Full of Grace and Truth

“Full of grace and truth” has stayed with me this Christmas 2020 season to dispel the gloom of unreformed Scrooges, unredeemed Grinches, and an unrelenting pandemic.

The Gospel writer John used “full of grace and truth” to describe God’s coming into this world through the beloved child and prophet Jesus. John gets credit as a theologian for his elevated prologue beginning “In the beginning was the Word…” but, in truth, we are all theologians, speculating in our own “Tiny Tim” ways about the nature of the universe, of humanity, and the nature of God.

In early Christianity, “theologia” was communion with God, so maybe it’s better to consider John a mystic, a contemplative whose vision revealed a thin place—Jesus—where God’s grace and truth could touch, heal, transform our confusions and delusions and self-elevating pride.

Blending grace and truth, to my very human perspective, is as challenging as mixing divinity and humanity. When I think of those among us full of grace, they seem able to be gracious because they hold their tongues when it comes to truth: “No, you don’t look fat.” “No, your profits are well-deserved.” “Yes, you are super.”

When I think of those among us full of truth, they come across as challenging, even judgmental, spoilers, disagreeable. Yes, they are prophets and whistleblowers and much needed in our self-deceptive, aggrandizing, fame- and wealth-driven world, but dinner with them? Heavens, please, no!

But one of the characteristics that makes divinity “divine” seems to me to be its ability to integrate both grace and truth. “Yes, you belong,” grace says. “Yes, you belong,” truth says. In the view of process theologian Daniel Day Williams, belonging is as vital (as in life-giving) as believing. Grace tells us we belong. Truth tells us we belong.

The belonging Jesus proclaimed confirms our place in creation and our citizenship in God’s common spiritual wealth, neither of which is to be taken lightly. That’s grace with a dose of truth.

Happy New Year!

Chris

 

Relevant New York Times columns by Peter Weimer:

The Forgotten Radicalism of Jesus Christ

The Uncommon Power of Grace

How Can I Possibly Believe that Faith is Better than Doubt?

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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.  

Einstein's "Holy Curiosity"

This 1947 photo by Philippe Halsman was a favorite of Einstein's.

An article in Sunday’s paper about the possible evolutionary advantages of curiosity introduced me to a “famed quote” from Albert Einstein that was nonetheless new to me. He told a college student “never lose a holy curiosity.”

Of course, my “holy curiosity” got the better of me and I clicked on the link to that quote and found an intriguing conversation Einstein had with an interviewer, William Miller of Life magazine, and his “nihilistic” college-age son about religious beliefs.

Granting that we are free to name any power we believe in “God,” Einstein explains, “I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. … The presence of a superior reasoning power…revealed in the incomprehensible universe forms my idea of God.”

“I cannot accept any concept of God based on the fear of life or the fear of death, or blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him I would be a liar. … I am an honest man.”

“Certainly there are things worth believing. I believe in the brotherhood of man and the uniqueness of the individual. But if you ask me to prove what I believe, I can’t. You know them to be true but you could spend a whole lifetime without being able to prove them. The mind can proceed only so far upon what it knows and can prove. There comes a point where the mind takes a leap—call it intuition or what you will—and comes out upon a higher plane of knowledge, but can never prove how it got there. All great discoveries have involved such a leap.”

When asked if he believes in a soul, Einstein responds, “Yes, if by this you mean the living spirit that makes us long to do worthy things for humanity.”

He suggests to the student that he (and by inference, we) find something “to occupy your curiosity for a lifetime.”

“Then do not stop to think about the reasons for what you are doing, about why you are questioning. The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives.”

As the interviewer and son are leaving, the son points to a tree “and asked whether one could truthfully say it was a tree.” “This could all be a dream,” Einstein replies. “You may not be seeing it all.”

“If I assume that I can see it, how do I know exactly that the tree exists and where it is?” the student asks.

“You have to assume something. Be glad that you have some little knowledge of something that you cannot penetrate. Don’t stop to marvel.”

Reading this exchange, I couldn’t help but think of my and your “little knowledge” of God and the spiritual life. Einstein’s counsel never to stop marveling rings in my ears and rings true in my heart.

“It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity. Try not to become a person of success but rather try to become a person of value. One is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than one puts in. But a person of value will give more than he/she/they receives.”

Related post: What Is Truth?

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

When God Gets Too Big

As a child my parents told me not to take more on my plate than I could eat. When I did, I dawdled at our table after everyone left, expected to finish my meal. I won’t make that mistake tomorrow as we celebrate Thanksgiving in America.

I’m aware of a similar dynamic as I have paused reading The Tao of Physics. Not only the science got a little too detailed for me, but the God in the details got too large, too impersonal and even frightening, more than I could “eat”! My bookmark with excerpts from Psalm 139 kept tempting me to abandon God’s incarnation in reality to welcome God’s intimate presence, “you who formed my inmost being, knit me together in my mother’s womb.” “Comfort food” theology, so to speak.

Maybe that’s why the ancient Hebrews chose to follow one God out of the pantheon of gods polytheism offered. Maybe that’s why the first Christians chose to follow Jesus out of the panoply of prophetic voices in Judaism. It was a matter of focus, a matter of admitting, in the words of Psalm 131:

My heart is not lifted up,

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

I am now contemplating the Psalms in the 130’s, their uplifting poetry a pleasant contrast to dispassionately documented subatomic and cosmic interactions, though still filled with “signs and wonders” (Ps 135:9). I’ve been yearning to walk naked with God in the cool of the day in the Garden of Eden, or to share “the sympathizing tear” with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.

This coming Sunday is traditionally the end of the Christian calendar, “Christ the King” Sunday, when Jesus is celebrated and elevated as sovereign of the universe. By the following Sunday, the First Sunday of Advent, we once again await his nativity, a baby born in a barn. Thus I’m following a pattern, perhaps, of being overwhelmed theologically and then discerning divinity in something tiny as an infant. God is indeed in the small things.

The Tao of Physics informed me, in the words of astronomer Fred Hoyle:

Present-day developments in cosmology are coming to suggest rather insistently that everyday conditions could not persist but for the distant parts of the Universe, that all our ideas of space and geometry would become entirely invalid if the distant parts of the Universe were taken away. Our everyday experience even down to the smallest details seems to be so closely integrated to the grand-scale features of the Universe that it is well-nigh impossible to contemplate the two being separated. [p 195-6]

And, addressing Yahweh, Psalm 138:3 reminds me:

On the day I called, you answered me,

you increased my strength of soul.

I once wrote a piece entitled “Advent Is a Time to Look for a Star.” It should not surprise us that the star of Bethlehem may portend an answer to a prayer like the psalmist’s.

Dear Readers,

Recently my visitors per post dropped from a couple thousand to around a hundred. Because most come from Facebook, I gather it has something to do with Facebook algorithms. Facebook would probably like me to pay to boost my posts, but I’ve never done that—it feels like “cheating,” and I couldn’t afford it anyway.

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Thanks for your patience and support!

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Ten Minute Christ

A singing bowl from Nepal given me by a 

Buddhist colleague when I completed an 

interim ministry at MCC San Francisco.

I am struggling to write about a book I first mentioned two weeks ago, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, a 1970 book by Abbot Zenkei Shibayama. There are so many stories and insights that I would like to list for you, as I did with the remarkable Cloud of Unknowing. But I feel called to do something more: to somehow translate Zen into progressive Christian experience.

This effort recalls my college class on Asian Religions, taught by Professor Miyuki, a Japanese Buddhist. I was quite proud of my midterm paper for the class, but was dismayed that my professor deigned to give it only a “C.” Having read more about Zen training since, I realize this was the slap in the face that a Zen master might give a disciple, to awaken something in me.

But at the time, my rational, dualistic and discriminating side got the better of me and I met with the professor to explain that everything I had written came from the texts for the class. In accented English, he told me in words that “should” have been my complaint, “You just don’t understand.” In other words, I just didn’t get it.

As the Zen Master Enkan said to a scholar monk of the Sutras (Buddhist scriptures), “Your knowledge is not of any use, is it? It is like a small lamp under the shining sun. It seems to have no light.” As Shibayama explains, “In the face of real experience concepts are like flakes of snow fallen on a burning fire.” He describes words as “just the conceptual shadows of the facts.” As a writer, this is another blow from a Zen master!

So, for my final paper, I simply told a story, drawing from the intuitive, creative side of my brain rather than the rational, academic side. I don’t remember the story, but I remember that my guide in the story, who was also myself, was a little girl.  Professor Miyuki loved it, and gave me an “A,” and I think an “A” in the course as well.

Zen tries to recover the satori, or Enlightenment, experience, believing that Buddhist scholars “tended to place too much importance on the metaphysical or philosophical interpretations of the sutras.” Zen Master Sekito and his disciples were blocked along a mountain path by vines and creepers. The monk ahead turned to Sekito asking for his sword to clear the way, and the Master handed it to him blade first. 

“Stop the nonsense! Let me have the hilt!” the monk demanded. Sekito’s reply was sharper than the edge of the knife. He said, “What is the use of the hilt?” The monk could not utter a word in reply. We are apt to stick to the hilt which is of secondary importance, and miss the Truth altogether (p 26-27). 

This story made me think of how often we Christians “stick to the hilt,” the Bible, our theology, and miss Truth altogether. Scottish theologian P.T. Forsythe held that, “Prayer is to religion what original research is to science.” Spiritual practices open us up to Truth, even in scriptures. As Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplative Prayer, “God’s presence cannot be verified as we would verify a laboratory experiment. Yet it can be spiritually realized as long as we do not insist on verifying it. As soon as we try to verify the spiritual presence as an object of exact knowledge, God eludes us.”

Shibayama suggests, “Zen does not remain simply the core of Buddhism, but it works to deepen and revive any religion or philosophy. For instance, there can be a Christian Zen…”

For four or five years I served as spiritual leader of Midtown Spiritual Community here in Atlanta, a spiritually eclectic group, and their mission statement expressed a desire to have a direct experience of the divine. During the contemplative retreat I co-led a few weeks ago, participants told us they preferred our experiential emphasis on spiritual exercises over academic presentations.

When I served as interim pastor of MCC San Francisco, I occasionally sat with their Buddhist group, following the spiritual exercise of zazen. Shibayama explains that, in Japanese, “za means to sit cross-legged, zen, to calmly concentrate one’s mind.”

He says we are to directly realize that “All beings are primarily Buddhas,” and by this he does not mean simply humans or even all creatures, but all entities, from atoms to galaxies. He tells us that there is another saying in Zen, “If one sits for ten minutes, he is a ten-minute Buddha.”

Immediately my heart flew to the “ah-hah” that if Christians could sit still in contemplation for ten minutes, and realize our own incarnations of Christ, we could be ten-minute Christs! It would give a whole new meaning to the Resurrection and to the triumphal return of Christ to this world—beliefs that are often doubted by progressive Christians.

But, like the Desert Mothers and Fathers, we wouldn’t be doing this for ourselves alone. Buddhism teaches the practice of six virtues: generosity, observing precepts and other good deeds, patience and forbearance, zeal, meditation, and true wisdom. Generosity and good deeds are sometimes singled out. And generosity and good deeds are what singled out the first followers of Jesus and attracted others to our faith.

I’m sure what I’ve written here has stepped on a few toes in Zen Buddhism as well as in progressive Christianity, as I am a faulty and limited blogger. I apologize. But just as Zen wanted to enliven Buddhism, so I think a Zen way of practicing our faith could enliven Christianity.

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The Fundamentalist Memory Hole

Aristarchus, in the third century B.C., clearly established a heliocentric picture of the solar system that was well understood and accepted by the Greeks. … Yet Ptolemy, five centuries later, turned this on its head and proposed a geocentric theory of almost Babylonian complexity. The Ptolemaic darkness, the scotoma, lasted 1,400 years, until a heliocentric theory was reestablished by Copernicus.

–Oliver Sacks, The River of Consciousness, p 204

Christian fundamentalism (which has parallels in other religions and ideologies) arose at the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th century in America and Great Britain in reaction to liberal theology and modernism. One might say it is parallel to Oliver Sacks’s above description of the regression that misguided science for centuries, imagining a solar system with Earth rather than the Sun at its center.

My post last week described a scotoma simply as a blind spot, but it can be more than that. It can be what Orwell called a “memory hole” which sucks acquired knowledge out of the room, an amnesia of, in the case of fundamentalism, a spiritual tradition that experienced a diversity that recognized scripture as an element of faith but not its sole author. Biblical literalism was at odds with earlier and subsequent ways of interpreting scripture.

This is my beef with fundamentalism—not that it isn’t a useful way to reclaim the biblical story, but that it claims to be the ONLY way to read scripture, dismissive of our own progressive Christian interpretations.

I am glad to have been raised as a Christian fundamentalist and biblical literalist: it gave me a knowledge of the Bible and a certainty and guidance I needed as a child and youth. But I ultimately found it confining, not only of me personally as a gay man and a political liberal, but of me spiritually, bereft of much church tradition and teachings and reflections of the church doctors and saints, theologians and mystics.

That upbringing also resisted science and culture and other faiths, though more so today than when I was growing up. More than ever today, fundamentalism sucks acquired knowledge out of the room, even that of fellow Christians like myself who remain faithful to Jesus without fear of hell or certainty of heaven, without subscribing to all Christian doctrines, and while trying to welcome insights from science and other cultures and religions.

I know the pain that fundamentalists feel when challenged, or when disappointed in those who do not similarly “believe,” as I felt that as well. Unlike some progressive Christians, I try not to express animus toward fundamentalists or fundamentalism, save when they try to theocratize our politics and political institutions. I am truly a liberal in the classic sense, trying to welcome as many viewpoints and perspectives and knowledge as possible.

And I agree that scriptures have to be taken seriously, even authoritatively, but not literally. A literal interpretation, I believe, actually does a disservice to scripture. It can miss the depths and richness and complexity of the biblical conversation about the meaning of it all.

And, as Jesus said of the Sabbath and the fundamentalism of his day, the Bible was made for humankind, not humankind for the Bible.

For Black History Month in the U.S., I invite you to read and/or circulate Black Lives Matter and Black Museums Matter. For more such posts, use the search engine on my blogsite or click on the following words to search for “black” or “Civil Rights,” and scroll down for multiple posts. 

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"Darwin's Epiphany on the Meaning of Flowers"

Our orchids are budding and blooming

this month thanks to Wade's care.

I confess I am approaching Oliver Sacks’s posthumously published book, The River of Consciousness, as a sacred text. The richness and depth of both his writing style and his content made his articles in the newspaper favorites of mine in the years preceding his death.

The first essay, “Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers,” which I anonymously alluded to last week, has not disappointed. Darwin observed that flowers and insects co-evolved, and he once  contrasted his (in Sacks’s words) “frontal assault…on creationism” in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection to his subsequent work with flowers.

In Darwin’s words, “no one else has perceived that my chief interest in my orchid book has been that it was a ‘flank movement’ on the enemy,” the opponents of evolution. As Darwin’s botanist friend Asa Gray suggested, if his book on orchids “had appeared before the Origin, the author would have been canonized rather than anathematized by the natural theologians.”

In other words, we human beings would have felt less threatened understanding how flowers and insects evolved characteristics over eons that were mutually beneficial. The evolution of mammals like us threatened our sense of superiority, our presumption that we were made ex nihilo in the image of God, not descended from other animals.

The second but more ancient Genesis creation myth that describes Yahweh shaping the first human being from earth is closer to Darwin’s own observation in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Dust we art, to dust we shalt return.

Sacks writes, 

The notion of such vast eons of time—and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety—was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided, for many of us, a sense of deep meaning and satisfaction that belief in a divine plan never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. 

Reminds me of Paul’s metaphor of how “we see through a glass darkly.”

With Oliver Sacks, 

I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world. 

Sacks credits this insight to “Darwin’s epiphany on the meaning of flowers” and Sacks’s own childhood experience of the natural world.

I once worked with a pastor who gave as much attention to the arrangement of flowers, cuttings, and plants on the chancel as he did to the words of sermons, the sacraments, prayers, and liturgies. When he died, I entitled his eulogy, “The Importance of Flowers.” To this day, I remember less of his theology than of his aesthetics—or truer, his aesthetic was his theology.

The impertinence of youth caused me once to chide my father for spending so much time on his garden “rather than on something that lasts.” “What lasts?” was his wise response, making no apology.

Possibly the better way to proclaim the Gospel is to “say it with flowers.”

Last Wednesday we passed the 300,000 mark in the number of visits since this blog began. Last week’s post did extraordinarily well, with 2700 visits so far. These figures do not include subscribers.

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Just Sex

"Judas Kiss" by Becki Jayne Harrelson.

Have you felt betrayed by a kiss?

Given the attention sexual harassment (and worse!) has been getting recently, this is a relevant post! “Just sex” may give rise to thoughts of sex without concomitant expectations, like love or commitment or responsibility. But it might also suggest sex that is “just”: fair, mutual, and non-exploitive.

Years ago I moderated a panel on justice activist concerns for a reunion of Yale Divinity School alumni and alumnae. I had invited Professor Margaret Farley, R.S.M., Ph.D., a Roman Catholic sister and Christian ethicist, to participate.  By coincidence, her new book, Just Love, had riled up the Vatican, making her book an instant best seller.

In my introduction, I asked, tongue-in-cheek, if she had sent the Vatican a thank you note for free publicity.  Either I had a “brain fart” or I was influenced by hostile reactions to the book, because I accidentally referred to the title as Just Sex. I fear she may have thought I was having fun at her expense, but I honestly made the mistake, which she quickly corrected, after the packed auditorium let out a boisterous laugh.

What prompts this recollection is that I will be moderating a conversation at the upcoming LGBTI Rolling the Stone Away gathering in St. Louis entitled, “How Sex Has Shaped Our Movement and Our Theology.” (Click on the link if you wish to see any of it live-streamed.)

I laughed when I realized the irony of my assignment. During one of the initial organizing conference calls for the meeting, I had pointed out that spirituality was not included among the topics different panels would be discussing. I’ve written that, in my pursuit of ordination, the church was more interested in my sexuality than my spirituality. My books and this blog have mostly been written to enhance readers’ spirituality.

But, given the caliber and friendships of the other panelists, I happily agreed to serve on the panel. And as my readers know, I do love and value sex! Multiple e-mail exchanges and two conference calls have surfaced questions we will be addressing in our conversation, which is to be videotaped for posterity.

One of those questions, as presently worded, will be, “Does sex need to have any spiritual dimension or can sex just be sex?”

Regular readers of this blog can probably guess my answer. When I was writing my book on same-gender marriage and its sacred nature, I attended a dinner party given by a Body Electric instructor and therapist. This is important, because Body Electric, founded by a former Catholic seminarian, has given body- and sex-positive courses for decades for gay and straight alike.  

I had advised him when he decided to lead a Christian Body Electric weekend, though I declined assisting, given a major vote pending in my denomination on LGBT ordination, and I was afraid what our opposition would make of my participation. But I did co-lead the next year or two later. It was easy, given how body-centric Judaism and Christianity are, and we used the following exercises: footwashing, healing touch (massage) while retelling the biblical narrative, re-baptism (in a hot tub!), laying on of hands, an informal Communion, and a reenactment of the beloved disciple on Jesus’ chest.

So I was stunned when my dear friend, who helped me through a rocky time of my life, said matter-of-factly, “There’s nothing sacred about marriage.” Granted, his words probably meant something entirely different to him, not wanting to elevate a heteronormative model, perhaps, or something else.

As readers of this blog know, I am more in line with Celtic Christianity in which everything with the potential for good has a sacred dimension. And I believe every one of our acts and experiences shapes our souls; everything that is done to us and everything we do has spiritual dimensions.

That’s why I believe sexual harassment as well as sexual intimacy have spiritual ramifications. I long ago wrote that sexual abuse (and all forms of abuse) is also spiritual abuse. And sexual pleasure uplifts the soul, but for me, only when fair, mutual, and non-exploitive.

A Presbyterian sexuality task force came up with the term “justice-love,” a helpful corrective to justice without mercy and love without justice. At the time I lamented that the words now required hyphenation, that they had become so far removed from one another that they needed to be joined in this marriage of words.

“Does sex need to have spiritual dimensions or can sex just be sex?”

Even in the most tawdry of expressions, I’ve never been able to separate sex from the “fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

I’ve endured and resisted unwanted advances and unintentionally I’ve made unwanted advances, but the sexual experiences that pleasure me are those that have one or more of the above ingredients.

Relevant Post: Judas Kiss 

And a post for Halloween: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

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Painting Copyright © by Becki Jayne Harrelson, used by permission. Text Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use of text with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Potlatch

As a youth I was fascinated by a custom practiced among Pacific Northwest Native Americans called the Potlatch. I capitalize the Chinook term here, though my OED does not, because it seems every bit as sacred as Christmas and Easter.

Having accumulated much, a person (often a chief) would give away or burn all possessions and start afresh. Though my dictionary implies this was a show of wealth and prestige rather than generosity and humility, I’d say Christmas or any show of charity and humility is practiced with similar mixed motives, so why quibble?

Wade and I have been engaged in a similar practice as we downsize and move to a smaller, more affordable home, though one we hope to improve. I got practice for this in October by emptying my public storage unit in Los Angeles of my parents’ library and a few pieces of their furniture.

I was ruthless in finding new homes for their books, though I did glean three boxes of books and memorabilia to send home. About 35 boxes of books went to a used book store in the suburb where they lived. The furniture went mostly to family, thankfully, though a few pieces found their way to Mexico thanks to my brother’s enterprising neighbor.

My parents were not hoarders in the problematic sense, but they did hoard memories and books. Those “sacramentals” whose stories we knew we often kept, but the ones whose stories have been lost to us easily wound up in the yard sale after my mom’s death. Yet the books also contained “sacramentals”: postcards, photos, news articles, letters, poems, etc. that I needed to remove before giving up the books.

Maya Angelou shared her steely resolve with me through a book of hers I was reading in my morning prayers during that process, one I had found in one of those little lending libraries in a neighbor’s front yard. She could be sentimental and nostalgic, but also realistic and pragmatic, and she helped me recognize the grief and nostalgia of my enterprise as well as its practicality and necessity.

This October pilgrimage prepared me for our December/January Potlatch. Wade, the true materialist of the household, nonetheless loves giving up things just as much as acquiring them, and has made multiple trips to our neighborhood Habitat for Humanity ReStore, delighting its volunteers with every batch of items we will no longer have room for or have fallen into disuse.

As it was my job with my original family to empty my parents’ bookshelves, so too I needed to prune my own overflowing library, an exercise that reveals my present priorities.  My books about theology, church organization, and interim ministry were the easiest to surrender, but the books about spirituality will stay with me for now, including my Henri Nouwen collection.

My collections of books by Gore Vidal and Paulo Coelho, LGBT authors and other contemporary writers I deeply appreciated reading, but can release to keep books that changed my life and make room for those I hope to read. And of course, my volumes of poetry and art will stay. A local seminary library has benefited from my literary Potlatch.

My many boxes of personal and professional files I am still sorting for my archive at the Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion at the Pacific School of Religion. Many boxes were sent years ago, many are still to be reviewed. I have given up my desire for putting together a scrapbook, wanting rather to “move on” rather than be kept in the past.

These archives serve as the “final resting place” of the papers of such folk and ministries as John McNeill, Janie Spahr, and the Lazarus Project (to name a few) and I would urge you to make a donation to preserve them, and include them in your will. Write to CLGS, Pacific School of Religion, 1798 Scenic Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94709, call toll-free 800-999-0528, email clgs@clgs.org, or visit http://www.clgs.org.

The first sermon I gave to an LGBT congregation, MCC Hartford in 1974, was entitled “Letting Go.” Coming Out is ultimately about letting go, whether coming out sexually or coming out spiritually. In a post entitled “Spiritual Picassos,” I described spirituality as a process like Picasso’s life’s work, letting go of unnecessary lines in his paintings and drawings to suggest the essence of his subject.

In October I found a big box of my childhood writings: stories and poetry. When I mentioned I was surprised that there were so many, my brother reminded me, “You were always writing stories.” Somewhat arbitrarily, I selected a few for my archive and tossed the rest, so impatient was I to let go of the dross of my life!

However, one story I rescued long ago was my first childhood attempt to write a story from the Bible, the story of Joseph and his brothers. His having to let go of his family, country, safety and security, believing in his dreams, spoke to my spiritual imagination.

“You intended this for evil,” Joseph later told his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “but God intended it for good.” As I think back on my life, disappointed and disregarded by the church alongside my LGBT sisters and brothers, there is no doubt our exclusion was evil, but God has used the injustice for good to those who follow.

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

Is God Too Grand for Us?

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Is God too grand for us? In a word, yes.

God has become so big to me that with the psalmist, I worry, who are we that God is mindful of us?

Progressive Christians (hopefully) have not settled for “a pocket God,” a term introduced to me by Evelyn Underhill biographer Dana Greene, a god we can pull out of our vest pocket like a dependable watch, an anthropomorphized deity that reflects our narcissism as well as our peculiar ideologies. Earth, for us, is not the center of God’s universe. We have theologized the Copernican revolution.

That’s why I was struck by one sentence in The Temple of God’s Wounds that longtime readers of this blog will remember I read day-by-day, chapter-by-chapter each day of Holy Week. Each time I find something freshly insightful as well as things that do not speak to me, but in all my years of reading it, I have only underlined one sentence: 

To break God’s heart is beyond human imagining. 

Can the grand God progressive Christians imagine be so personal as to be heartbroken? What happened to the personal God of Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, Mary and Jesus? What happened to the personal God of the psalmist who wants to “cling” to us, the God whose providence Jesus claims we should trust for our food and clothing like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field?

Do progressives only have left the impartial and somewhat impersonal God of judgment, the God of Micah who commands us “to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with our God,” or the judgment day Christ who separates the sheep from the goats, those who helped “the least of these” from those who  failed to do so?

Can we also find a “warm and fuzzy” encounter with God, such as the beloved disciple cuddling with Jesus or the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and drying them with her hair?

Following the lead of contemplatives and mystics and Celtic spirituality, I have repeatedly encouraged “intimacy with God,” believing we can enjoy such intimacy in our prayers and meditation and praise through which we may discover, discern, and disclose God’s proximity in ourselves, our neighbor, our opposition, the stranger.

The God of the Bible is One big enough to create the cosmos as well as the creatures, going so far as to–in the words of the psalmist—shape our inward parts, be with us in every place and condition, and in Christian terms, be welcomed into our hearts and homes and humanity.

Much theology is metaphor, and much of religion is storytelling. Progressive spirituality encourages looking behind, beneath, within and beyond the metaphor, even as our Christian faith challenges us to find the personal in its story.

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Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers. This year, I offer a signed gift copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, to each one who donates $100 or more (at once or in installments) over the course of 2015.

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

Watch Your Language!

A memorable episode of the old sitcom Frasier featured a scene from the dog Eddie’s perspective. The human conversation about him was unintelligible except when he heard his name or the few words in his vocabulary like “treat,” “walk,” “food,” and so on. A parallel scene from the father Martin’s perspective listening to his psychiatrist sons using psychological jargon revealed the same babble interspersed with words he understood.

This is the way I feel about 100 pages into Stephen Hawking’s (with Leonard Mladinow) The Grand Design. I experienced the same thing 95 pages into his book, A Brief History of Time, and I was reading the illustrated version! Suddenly everything gets more complicated as he connects QED with QCD and GUT (Grand Unified Theory), quarks and Feynman diagrams, baryons and mesons and asymptomatic freedom.

There are too many subatomic particles in the air! I can’t keep up!

I got a laugh when I mentioned in a workshop at a Unitarian Universalist Church that in Christian worship I hear traditional jargon, and say to myself, “Why did they say that? What does it mean?” My subtext is: How does it enhance the experience? Is it intelligible to an outsider?

Some like to mock Scientology’s terminology, but Christianity’s lingo is just as weird to the novice, yet because those in our culture have heard it so often, we take it in stride. I’d like to avoid specifics, because each example will offend someone for whom the phrase has taken on positive connotations. But at the risk of losing you, here goes one example…

What does it mean, for instance, to say, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost”? When I was baptized at the tender age of six and asked, just before my full body immersion, if I believed in this trio, I was stumped. I thought baptism meant I would belong to God and Jesus forever. I wasn’t certain who the Father and Son were, and I’m not sure I knew of the Holy Ghost.

I know some of you will now think, well, he was too young to be baptized, to give consent. Blessedly my pastor knew better, and told the congregation so before he dunked me. He knew I wanted Jesus in my heart and God in my life. More sophisticated theology would come later. And besides, I gave more consent than infants who are baptized.

But why do we need to do everything in the name of the Trinity? Why is it said so often, as if this incantation sacralizes everything? First, it excludes other possible manifestations or faces of God. Second, it’s an exclusively male grouping, unless you know that the Spirit is feminine in one testament and neuter in another. And why not include Mary, the mother of Jesus? Who gave God sole custody?

(I myself used to reduce the Trinity to their functionality: Creator, Reconciler, Sustainer, but that too seems unsatisfying, incomplete and much too impersonal.)

I know, I’m just being difficult, like a parishioner who puts an anonymous petty criticism in the church suggestion box.

Progressive religious intellectuals have a similar problem with holy gobbledygook. I was given an article by a scholar for publication in a magazine I edited. I could make out what was being said (I can read academese). But I thought it could have been said in a paragraph rather than the 20 pages I received, and I doubted my readers would appreciate the author’s complicated and convoluted reasoning with multi-syllabic words that sounded recently devised. So I published an intelligible excerpt!

Okay, so now I’ve offended everyone. Undoubtedly someone will say, take the beam out of your own eye before addressing the splinters in others. Mea culpa. But we need some kind of modern day Pentecost to proclaim a gospel that others can grasp. Come, Holy Spirit!

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here or mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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

What Calvin Taught Me about God

Calvin as a puppy.

This is an abridged reprise of a column I wrote for the September, 1995 issue of the More Light Update, the publication of Presbyterians for Lesbian & Gay Concerns (now More Light Presbyterians) edited by James D. Anderson.

Total attentiveness.

Unconditional love.

Limited judgment.

Irresistible grace.

Providential play.

T.U.L.I.P.

This is what Calvin has taught me about God. And if it varies from the TULIP acronym for John Calvin’s teachings, it’s because this list summarizes what I’ve learned from quite another Calvin—our dog.

Calvin is a golden retriever/Labrador/shepherd mix we adopted from Atlanta’s Humane Society on the last day of 1994. We got a house partly because we wanted a dog. We heard a voice that said, “Build the house, and he will come.” And so it was.

“Only Chris would find mythological import in getting a dog,” I can hear you saying. But life is filled with opportunities for spiritual metaphor.

“Nothing more zealous than a convert,” someone else might be thinking—that is, anyone who knows me well enough to know that I was never a “dog person” before now. I had grown up being bitten by my brother’s dog on arbitrary occasions. My mother theorized that our dog’s behavior was the result of some neighbor children abusing Freckles when we were away.

Though enduring a relationship with an abusive canine never landed me on Oprah, it nonetheless inhibited my establishing close relations with any dog. I eventually learned to handle my fear and be friendly to friendly dogs and keep barking dogs at bay, but the idea of ever developing an intimate relationship with a dog was far from my mind.

The closest I ever came was a friendship with Smokey, a retriever mix that lived in a house I also lived in when I was in college. Smokey helped me overcome my caninephobia and dogged doggy stereotypes.

I took him to worship one Sunday for the children’s sermon to show them how he reminded me to play by dropping a ball in my lap while I studied. The kids took turns throwing the ball for him to retrieve, and I made the point that children play the vital role of reminding their parents to play. Smokey did not bite any of the children nor relieve himself on a leg of the Communion table, so I realized that at least some dogs could assist in worship and serve as limited role models.

But, if you’ll forgive the seemingly trivial comparison, it required an incarnation to completely overcome my dogma. Between the two of us, my [then] partner was the dog person and the motivating factor of our finding a dog. But when we went to the Humane Society “just to look,” it was I who pushed to adopt our puppy. Somehow I sensed we were a fit, the three of us.

Soon I was transformed. My partner could not believe my conversion. When I went to Los Angeles to visit my mother, she, too, was astounded at how differently I responded to her own dog, a beagle named Schultze.

But Calvin’s unconditional love had introduced me to a dog’s irresistible grace.

While I am aware of the creaturely paternalism inherent in “owning” a dog, Calvin is happily codependent. He follows us around the house and plops beside one or the other of us wherever we are. And Calvin, like Smokey, reminds us both to play.

We haven’t needed our alarm to wake us in the morning since our dog came to live with us. Calvin knows I’m the first to get up, so he starts licking me awake at the appropriate time. Later, when I call my partner to breakfast, Calvin does the same for him. It’s obviously more pleasurable than being awakened by an irritating buzzer.

Though we read a book about raising a dog, we made mistakes along the way. Thankfully, puppies have short memories, so we had many opportunities to do things better. We enjoyed unlimited atonement—though I doubt that would have been true if we had taken advantage of that and either poorly cared for him or abused him.

Rather than “obedience” school, we took him to dog training classes, which was more about training us than him. Trying to be model parents, we both attended every class with Calvin. I’ve said in a variety of contexts that I believe “control” is the central spiritual issue with which we all struggle, and I learned this was also true of dogs.

As “lead dogs,” though, we had to learn not to “pull against resistance,” because a dog will resist being forced to do something. Rather, Calvin was to learn “attentiveness” to us. I thought to myself that, equally important, we needed to learn attentiveness to him. How else would we know when he needed to go out? Or be fed and watered? Or play and rest? Or go to the vet’s?

We also learned how to get Calvin “down,” how to, in a sense, give him permission to chill when he gets anxious or hyperactive. How many of us could use someone doing this for us?

And finally, whenever he wants it, Calvin turns on his back with paws in the air to welcome our loving scratches and rubs.

What I’ve learned from Calvin prompts me to re-view my theology:

+God wakes us every morning by “licking” our bodies with sunlight and shower, bedding and breakfast, and for some, the touch of someone who loves us.

+Attentiveness is required to follow God’s lead. The spiritual life is all about attentiveness to the sacramental nature of existence, mindfulness of the present holiness. And, as a worthy “lead dog,” God is both attentive to our needs and intent on shepherding rather than “pulling against resistance” as well.

+Spiritually, we need to work through our control issues to sometimes “let go and let God.” We also need to re-evaluate the concept that God is in absolute control, since that appears to make God responsible for evil as well as making God coercive rather than persuasive. (Calvin seems to realize our limitations as lead dogs, too.)

+Practically, God is more concerned with the present than with past mistakes.

+Providentially, playing and resting and pleasuring in God gives us peace and joy in the present and a foretaste of the commonwealth of God to come.

But, in my lessons from Calvin, there is something yet more unique to the experience of those of us who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. If I could change in my attitudes toward dogs, then those who fear us may similarly be transformed in our close relationships with them—relations already existing or that we form.

And yet more significantly for us: if I could experience the revelation that a dog may truly be a best friend, then those of us who have been repeatedly and arbitrarily “bitten” by God may yet have the revelation that God is truly our best friend, that the god that bit us was not truly representative of God, but was a manifestation of spiritual abuse at the hands of a homophobic church.

Postscript: As a result of an exchange of letters with Schultze, Calvin went on to write his own philosophical “take” on things in a 1998 book, Unleashed: The Wit and Wisdom of Calvin the Dog (excerpts here and more photos here). In 1999 he adopted his own dog, Hobbes, abandoned in a local park. For more on Calvin, read The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life. He went to dog heaven in 2007.

Copyright © 1995 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved.

I am mentioned in a blog I highly recommend: http://www.jmarshalljenkins.com/2014/11/13/van-goghs-sermons/

Calvin grown up, always happy!

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here. Or please mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. It is an authorized Emerging Ministry of Metropolitan Community Churches, a denomination welcoming seekers as well as believers.

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