Held by God

Following last week’s reprise of A Healing Touch, this September 28, 2016 post reminds us that we are ultimately held by God. Given the verdict yesterday, you may want to read, "I Can't Breathe!"

Okay, so now you’re gonna think I’ve gone off the deep end. 

I’ve had a lot going on lately, and when I wake at night, I start thinking of all those things I need to do, should have done, am anxious about. I don’t mind when I use such nocturnal musings constructively, as when a post or talk or retreat comes to me and I develop it, lying still. But when my thoughts serve no purpose, I am bothered that I’m losing sleep over them. The worry gene runs in my family, so I’m not alone. 

Lately my usual way of simply blocking thoughts, or using a mantra, verse, short prayer, or Psalm 23 has not been working, so I’ve discovered a new strategy. 

I imagine I’m being held by God: the soft bedding, the warmth of Wade, the firmness of the mattress, the caress of the ceiling fan, the enveloping darkness become God holding me. And lest you think I am centering God on me, I believe this is true for everyone. 

Process theology talks of the cosmos as God’s “body.” God is not separate from the world—what is material is God’s incarnation, God’s embodiment. And body theologians try to recover the body as a locus of divinity. So I do have theological legs to stand on. 

And Christianity’s premise is the Incarnation, that God became one of us, and offers God’s body and blood that we may become the Body of Christ, an agent of redemption in the world. So I also have a Christian leg to stand on. 

Jesus said the kingdom or commonwealth of God was coming into the world and already in our midst. The trajectory of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is that of God coming into the world, not abandoning it. And Paul remarked that the whole creation was groaning in birthpangs to bring something new into the world, and that in God “we live and move and have our being.” So I have a biblical leg to stand on. 

I also believe that I’m a part of God as well, so I think of cuddling with Wade as having divine inspiration. Teresa of Avila said that on earth, God’s body, Christ’s body is our own. And Augustine’s spiritual goal was resting in God. So I have church tradition behind me. 

My “ah-hah” is how good it feels to be held by God and to hold as God. It awakens a new kind of eroticism, if you will, that feeling of bliss one experiences in the unity of lovemaking or prayermaking. I’ve written elsewhere that “eros” is our “urge to merge,” what inspires the lover as well as the mystic. 

I’ve also spoken and written about the Beloved Disciple, who lay his head on Jesus’ chest during the Last Supper, “listening for the heartbeat of God,” as Celtic Christianity would have it. I’ve poked fun at recent English translations of that passage that seem to keep distancing the beloved disciple until I fear the next translation will have the beloved disciple in another room entirely! 

The NRSV translates simply that the beloved disciple is “reclining next” to Jesus. But it also translates John 1:18  as Jesus being “close to the Father’s heart” rather than the actual meaning, that Jesus is “close to the Father’s bosom.” 

What I believe is that we fear such intimacy with God, one of the earliest themes of my writing on spirituality, a cover article for Presbyterian Survey in the 1980s. 

Jesus experienced or was experienced as being a child of God, the essence of Yahweh, and the mystical gospel writer John declared that Jesus came so that we might all be children of God. So I have a mystic’s reason for my experience. 

I encourage you—no, I urge you—imagine yourself being held and touched and cuddled by God. Imagine God dwelling in you, your breath, your body, your touch. 

It feels good because it is good. 

 

FYI-I considered retiring from my blog on its tenth anniversary in February but didn’t want to “abandon” readers during the pandemic! My brother suggested I run “the best of” posts, and I decided to run past posts that speak to our current experience. This will also give me the opportunity to write a new post occasionally. Thanks for your continued interest! 

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

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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.  

A Healing Touch

With Mom on her 84th birthday in 1999.

As I get older, I have fewer opportunities to be touched. I knew that about old age even before I got there, and that’s why I’m sitting so close to my mother in the above photograph, my arm around her. I had noticed the need particularly among the older women of our neighborhood church. The passing of the peace was an opportunity for older folk to receive and give full-on hugs. Now I am grateful for such hugs in greeting or in parting worship.

Perhaps it’s because we regard older people as fragile. Perhaps because of due respect for the aging process, a reverential aspect. Perhaps because we older people are less attractive or no longer “breeding material.”

I have written of an experience of lovemaking that restored my sense of lovability in my book, Come Home! The “healer” in that case visited Atlanta last year and I was able to give him a copy of the book, marking the passage and expressing my gratitude.

But those opportunities are rarer as one ages, even when in a relationship.

In an email exchange with a friend and reader of this blog concerned about losing the gay parts of himself as he enters an assisted living program, I waxed philosophic about my own situation:

As a youth I had fantasies. As an adult I had experiences. As a senior I have memories. I need to hold on to my memories even though they don’t have the anticipatory ecstasy of fantasies or the existential bliss of experiences.

So, simple touch becomes all the more important.

When I was a kid, I used to love sitting in the car as a gas station attendant cleaned our windshield, enjoying the gentle rocking of the car—oh, the olden days of full service stations! I also enjoyed getting my hair cut, and my initiation rite into manhood was when, after many years, the barber finally honed a straight razor to trim my sideburns. These were gentle and safe ways to have a man touch me, and I found them healing.

My father enjoyed telling the story of rocking me as a baby while I steadfastly refused to go to sleep. I no doubt simply enjoyed my father or mother’s touch, being held close to their hearts. (As late as my teens, my joke with Mom was that I could still sit on her lap!) No doubt my body remembers and that’s why I enjoy cuddling so much.

All of this comes to mind because of a transforming incident during my recent contemplative retreat. Though our Roman Catholic hosts were welcoming beyond mere hospitality, their church does not allow offering Communion to Protestants. I do not like this, as you might guess, and I had decided not to go forward to merely receive a blessing. But in moving out of the way to let others in my pew pass by, a smiling sister gently urged me to go forward for a blessing. So I did, crossing my arms to indicate my heresy of being a Protestant.

I expected the tall and very aged priest to simply make the sign of the cross in the air and say a blessing. Instead, he gently touched my forehead while saying a blessing. The power of his touch jolted me. I immediately felt good inside, and the bliss remained with me for an hour. I could not help but think his power was deeply spiritual.

The next time I went forward for Communion, another aged priest made the sign of the cross on my forehead with oil, and I did not experience the same jolt of spiritual power. And I realized I couldn’t even remember if the earlier priest had made the sign of the cross on my forehead; I just felt power from the palm of his hand on my head.

With all the conversation these days about inappropriate touching, by priests and other professionals, I sorrow that this may lead to less healing touch. I remember how my mother’s first graders used to hang on her, begging to be touched and hugged, even after they went on to higher grades.

Being old, I have during this same time had to go to a dentist, an orthodontist, and an oral surgeon to repair or remove two “virgin” teeth which broke. My dentist praised me as one of his best patients, I think because I have a high tolerance for discomfort and pain, no doubt learned in part as a gay activist in the church! (Smile)

But their healing touch also made it possible for me to sit still for some difficult procedures. After two root canals, I explained that the orthodontist’s abdomen pressed against my head during the procedure was somehow comforting. I asked if he did that intentionally to calm his patients, but he explained it was just ergonomically sound, otherwise his reach over me would tire his shoulders as he worked on my teeth with the help of the lens of a microscope over my head.

I thought of Temple Grandin, the autistic expert in animal science who discovered she could calm herself by a device of her own invention that held her and later applied that to an invention to calm cattle on the way to slaughter. There is something calming about being held and touched, whether facing life or death.

As a progressive Christian, one of my reservations about Jesus being known as a physical and mental healer is that such magical qualities do not fit my desire for him to be known rather as a spiritual mentor and healer.

But maybe his touch was like that of the priest’s, or that of the orthodontist’s, or that of a hugger, or that of a lover—especially when visited upon so many people who were “untouchables”: lepers, epileptics, the sick, the dying and dead, those with physical or developmental disabilities. Women of his time were considered untouchable during menstruation. Children were assumed unclean, one of the reasons his disciples tried to send them away.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me” could as easily mean “Suffer those who are untouchable to come unto me.”

Related Post: Held by God

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Crosses

In celebration of this month’s fifth anniversary of my blog, the last entry of January and every Wednesday of February I’m providing links to the most visited posts of each year. For 2014, that would be My Loneliness Led Me to God and virtually tied for second, Does a Corporation Have a Soul? and “I Had No Idea Your Blog Was Gay.”

During a visit to New York City, a gay seminarian and I enjoyed becoming acquainted as we walked through Central Park together. It was mid-November and dead brown leaves crunched beneath our feet at the same time others stubbornly clung to branches overhead, caressed by a cool, but not cold, breeze. A dip in the road led to a small, wooden bridge over a small brook. From this place, looking round, no visible sign revealed that we were in the heart of a city. It was on this bridge, leaning on opposite handrails, facing one another, that my new friend told me a touching story.

When he was a child, he began, his first trip from home occurred when his parents sent him to a church camp somewhere in the midst of a forest. He was frightened and lonely. He missed his family terribly. A manifestation of his feelings over the separation came one night as he dreamt that his father, walking to church, had fallen beneath the wheels of an oncoming car.

The other kids all seemed to have been there before and knew one another, and he did not feel included. He felt particularly vulnerable, and he believed they sensed his vulnerability. We know that kids can be cruel to one another. We are tempted by traditional theology to conclude that this suggests some innate human corruption, but I believe cruelty is something we learn, not something with which we are born. At one point they taunted him, throwing pine cones at him from the roof of one of the cabins. He ran away, crying, and hid himself in a small corner of his cabin.

A storm broke outside, and the darkness of heavy clouds and oncoming night accentuated the boy’s inner turmoil. An older boy, a camp counselor, came looking for him. When he found the younger boy, he seemed to understand and feel his pain, loneliness, and sense of not belonging. And he comforted him. He held him in his arms for a while, and his strength lessened the younger boy’s fear. He found him a chocolate bar, then reunited him with his campmates. The rain had since stopped, and they were gathered around a campfire. The older boy and the younger boy sat together.

The next day was the final day of camp. His parents came to take him home. As he prepared to depart, the older boy came to say good-bye. He handed the younger boy a cross that he had fashioned for him, held together with string where the carved sticks crossed, which could be hung by another string tied at the top. There was tenderness in the older boy’s gesture.

Now, hearing my new friend tell the story, I intuited something more between them than would have met his parents’ eyes. A spark between the younger and older boy, a spark of tenderness, of compassion, of love. Love that at once was eros and agape and philia.

My friend sighed. “That cross is my most valuable possession, and even if I were to lose it, it would still be here within me,” he said, pointing to his chest, passionate tears coming to his eyes. We held one another on the bridge, and I felt the presence of the other boy in our long hug. He probably did not know how profoundly he had touched the young boy who would become this seminarian. For in the older boy’s touch, the younger boy had not only experienced the affirming touch of another boy: he had also felt Jesus’ touch. His occasion for telling this story to me had come in the context of explaining the importance of Jesus in his faith, something he was unwilling to sacrifice in the radical enclave of New York’s Union Seminary.

When he later showed me the cross, I felt as if I were handling an icon or relic of a saint that had crossed my friend’s path.

Upon my return home, I opened the box of a similar relic of a saint that had crossed a friend’s path. It too is a small cross, but of silver metal with elaborate etching on it. It too had been given out of love and friendship at a church camp. But it had been passed from a younger man to an older one.

The older man was a Methodist minister I met when I was a student at Yale Divinity School eighteen years before. He was married, and had gone through years of Freudian psychotherapy at the hands of psychiatrists who believed his homosexuality was a “fear of castration.” Essentially I told him that was bunk. Eventually, I knew his own experience would lead him to the same conclusion. He intuited that too, and our few conversations arose from his heartfelt wish to accept that he was gay.

To show his appreciation one day, he handed me a gift. I opened the small box and found the beautiful silver cross. He explained its significance. As one of the leaders of a church camp, one of the teenaged men had taken a liking to him—a liking that apparently included eros and agape and philia, though that was never explicitly expressed. My friend said that it made him feel so good to be loved by another man! At the same time, it frightened him. On the final day of camp, the young man had given him this cross to express his deep feelings for the minister.

I protested, “Surely you want to keep this cross, given its meaning in your life!” I don’t remember exactly how he responded, but I believe he gave it to me both because he knew that I would honor its value and because passing it on to me signified the important bonding we had enjoyed as we shared what it meant to be gay, to be Christian, to be men.

When crosses were first devised out of the cruelty that human hearts have learned, who would’ve imagined that God could have transformed such a cruel machine into an icon of love between an older and a younger boy, and between a younger and an older man? Or that such a cause for suffering could create communion among all kinds of Christians?

Of course the cross would have no power for other than cruelty were it not for Jesus. His touch could heal—even cruelty. And as we touch one another as the Body of Christ, I mean, really touch, with eros and agape and philia—we too will heal our hearts and one another’s hearts of their cruelty. And love—eros and agape and philia—will allow, enable, and offer us communion.

A longer version of this was first published in February 1991 as one of my monthly columns for the More Light Update, edited by James D. Anderson. The Union Seminary student became a well-known documentary filmmaker.

A reading for this week of Lent:

“Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise.”

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Copyright © 1991 and 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

A God of Sensations

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Donations to this ministry are welcome! 

Most communication around God and the life of the spirit is visual or auditory. Cathedrals were built and artwork painted and sculpted to visually inspire awe and reverence. Biblical writers, preachers, theologians, teachers, and contemplatives have used words as bread crumbs leading to spiritual paths and insights. 

But there is another way I believe God and spirit may be experienced: kinesthetically. It is primal and prerational, our first encounter with something beyond ourselves. It begins in our mother’s womb, immersed in embryonic fluids, nourished and protected by our mother’s flesh. We feel the pulsing of her heart. On a men’s retreat, I heard the Franciscan Richard Rohr speculate that men’s love of drumming may come from that early memory of our mother’s heartbeat.  

I hope it’s not just me that takes pleasure in idiosyncratic kinesthetic experiences. It will date me, but as a child I took pleasure sitting in the car, enjoying its gentle rocking motion as a service station attendant wiped the windows clean. Before I could do it for myself, it made me feel good to have someone tie my shoes. And I loved going to the barber, with his gentle touching and trimming. 

A source of humor for my partners and friends, as a child and as an adult, I enjoy the vibration of someone vacuuming. I used to follow whoever performed this task from room to room for the kinesthetic pleasure of it. It’s not the same when I do it myself, so it must have something to do with the feeling of being taken care of.  

And being held, in a mother’s lap or a loved one’s arms, is best of all.  

What prompts this reverie?  For weeks now, painters have been pressure-washing and painting our complex, and today is our turn. We have a friendly relationship, though my Spanish is as wanting as their English. Despite my reliance on verbal communication as a writer and speaker, reader and listener, just their presence is enough for me to feel cared for. 

And that’s true also of my experience of God. Though I read and pray, the good feelings come when I sit in silence, in contemplation, enjoying an intuitional feeling of being surrounded by God’s presence. I wonder now if that’s what Henri Bergson, the earliest process theologian I read in college, meant when he wrote that intuition is as necessary as reason. Intuition may also be primal and pre-rational. No doubt science can explain it, possibly through genes or neural patterns or evolutionary biology. But there’s also no doubt we can enjoy it. 

Many search for a sensational and supernatural God, an overwhelming, intervening, and transforming God of drama and spectacle. Jesus noted that desire when he resisted those looking for signs and wonders, instead welcoming and healing souls most often with his gentle touch.  

I enjoy a God of gentle sensations: a breeze on the hairs of my neck, the warmth of a loved one, the caress of the water as I swim, the sensuality of my sweat as I run. I believe that God’s gentle touch is built into our natural world.  

+++ 

Chris will be co-leading a retreat for gay and bisexual Christian men at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center, Thursday dinner Oct. 4 through lunch on Sunday Oct. 7, 2012, in Pennsylvania, open to the public. We will consider the “good things” of our religious traditions that help us thrive.

Check out my latest Huffington Post article: "That's What I Want in a Church!"