me.

As I wrote, I found deeply buried grief and pain and anger resurrected within me. Also, the knowledge that I had yet to find a publisher for my book haunted me. I wondered if anyone even wanted to hear my story. I took my many feelings into my prayer life during my working retreat, praying for understanding, for resolution, and for healing from these overpowering and painful feelings.

I began to look more intently at the crucifixes on the walls in Mount Calvary, especially the one carved of wood in the chapel. Monasticism has deeply influenced my spiritual life, but I had formerly maintained a Reformed dislike for the contemplation of Christ’s suffering on the cross. Those who contemplate it are likely to duplicate it, it had seemed to me. And I offered hearty Protestant applause to those who avoided crosses and lived “Easter lives,” or, better yet, to those who took action that removed the crosses of others so that they might live out the resurrection.

Reviewing and editing my manuscript, my book seemed to me to be filled with crosses for myself and others. I had enjoyed my life, my ministry, and even the church. Why did the cross overshadow my joy? Perhaps I had avoided contemplating crucifixes because I had witnessed too many crucifixions of lesbian and gay Christians in the church.

During one morning’s Eucharist, as Christ’s body was broken and Christ’s blood was spilled again, I looked toward the figure of Jesus on the cross above the sacrament. What I witnessed at that moment may prove offensive to some: instead of simply seeing a limp and lifeless body, I saw One who was relaxed. The goodness of the crucifixion dawned on me. Jesus surrendered his will to God’s. He trusted God.

I thought of my own spiritual need to relax, trust God, to be loving rather than controlling. If God can make sense out of Jesus’ suffering and render him the victor, then gay Christians may take hope that our suffering is not in vain. We can fulfill our prophetic ministry, no matter what others may do to us. Our crucifixion is their last resort, not God’s.

Every closet and every church needs a crucifix. It’s time for lesbian and gay Christians to contemplate Christ’s suffering, for it reminds us that God suffers with us. It’s time for Protestants to get those bodies back on our pretty, empty crosses, for it will link us to the suffering of those who are being crucified today. It’s time for all Christians to take seriously that the church as the Body of Christ must continually risk the brokenness of that body to do what is right.

I believe that Jesus on the cross calls lesbian and gay Christians to risk the brokenness of our bodies, in order to fulfill a prophetic ministry with the church. I believe that Jesus on the cross calls the church to risk the brokenness of its body to fulfill its pastoral ministry with gays and lesbians. Our Christian faith assures us that, no matter how difficult it will be, fulfilling these calls leads to resurrection.

This and last week’s posts are excerpts from the chapter “Risking the Brokenness of the Body” from my 1990 book Come Home! Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians, published by Harper & Row, with added chapters in its 1998 Second Edition, published by Chi Rho Press. These excerpts fit well the themes of the present season of Lent. Today, of course, I would add transgender, intersex, and bisexual people.

West Hollywood Presbyterian Church on retreat at Mount Calvary Retreat House
(See if you can find me!)

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Risking the Brokenness of the Body, Part 1

Mt. Calvary courtyard

I occasionally took personal retreats at an Episcopalian retreat house overlooking Santa Barbara. Mount Calvary was run by the Order of the Holy Cross. As one might suspect with names like that, there were many depictions of Jesus on the cross in sculptures, carvings, and paintings.

One stormy afternoon, sharing pizza and wine in front of a cozy fireplace, one of the brothers and I discussed the ramifications of the relatively recent decision of the Episcopal Church in the United States to ordain women. I was surprised that, despite his liberal views, he opposed women’s ordination. He did so not because he opposed it per se, but because it would interfere with any hope of reunion between the Anglican and Roman Catholic communions. “I’d have no problem with it if Rome ordained women,” he explained.

I considered the many similar objections to the ordination of lesbians and gays in my own Presbyterian Church. The impending reunion of the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and the Presbyterian Church, U.S., which had split over the abolition of slavery one hundred years earlier, might have been impeded if the more liberal northern congregations had approved ordination of homosexuals.

So the constant cry that ordaining homosexuals would split the church was sounded even more to muster our defeat. (I believe the church would do more to keep its dwindling fold if it banned ordination of boring preachers and belligerent clergy!)

Also fresh in my mind were the recent concerns expressed over the unity of the National Council of Churches in the United States, if it accepted the membership of the predominantly gay Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.

As I considered all these perceived threats to the church as the Body of Christ, I reflected on the many images of Jesus on the cross in the retreat center. Repeatedly reminded of the brokenness of our Lord, a response to the brother who opposed women’s ordination came to me. I rhetorically asked him, “When Jesus was faced with the choice of doing what was right or keeping his own body from being broken, which did he choose?”

Paul wrote to the church at Philippi that Jesus “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in our likeness. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:6-8).

“He learned obedience through what he suffered,” affirms the epistle to the Hebrews, which some biblical scholars assert may be the only book in the Bible written by a woman (Heb. 5:8). But, she explains, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard for his godly fear” (Heb. 5:7).

This is clearly a different vision of God than the Almighty presented in the Old Testament. This is a God who, out of sacrificial love, leaves the closet of heaven to descend to earth and become like us, “tempted in every way as we are,” willingly living and working among us and dying at our hands—all to bring us God’s Word of love (Heb. 4:15). This is a deity who risks the brokenness of the body to call us home to God.

Many Christians feel uncomfortable with this image of God. They want to believe that God is all-powerful as well as all-loving. Our imperfect world belies the possibility that God is both. If God is both, God may be blamed for either causing or allowing human suffering.

In his book The Divine Relativity, process theologian Charles Hartshorne suggests that, facing a contradiction between an all-loving yet all-powerful God, it would be better to sacrifice our understanding of God as all-powerful than to sacrifice our understanding of God as all-loving. We conceive of God as the best possible entity, and when we think of the best possible person we know, we are more likely to choose the most loving over the most powerful. Even the Superman hero in comic books is not attractive because he is super powerful, but because he uses his super powers for good, in other words, lovingly.

For many years I found this reasoning worked for me. But then it occurred to me that perhaps our understanding of power was distorted, for we think of power in terms of possession and control. In my own loving experiences, I found that my attempts at possession and control had nothing to do with love, nor did they bear any resemblance to the spiritual power I witnessed in others whom I considered more mature in faith.

In his temptations in the wilderness, Jesus’ response to the Tempter’s offering him possession and control of all the kingdoms of every age on earth was, “Begone, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God and God only you shall serve’” (Matt. 4:10). Possession and control do not characterize God’s power. Love is God’s power. Possession and control is worldly power, love is spiritual power.

Process theology understands God as one whose love is persuasive rather than controlling. Biblically there is much basis for that perception. God leads us as a shepherd, challenges us in a prophet, models human life for us in Jesus Christ, influences us as a teacher, empowers us like a counselor, and inspires us as the Spirit.

This and next week’s posts are excerpts from the chapter “Risking the Brokenness of the Body” from my 1990 book Come Home! Reclaiming Spirituality and Community as Gay Men and Lesbians, published by Harper & Row, with added chapters in its 1998 Second Edition, published by Chi Rho Press. These excerpts fit well the themes of the present season of Lent. Today, of course, I would add transgender, intersex, and bisexual people. 

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 1990, 1998 and 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Thank God You Were Born!

"In your beginning..."

Or thank the cosmos!  Or evolution! Or your parents! Or “to whom it may concern”!

“Thank God you were born” is the message I often write on birthday cards or Facebook birthday messages. I intend it as my own thanksgiving for the birth of the person I’m greeting, but I realize it could be understood as a spiritual directive to the recipient as well.

As you might guess, this post is partly prompted by the American observance of Thanksgiving tomorrow, but it is mostly inspired by the words of an astronaut I heard last night watching PBS’s Beyond A Year in Space. Knowing the desert quality of much of the rest of the universe, seeing the “oasis” of planet Earth from afar, the astronaut said of life on earth, “When you’re born, you’re in heaven.”

Many of you know how much that sentiment resonates with me. In The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life, I wrote that if this is all there is, then, thanks be to God! But also, understanding that heaven is to be found in this life reminds me to see it, seek it, make it, create it, share it, and appreciate it.

I know that my suffering, though real and mine to claim, is minimal compared to the many who experience this life as hell through no fault of their own. But built in me is the ability for personal suffering to be turned into empathy and compassion for others. And I see this gift in those who have been through hell and back.

It was my own loneliness as a child and teenager that made me welcoming of others, to whatever extent I am. It was the denial of vocational goals and aspirations that made me wish better for future generations. It was the inequality and injustice I experienced personally that made equality and justice a wish for all, and prompted me to do what I could to help achieve it.

But this earth gave me a chance to breathe and to grow and feel pleasure and see beauty and hear harmony and dissonance, to know love, and to taste and see that life can be good. If and whenever these abilities are limited, there’s still a glimpse and a memory and a hope to sustain me, even inspire me.

It humbles me to know that dinosaurs reigned on this earth for 160 million years and were extinct for 66 million years before the evolution of mammals led to my distant ancestors. Humans almost seem like an afterthought or a blip in evolutionary time.

And it humbles me when I recognize our individual frailty and limits as I did last Wednesday sitting in a surgery waiting room as spouses and families and friends awaited word of their loved ones from their surgeons. Our time is brief, but oh-so-valuable, or all the more valuable.

A friend in mourning simply and respectfully described another’s death, “We all have a fragile grip on life, and she lost hers.” So, all the more reason to celebrate our birth days.

When I visited Nepal I learned that the local priest came to one’s house to offer a blessing the morning of one’s birthday. I can’t remember if the local priest was Hindu or Buddhist, but what a wonderful thing to emulate!

Birth days are a blessing, in and of themselves.

Thank God you were born!

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

Monastic Vows

Thank you for the record number of visits and responses to last week’s post, “Married at Last!” and the “likes” and comments on Facebook about my birthday and our wedding!

I am passionate in my admiration for the contemplative life. I could not have done what I have done as a gay activist both in the church and the culture were it not for my morning prayers and personal retreats, times to bask in God’s unconditional, overwhelming, and transformational love.

And I have always had a rather romanticized desire to be a part of a monastic community. I believe I could handle most of the vows required of monastics.

I’ve got poverty down, having been self-employed doing free-lance church work, including writing and speaking and editing, for most of my career, and now writing a free weekly blog with a large readership whose donations so far this year total just $850.

And the vow of stability required by some monastic communities would also be within my reach, being an introvert and a creature of habit as well as being loyal and steadfast.

Those who know me or have read my books may find this difficult to believe, but I could even handle celibacy or chastity.

But to take a vow of obedience would be for me most challenging of all.

In birth order theory, being the youngest of my family, I would be the revolutionary, the rebel, even the prodigal. While I’m not quite all that—after all, I’m the only child of my parents whose vocation has been upholding their Christian faith—yet I am a progressive Christian, which means I resist being told what I have to believe and how to behave!

What helps me is understanding that the word “obedience” itself comes from a root word meaning “to listen,” and I’m pretty competent at that, not only as a pastor and friend, but also as one whose prayers are more about listening than speaking.

One could say that the Christian vow of “obedience” is much like the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” Jesus commanded us to “watch,” or “watch and pray,” as he asked of his disciples in Gethsemane, seeking always God’s will and God’s way and God’s commonwealth.

Years ago, I found myself praying to God, “Bring me closer to you,” but then I quickly added, “But not through anything bad.” Much of spiritual intimacy is predicated on suffering, when spiritual intimacy is provided to alleviate suffering. Jesus healed the masses with his hands and his words, words that reminded them of God’s benevolence, giving us life and love, mercy and grace.

My mother was the first to encourage my reading of monastics, just as she did much of her life. But it was not until the 84^th and final year of her life that she told me, “You know, I’ve always believed God loves us all, but I only recently have come to believe that God loves me personally.”

Surprised, I said, “Mom, haven’t you been reading all my books?!”

For her, this was a kind of a spiritual “arrival.”

It may just take me 84 years of life to fully believe it myself.

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

"Judas Kiss"

A week ago today during prayers I suddenly felt grateful for embodiment. First, for my own body. Even when it feels pain, I realize it’s the body’s alarm system that something has gone wrong. And when it feels pleasure, ecstasy lifts me onto a different plane of reality, and I know what’s good and true and beautiful.

I did not stop at thanking God for my own body, but began a stream of “thank you’s” for the embodiment of others. For my parents: my mother’s body growing me, my father’s body making love with my mom, together conceiving me. Then the bodies of my partner, family, friends, pets, as well as lovers of times past. And nature and community and the cosmos. It was becoming an American-Psalmist-Walt-Whitman-style song of praise. I thanked God for their touch, their warmth, their holding me, their smiling at me, their crying with me.

But as quickly as gratitude flooded my thoughts, a stream of confessions followed: times when I mishandled or demanded or exploited or ignored or judged or passed by bodies,  including the earth’s body, the Body of Christ, and my own body.  The elevation of Paradise is never far from the Fall of human mismanagement.

Then I remembered Becki Jayne Harrelson’s painting, Judas Kiss, and its discomfiting, tender, and sensuous depiction of Judas handing over a nearly naked and thus vulnerable Jesus to suffering with a kiss. We most often hurt those we love, and they us. Many of us have been “handed over to suffering” by a kiss in various expressions, from the kiss of baptismal waters, to the kiss of  the laying on of hands, to the kiss of promising relationships. And our own bodies have handed us over to suffering through artificial pleasures that seemed good and true and beautiful at the time.

The eroticism of Becki Jayne’s painting cannot be missed, the eros that impels us both to another’s body and to another’s spirit, and to God’s body and Spirit. (For more about the artist and painting, see below.)

The day after these revelations, I found myself praying that I wish I could see God, who evolved a wondrous world and whose creative work also evolved you and me. I opened my eyes as another realization came—I was seeing God. Pictures of family and friends and ancestors on the credenza, the tree outside the window holding a nest of baby birds, the fuchsia-colored orchid flowering in the other room after a long dormancy, our dog Hobbes snoring on the sofa, the furniture and rugs and the people who crafted them, my own arms and legs. And again my gratitude was followed by confession: for betraying, denying, abandoning, and doubting this face of God.

As if that were not enough, the next day on the front page of the newspaper appeared an image of the cosmos as it looked 370,000 years after the Big Bang, looking like an elongated speckled Easter egg in blue, red, orange, and yellow. Inside the paper I read the article associated with the picture, reporting that the age of the universe has been upgraded to 13.8 billion years old. As I turned back to the front page, the unfolded paper revealed again the colorful cosmos, but this time juxtaposed by a full page ad on the back page featuring a model—and all I could think of in that moment was, “from this (the universe) to this (the human being).” God’s countenance is constantly lifted upon us, no matter how much we look away, turn away, are blinded by tears, have doubts, or simply fail to see.

“Judas Kiss” image Copyright © 1993 by Becki Jayne Harrelson. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

“Judas Kiss” words Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes. Past posts are available in the archive in the right rail on the blogsite.

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Becki Jayne Harrelson painted “Judas Kiss” during Lent and Easter 1993 “in response to the verbal gay bashing that Congress was doing” over then President Clinton’s attempt to rescind the ban against gays and lesbians serving in the military. It is part of a series of Christian iconography intended to serve as “a narrative about sexuality in harmony with spirituality.” For further explanation, click here.

See another in her series in the post, “Faggot” Jesus.

A post you may have missed: Where is God?

Interrupted Lives

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

My friend, fellow writer, AIDS volunteer and chaplain Pat Hoffman gave me a copy of Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life during the early years of the AIDS crisis in southern California. She thought Etty’s diaries witnessing the Nazi takeover of her native Holland and the deportation of Jews to German death camps might speak to the experience of the prematurely interrupted lives we were beholding.

As I read, Etty also spoke to my sexuality, my writing, and my progressive faith. Unbound by religious trappings, subsequently claimed by both Jews and Christians, this young Jewish woman wrote, “When I pray, I hold a silly, naïve or deadly serious dialogue with what is deepest inside me, which for convenience sake I call God.”

As the editor of her letters, G. K. Garlaandt explains in the introduction, “Her mysticism led her not into solitary contemplation but squarely back into the world of action. Her vision had nothing to do with escape or self-deception, and everything to do with a hard-won, steady and whole perception of reality.”

Etty claimed a sense of equilibrium in the face of virulent madness as she wrote, “I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; there is room for everything in a single life. For belief in God and for a miserable end.”

And, as she anticipated being transported to Germany and its concentration camps, she boldly prayed:

Dear God, these are anxious times. Tonight for the first time I lay in the dark with burning eyes as scene after scene of human suffering passed before me. I shall promise You one thing God, just one very small thing: I shall never burden my today with cares about my tomorrow, although that takes some practice. Each day is sufficient unto itself. I shall try to help you, God, to stop my strength ebbing away, though I cannot vouch for it in advance. But one thing is becoming increasingly clear to me: that you cannot help us, that we must help You to help ourselves. And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves. And perhaps in others as well.

Speaking about Etty Hillesum this past Sunday as an example of “Our Lives as Sacred Texts,” I was reminded that today, November 30, is the anniversary of her death at Auschwitz in 1943 at the age of 29. And this is the eve of World AIDS Day, December 1.

Spiritual writer Henri Nouwen advised against comparing the intensity of one’s suffering with that of others, explaining, “Your suffering is your own.” Yet Etty’s interrupted life shares a continuum with other interrupted lives, just as her words speak to my own vocation of writing:

Such longing to jot down a few words! Such a strong sense of: here on these pages I am spinning my thread. And a thread does run through my life, through my reality, like a continuous line. … It’s not so much the imperfect words on these faint blue lines, as the feeling, time and again, of returning to a place from which one can continue to spin one and the same thread, where one can gradually create a continuum, a continuum which is really one’s life.