Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: Writing

Showing posts with label Writing. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 10, 2019

My Monastery

A recent selfie!

The day I write this, I realized during my morning prayers that they are my entrance to “my” monastic community. I put “my” in quotes because the community in which I’ve been blessed to participate has never been mine alone, but that of generations of Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Native peoples, Celtic peoples, and more—past, present, and future, from every people and culture.

And, in my heart, I join you who read this or who have read anything I’ve written, because you are a part of me as I am a part of you. And you too enjoy the same contemplative community whenever possible.

I guess this all began yesterday afternoon as I went through “Mom’s box” of my life’s souvenirs. Mom saved things that I had forgotten I had written and published, as well as articles about my work and announcements about presentations I had forgotten. And she included a file of my stuff labelled “Chris” in Dad’s handwriting, indicating he had done likewise.

Reading and writing words has been my way into a spiritual community vaster than I ever imagined when I was a child. And it has been my way into discovering a God grander than could ever be “captured” by mere words, even those of the Bible.

As happened this morning, my morning prayers are often a means of continuing conversion and more comprehensive understanding, providing continuity to my (and our) disparate experiences. I continue reflection begun several weeks ago on Benedictine John Main’s Letters from the Heart. He writes of the monastic experience:

More and more it will fulfill its prophetic role by living in the cities where the experience of community and of spirit are all but lost. There, in these modern deserts, it will bloom by the proof of the power of faith and absolute generosity to achieve the impossible in liberty of spirit. “Let the wilderness and thirsty land be glad; Let the desert rejoice and burst into flower” (Isaiah 35:1). [ p 75]

I thought of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the early Christian monastics who went off into the wilderness to pray. Now we, in our own “deserts,” may hear the call to take what I call in my retreats “monastic moments,” opportunities to look inward, to listen to our own hearts, undistracted.

Of visitors to his monastery, Main writes,

They think they will find God in the terms they have imagined until then. But instead they first find themselves—recognized, known, and inexplicably loved. And because of that experience their expectations begin to change. They no longer seek a God of their own imagining. Instead, they begin to expand in the presence of the God they know to be beyond thought or image. [p 72]

And, he adds, “They now realize that God is seeking them. They must simply be still and allow themselves to be found.” [p 72-73]

We are called, Main says, to shape a community where others may also find their way, at the same time recognizing it is not “ours” but God’s. He correctly cites Bonhoeffer’s warning that an idealistic view of community leads only to disappointment, either in God, in others, or in oneself. The Rule of Saint Benedict describes the essence of Christian community as loving people as they are.

I will again be co-leading a 5-day contemplative retreat April 27-May 1, 2020 in Cullman, Alabama, through the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary. It is open to the public.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Stay with Me

On the sacred mountain of Haleakala, a lone silversword, 1982.

My friend, Henri Nouwen biographer Michael Ford, asked me to write something about Henri, his affinity for Vincent van Gogh, and loneliness, as he prepares to write a book about Henri and loneliness.

Loneliness is the wilderness for the writer, the artist, and the contemplative. Writing, creativity, and prayer are not ways out of the wilderness, but a way to make the wilderness blossom, to turn the ache of feeling lonely to a fulfilling solitude, transforming “lone” to “alone,” derived from joining the words “all-one.”

French existentialist and novelist Albert Camus wrote a book of short stories, The Exile and the Kingdom, stories contrasting being alone and being with others. I’ll never forget the Algerian woman who leaves her husband’s bedside in the middle of the night to ascend to the roof and commune alone with the stars.

The story pertinent here is about an artist whose work makes him famous, acquiring admirers and students alike until he can’t work anymore—that is, until he finds a hidden attic in which to rediscover his art in solitude.

In his prolific and often profound letters to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh writes sometimes of his loneliness, while tending the fire in his hearth should a passerby stop to be warmed by its glow. His paintings became a way of offering himself to others, his “sermons,” as he once called them, that he hoped would have the same consoling effect that the Christian religion once offered. “While I sit here lonely,” Vincent wrote, “My work perhaps speaks to a friend.”

A theme or strand of loneliness wove its way into every one of Henri’s “letters to Theo,” his dozens of books on the spiritual life. A desperate extrovert, Henri nonetheless needed times of exile to hone his craft as writer and contemplative. His most severe exile, a time away from his community nursing a heart broken at the ending of a promising relationship, arguably produced his most profound, most simple, and most heartfelt spiritual treatise, The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey through Anguish to Freedom.

Henri’s loneliness spoke to my own. Upon hearing a tape of a lecture on loneliness for his class, I enrolled in the course, the notes of which became Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. The movements were from loneliness to solitude, from hostility to hospitality, and from illusion to prayer. Of all his books, Henri later observed, this was closest to his lived Christian experience.

When I write, create, and pray, my loneliness is transformed, my exile becomes community, my wilderness blossoms and communion is possible.

My writing is talking to a friend, making conversation, or a stranger, breaking the ice. My creativity is imagination let loose, hopefully to entertain as well as to encourage. My prayer is recognizing and enjoying God’s presence and remembering people I care about as well as those I should care about.

Jesus taught love, compassion, mercy, and gratitude as ways of transforming our wilderness. Reaching out to one another is the way to the kingdom, the commonwealth of God.

“Pray with me,” he urged his disciples in Gethsemane.

“Stay with us,” the Emmaus disciples urged their fellow traveler.

“Stay with me,” the haunting cry of a popular song goes, explaining “Guess it’s true, I’m not good at a one-night stand.”

That’s true of all of us, even God.

Related post:

My Loneliness Led Me to God

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Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Why Didn't Jesus Write?

This is not intended as an academic treatise—scholars can research and write those! This is a speculative opinion piece of imagination.

If the biblical witness is to be trusted, we know Jesus could read, because he read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah in his home synagogue in Nazareth. And we know Jesus could write, because he “bent down and wrote on the ground” when a woman accused of adultery was about to be stoned. Columbia seminary professor Anna Carter Florence has pointed out that, having come between her and her accusers, bending down would have forced her executioners to look her in the eye. Maybe it was not only his extemporaneous “Let him without sin cast the first stone” that dissuaded the would-be judges, but also whatever he wrote in the soil at their feet.

But why didn’t he write down all his thoughts and parables on a scroll somewhere, and put the Jesus Seminar out of business? Here are a few possibilities:

There wasn’t time. When one sees fire, the natural inclination is to warn “FIRE!” rather than pen a treatise on the dangers of combustion. Jesus saw the imminence of the inbreaking commonwealth or kingdom of God, and realized transformation (repentance) was needed immediately to embrace it. And once the commonwealth was among us, what need would there be of additional scripture?

Of course, there’s another way “there wasn’t time,” as Jesus died an early martyr’s death at the hands of the Roman Empire, who executed hundreds of Jewish zealots on crosses. By today’s standards, he still would have had time to write a memoir about the trauma of his childhood experiences, from Herod’s slaughter of the innocents to his mother’s reprimand in the Temple (you know, as in “no more wire hangers!”). But philosophies as wise as his are generally written by sages late in life.

Perhaps he needed a good editor. Steeped in the oral traditions of his Hebrew upbringing, with the knowledge that their stories and wisdom were passed down orally through generations before being written down, Jesus might have considered it presumptuous to put in tablets of stone for the world to see teachings he wanted to test among his own people first. Maybe there were others like the Syrophoenician woman who challenged his religious perspectives that limited him initially to “the lost sheep of Israel.” Maybe the Samaritan woman at the well taught Jesus as much about spiritual unity over religious differences as he taught her. And could his strong reaction to Peter’s denial of his anticipated suffering in Jerusalem (“Get thee behind me, Satan!”) reveal his own doubts of his trek toward martyrdom?

It could be that his disciples and the early Christians and his followers throughout the ages served as an editorial prism through which to see his rainbow promise, to harden his break with the religious parties of his time, such as the Pharisees and Sadducees, as well as reveal “the new thing” Isaiah had prophesied God doing and “the law written on their hearts” that Jeremiah proclaimed. There may have been copyright issues with his borrowing verses from Moses’ Pentateuch for his core beliefs of loving God and neighbor, though there was no Fox News to call him on his socialistic plagiarism. And his lumping of the scribes with the Pharisees meant they were not likely to take dictation from him.

Actions speak louder than words. Talk about Incarnation! Jesus’ dining with religious outcasts spoke more disturbingly to the religious leaders of his time (and ours), as did his free social intercourse with women, even disreputable ones. His willingness to touch lepers, the hearing impaired, and the blind is worth a thousand of his words. His ability to discern and cast out demons is sorely needed in our own age of addictions and violence. Jesus could have been a mime and we would still get his central message!

“It’s not about me!” Could Jesus’ self-effacing deference to a God beyond our abilities to know, explain, and confine, and his claim to be one of “the least of these” whom we are to clothe, feed, shelter, and visit have made him resistant to writing what would have been a bestseller (eventually) because its inevitable temple merchandising and self-promotion might have distracted us from our own callings to follow him in ministry and mission? Though I would have loved to see him on “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report,” maybe he is all the more memorable in his simple plea to “Remember me” when we dine with him in our hearts.

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This month, Presbyterian Promise invited me to write a letter of encouragement to my 17-year-old self as a gay Christian. Click here and scroll down to two such articles.

Posts you may have missed:

Blessed Are the Prophets

Exorcising Demons

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The God Who Removes Obstacles

Thank you, G. B., for making the first donation to this ministry! Others may do so by clicking on the “donate” link on either my blog or web site or by mail to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232, designating in the memo are, “For Progressive Christian Reflections.” Readers are the sole support of this ministry. Thank you! –Chris

The night after writing last week’s post about a dream, I had another. This time I found myself in the office of the church I last served, empty of my things save for a few "sacramentals" I had mistakenly left behind. I gathered these few items, but the only one I remembered after awaking was Ganesha, the elephant-headed Hindu god who is known variously as the Remover of Obstacles, the deity (deva in Sanskrit) of intellect, wisdom, and literature. With his gift for ironic humor, my Mormon nephew gave it to me one year for Christmas, and for years it sat atop my computer in hopes it would remove any technological obstacles I might encounter. Perhaps at some unconscious level I had hoped it might remove obstacles in the church I served.

I like that the “Remover of Obstacles” is also the deity of literature. As I wrote in my journal for the spiritual formation class I described last week, “Jesus is my liberator. But writing is my salvation.” Not just my writing, of course, but the writing of others as well, from ancient scriptures to contemporary storytellers. Writing may help us transcend obstacles, whether religious, political, historical, cultural, personal, or material. As such, writing may serve as a deeply spiritual medium. Not always, of course. Perhaps not most of the time.

When I served as a reporter and then news editor of a gay newsmagazine, I despaired that I would no longer be involved in spiritual matters as I had when employed by a church or writing my first few books. But what I discovered was that many if not most of the stories we covered were about spiritual warfare: religion attacking LGBT rights in the culture and excluding our spirituality in the church, refusing to welcome and celebrate our membership and ministries and marriages. Again, writing might come to the spiritual rescue.

In the interests of full disclosure, my dream may have been prompted by finally getting around to reading my Yale Div School classmate Barbara Brown Taylor’s memoir, Leaving Church. She adroitly describes the conflicting demands on every pastor, not the least of which is the spiritual warfare among those who follow the Prince of Peace. And almost offhandedly, she offers this bit of spiritual wisdom: “Church is not a stopping place but a starting place for discerning God’s presence in the world.”

Religion becomes a “stopping place”—an obstacle—when it thinks of itself more highly than it ought. That’s one of the things from which Jesus—our own “Remover of Obstacles”—tried to free us.

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Interrupted Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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