Fundamentals Without Fundamentalism

Dad in Japan.

Mom's senior photo.

Had they lived, my mother and father would have celebrated their 100^th and 99^th birthdays this past weekend. Gratefully I share some of the things they taught me by example that have shaped my spirituality.

They considered themselves fundamentalists, but this in the day when fundamentalism did not have quite the edge it does today. They were kinder, gentler fundamentalists, unafraid to laugh at themselves and to express doubt and uncertainty, able to cope with a daughter’s divorce and my homosexuality and even my progressive Christianity! My Mom openly questioned whether spirituality could adequately be covered by the “Four Spiritual Laws” popular with fundamentalist campus groups at the time.

Readers will know I am not a fundamentalist Christian by any stretch of the imagination, but my parents did provide me with the fundamentals of my spirituality, some of which follow:

Read and study, reflect and pray. First and foremost, the scriptures. Mom taught first grade at a Christian school and both Mom and Dad taught Sunday school at various times in our Baptist church, and the Bible was their central source of inspiration, as it is mine. Dad also read biblical commentaries and Mom also read mystics, as do I. When I travelled Europe after college, Mom asked me to take with me her marked and worn copy of Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ.  They ended every day by kneeling together for prayer beside their bed. And of course we never failed to say grace before meals, even in restaurants (while my brother, out of embarrassment, was under the table “looking for his napkin”).

Do good. One Saturday morning, Mom invited a homeless man into our dining room and prepared him bacon, eggs, toast and coffee much like her mother had fed the unemployed men traveling the rails near their house during the Depression. Dad fetched an intoxicated church member for coffee to sober up before taking him home to his wife. They both invited a sad server at an Arizona café to join us at the table and recount her troubles. Dad led a weekly jail ministry for many years, preaching and toting a heavy portable organ to accompany the inmates’ hymn singing. These are just examples of how kind they were.

Seek justice. Mom’s Christian school (which I had attended) wanted to publish an article and photo about my receiving an award, but rejected the picture because I had a beard. My mom, who was never keen on the beard, informed them that I had won the award having that beard, and if they didn’t want the photo she would not give them the article! During the Vietnam War, Dad suggested we send Congress to fight it, and that would be the end of it. He once gave chase to a young man who had snatched a woman’s purse and returned it to her.

And, before I came out to them as gay, Dad said to my mother of homosexuals, “If they feel for each other what I feel for you, I can understand why they want their relationships.” When my ministry within the LGBT community first appeared in The Los Angeles Times in 1978, Mom supported me and, though popular with students and their parents, was “let go” after three decades of teaching first grade at sacrificial wages. Shortly before Dad’s death, after another devastating defeat for LGBT people at a Presbyterian General Assembly, he encouraged me, “I hope the next time you go tilting at windmills, they fall down!”

Attend church. We were in church virtually all and certainly every Sunday: Sunday school and worship in the morning, Baptist Youth Fellowship and worship in the evening. Wednesday evening was Prayer Meeting and testimony time. Dad was a deacon and Mom was a deaconess, and there were plenty of church meetings and work days.

Support the church. Years after Dad’s death, I volunteered to Mom that I would clean out their garage. I discovered their old financial records and learned that Dad basically gave the church his first week’s salary every month before taxes. Their income was minimal, though we had what we needed, so this was sacrificial giving. After Dad died, Mom continued tithing (10 %) of her small Social Security income. Additionally, they gave generously to the church’s building fund (even though they did not like the design of the new sanctuary!) and multiple charities, including the parochial school where Mom taught.

Love well. My parents and our family had our ups and downs, but when first married, they covenanted never to go to bed angry, following the biblical admonition not to let the sun go down on your anger. Mom and Dad were high school sweethearts and absolutely loyal. Cleaning their garage I found well over 100 multipage letters exchanged during three circumstantial periods of separation, including World War II, each expressing their passionate love for one another.

Dad worked hard, delivering bread to grocery stores and maintaining our yards and house, and Mom, in addition to teaching, cleaned house and fixed all the meals—both with some help from us kids. Thinking back on it now, I see that they were practical ministers of both word (teaching and preaching) and sacrament (delivering bread and meals). They offered loving hospitality to their children and those important to us, as well as their grandchildren, great grandchildren, other relatives, neighbors, friends, and strangers.

Follow Jesus. This was central to all my parents did, in word and deed, in spirit and body, and I am still trying to catch up!

A few of the posts that mention my parents:

Acts of God and Acts of War ( About Dad’s letters on board a troop ship docked at Nagasaki.)

The Making of You

The DoubleFeature

Thanks be to God for the life, writings, and ministry of the Rev. Richard McBrien  (1936-2015)“who unflinchingly challenged orthodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church for five decades and popularized and perpetuated the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.” He is quoted as saying, “The theologian’s job is one of critically reflecting on [Christian] tradition or raising questions about it, even challenging it, and that’s how doctrines evolve and move forward.”

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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.

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

War and Peace

Looking for a letter about WW II by my grandmother, I happened onto this pencil drawing I made during the Vietnam War of a news photo of an American soldier mourning the bombing death of his Vietnamese wife.

“Christianity and war are incompatible, and nothing worth having can be achieved by ‘casting out Satan by Satan,’” English mystic Evelyn Underhill wrote in a 1941 letter a month before her death.

But I’ve wondered if she would have felt the same way if she had lived to see how WW II turned out. The destruction of fighters by fighters could be said to illustrate her point, even that of citizens of warring nations caught in the crossfire. But what of the millions murdered in death camps? Shouldn’t they have had someone fighting for them?

To her credit, Underhill wore her pacifism modestly, never claiming it to be a universal path and taking issue with pacifists who themselves became “warlike” in impressing that standard on all. In the same letter quoted above, she wrote of the choice between the war and the cross:  “And only a very small number are ready for the Cross, in the full sense of loving and unresisting abandonment to the worst that may come.” Earlier she had realized that her own spiritual progress required “learning more about the Cross,” and claimed “We must accept the world’s worst if we are to give it of our best.”

During the Vietnam era, I sorely wanted to be a pacifist, but I believed there were justifiable wars like WW II. I was absolutely supportive of friends who willingly or unwillingly served in Vietnam, corresponding with them, including one who wrote that he saw his buddy “blown to bits.” Though I could imagine dying for my country, I couldn’t imagine killing for it. Thankfully, my number in the first draft lottery was too high to be drafted.

Nonetheless, I had my desired pacifism challenged in an independent study of Christian ethics by Dr. Thomas Love, the founding chair of the Religious Studies Department at California State University, Northridge. “You’re an excellent marksman with a rifle,” he hypothesized, “And you’re at one end of a hallway. At the opposite end, a madman is slitting the throats of children one by one. He is about to kill another child. What would you do?”

“I’d shoot him,” I replied without hesitation, realizing that I was not really a pacifist. My college friend, Gary Hall, now (thankfully) dean of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., told me at the time that the hypothetical was unfairly manipulative. But the point remains that I would kill to defend an innocent. And I understand why so many war veterans talk of doing what they did to protect their buddies.

It’s pretty obvious I am writing this in light of recent “wars and rumors of war” regarding Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Syria, ISIS, and President Obama’s recent speech. I had another post written, but couldn’t resist speaking up.

In high school I saw the then newly-released 6-hour-plus Russian film epic of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1967). The only scene I remember clearly is of a miles-wide battle in which two armies engage in a bloody fight. At first you see the soldiers distinctly, but as the camera pulls back to a distant height, all one can see is a whirlpool of tiny figures on horseback drawn into a swirling vortex, illustrating war’s futility.

I can’t claim an easy answer about war for myself or anyone. The cross scares the hell out of me. But so does using the sword.

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Related post: A Pre-emptive Peace

For other posts on peace, enter “peace” in the search blank in the upper left corner of the blog. 

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. 

Veterans

I’m always a little surprised by how many veterans there are within predominantly LGBT congregations. This past Sunday was no different at Dallas’s Cathedral of Hope, when veterans were invited to stand and be recognized for their service, and I would guess around 30 or more rose at each worship. A nice touch was that the prayers remembered not only veterans, but conscientious objectors like Bayard Rustin.

It surprises me because, during the draft, they could have avoided service by revealing their homosexuality, and since then, in the volunteer military service era, LGBT people were not welcome, risking their livelihoods and sometimes their lives not only in the service, but in future employment if they received a dishonorable discharge. Part of my surprise is that LGBT citizens and other marginalized citizens have been willing to give their all, even when the countries they served did not give them all that other citizens expected. I think back on a member of MCC San Francisco who was the most decorated Vietnam veteran and was a gay African American.

At a Philadelphia television station in 1975, I participated in a live broadcast forum on gay rights that featured Leonard Matlovich, who had just that week made it to the cover of Time magazine for his courageous coming out as gay in the U. S. Air Force, giving us the famous ironic quote about his being given “a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.”  Much to my surprise, one of my roommates invited him to stay in our house that night, and my claim to fame is that he borrowed my razor the next morning!

All this made me think of the “veterans” of church service who are LGBT, not just those of us who were activists but all those who gave the church their all when the church refused to welcome their love and their beloved. The Shower of Stoles re-presents many of those veterans, remembering their contributions to the Body of Christ. And among those memorialized by the AIDS Quilt are many who served the church in a variety of ways. Now a carefully researched book by R. W. Holmen released by Pilgrim Press this month tells the story of the unsung heroes of the LGBT Christian movement in five mainstream denominations, Queer Clergy: A History of Gay and Lesbian Ministry in American Protestantism.

At the Cathedral of Hope I met so many clergy and church workers who have served or are serving a wide variety of denominations and traditions that I thought, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the national gatherings of each denomination would take a moment to invite LGBT veterans of church service to stand and be recognized? They would be astonished to see how many there are of us, and it would be gratifying to hear from them, “Thank you for your service.”

Watch Chris's sermon "Don't Give Up!" at the Cathedral of Hope UCC in Dallas this past Sunday, Nov. 10, or watch the entire worship.

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