Has Been

Not long ago I enjoyed a phone conversation with my brother in which we discussed looking back at our lives from the perspective of age, both being in our 60s. We laughed about our “tired gene” which has mellowed us, as well as made us less gung-ho to initiate major new life projects.  And we talked about what big dreams we had when young.  

What precipitated our talk was my volunteering with a task group of alumni from Yale Divinity School shaping our 35^th “cluster reunion” (classes of ’76-’78) this October. I mentioned that one of the young reps from the alumni association working with us had suggested we might want to talk about how we are “winding down” our ministries and other careers. I caught a whiff of denial, perhaps, as one of my former classmates quickly countered we might not be winding down at all, but preparing for our “next big thing.” I told my brother that I kind of felt like I was winding down—working just as hard, mind you, but with no great expectations as in younger days.  

Propinquity would have it—maybe even grace—that a writer detailing the LGBT movement within mainstream Protestant U.S. churches asked me at this time to be among those reviewing the manuscript for accuracy. I am grateful to be remembered for the various roles I played as an activist helping LGBT people claim our memberships, ministries, and marriages within the church and culture.  And to know that we are at least on our way to complete success. Career-wise for me (he said wistfully) I just wish it had come a little sooner. 

As I encourage former classmates to come to the reunion, I am learning what high achievers they have been in their various vocations, denominations, non-profit organizations, academic institutions, and humanitarian causes. They have worked hard applying what they learned in seminary to the world. Jesus would be proud. 

As those who follow this blog know, I was also reading Viktor Frankl’s epic Man’s Search for Meaning during this time. I can’t help but chuckle at my choice of texts at a time when “man’s search for his glasses” might be more pertinent! But Frankl, a concentration camp survivor who founded the psychiatric school of logotherapy, remarks on our desire to leave “an immortal ‘footprint in the sands of time’”: 

Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being. 

And, instead of envying the future of the young, Frankl says the old instead may affirm: 

“Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the thing of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”

“Having been is the surest kind of being.” We can be proud of work done, love loved, joys welcomed, sufferings endured. Being a “has been” doesn’t sound so bad, does it? 

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite, http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com. Donations welcome! 

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For a related post, check out “I Wanted to Be Famous!” (June 1, 2011) on this blog.

Spiritual Care for the Liberated

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

“It would be an error to think that a liberated prisoner was not in need of spiritual care anymore.” –Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning 

This observation comes toward the end of Frankl’s autobiographical and psychological account of his time as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Having described repeated traumatic events in the life of fellow prisoners, he turns to the trauma of suddenly being free: the feelings of unreality, bitterness, disappointment (when, for example, the person the prisoner most longed to see was no longer) and disillusionment (when others pleaded ignorance or relativized the prisoner’s suffering). 

Frankl writes that the liberated prisoner needed to re-learn how to feel pleasure. On the first day of “freedom” the inmates went outside the camp gates and witnessed “meadows full of flowers” but later confessed to one another, “Tell me, were you pleased today?” “Truthfully, no!” 

But a few days later, passing the same flowering meadows, hearing larks singing and seeing them rise to the skies, with nothing but earth and sky around him, he found himself kneeling and saying over and over again, “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.” He didn’t know how long he knelt, repeating these words, beginning to feel human again. But it is in that context that he writes, “It would be an error to think that a liberated prisoner was not in need of spiritual care anymore.” 

The insight struck me as a hammer brought down full strength on an anvil. Without pretending to compare Frankl’s suffering to that of the rest of us, it is also true that those liberated from closets or fundamentalism or even church are still greatly in need of spiritual care. We too need a verse to chant, to sing, to pray, so that we may feel pleasure and awe as we come to our senses as “the human being fully alive” that is God’s glory.   

And I would say we need one thing more. 

The first sermon in which I included gay people by name among “the least of these” for whom Jesus cared, my text was the story from Acts of Paul and Silas in prison. An earthquake frees them, and the jail keeper prepares to take his own life, thinking they have escaped. But Paul shouts out, “Do not be afraid, for we are all here.” That was my sermon title, and I explained that despite their liberation, they take time to convert the jail keeper, recognizing he too is imprisoned. I’d like to think that, almost to the day that I gave that sermon 40 years ago, I still have some of that youthful idealism.

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A Personal Axis Mundi

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

My first semester of college in 1968 I enrolled in RS 101: Man’s Religions (sic), one of the first courses offered by the newly established Religious Studies department of California State University, Northridge. Taught by Dr. Thomas Love, the department’s founding chair, it was my first immersion in biblical scholarship as well as the equal treatment of the world’s major religions. 

Though I had already begun my disengagement from fundamentalism and biblical literalism, it was still a shock to my system, as if I had plunged into a baptismal pool filled with ice-cold water. After the 8 a.m. class, I had four hours until my next course, so I studied beneath a young tree I nicknamed my “axis mundi,” my “center of the world,” an allusion to one of our texts, Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane.  

I usually felt depressed. The class questioned almost everything I had been taught to believe, but I wondered, why should that depress me? I could dismiss it and denounce it, as so many fundamentalists and biblical literalists do. But I realized the source of my depression: I believed the new information! I understood that to take the Bible seriously was to apply the best tools of scholarship to glean its spiritual wisdom. And I could not imagine that there was only “one way,” one spiritual path. Anyone who had hiked in the mountains and foothills of Southern California as I had knew better than that. 

I woke up last Friday morning thinking of my personal axis mundi, that tree that became my place of contemplation. Years later I would discover it had grown large and tall. But on my last visit to the campus, I found it had been removed in favor of yet another building. Good thing I thought of it as a metaphor, or my whole world would have collapsed, like that tribe in Eliade’s book that died out after their totem was broken. Joseph Campbell warned that we get into trouble when we mistake our spiritual metaphors for the real thing. 

During my morning prayers  I’ve been reading Viktor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning, the famed psychiatrist’s account of his time held in Nazi concentration camps. Friday I happened onto a passage in which he describes a woman aware she is about to die, but cheerful anyway. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told him, “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing to a tree outside, of which she could only see a branch with two blossoms, she confided, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness. I often talk to this tree.” Fearing she was delirious, Frankl asked if it ever spoke back. “Yes. It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’” 

In my prayers that morning, I thanked God for this woman, for her life, for her wisdom, and that she too had a tree to lean on. 

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