Spiritual Stretching

Our neighbor, Luna, stretching against the edge of our driveway.

Put your hands over your head and stretch. Take a deep breath.

Doesn’t that feel good?

And don’t you vicariously feel good when you see your dog or cat or another person stretch and perhaps yawn?

Many years ago I learned that, to prevent my back from seizing up on me, I needed to do a simple stretching exercise before getting out of bed in the morning.  I also do a coordination exercise a holistic chiropractor once taught me that’s supposed to help me think more clearly. And then I’m ready to, as the camp song goes, “Rise and shine and give God my glory…”

A few summers ago, Wade and I attended a yoga class that was all about stretching and breathing, led by our friend and neighbor José Blanco. It was surprising how challenging and tiring stretching and breathing can be, as well as how wonderful it can feel. Yoga, of course, is a spiritual discipline developed in Hinduism to focus body, mind, and spirit.

A lot of Christians don’t like to stretch. Orthodox literally means “straight thinking,” and many Christians like to keep to the straight and narrow, within the confines of what they consider proper belief and behavior.

Progressive Christians like to stretch our minds. That means we can stay in our heads way too much. That’s preferable to not going there at all. As they say, many people are lost in thought because it’s such unfamiliar territory.

Thankfully, stretching our mind may stretch our hearts as well, especially if we can catch our breaths.

Stretching is an antidote to confinement, an answer to tension, a solution for paralysis that is not permanent. It helps tissue lubricants flow, as well as the life-giving, oxygenating, vitality-inducing blood that we need to be nurtured and grow. 

Our spirits and our spirituality need stretching too.

Jesus did not teach yoga positions, but he was still a kind of yoga instructor, because he taught spiritual stretching. His spirituality stretched the religion of those around him to move out of ossification—which means to be make rigid, callous, or unprogressive—to move beyond laws written in stone and temples made of stone.

Anyone who has endured an obnoxious neighbor will know that “loving your neighbor” is a stretch. Anyone who has struggled with an image of an angry or distant God knows that “loving God with all your heart, soul, and mind” is a stretch. Those raised on negative self-images know that “loving your self” is a stretch. Those taught to fear or hate a stranger realize that Jesus’ urging to greet even those we don’t know is a stretch.  And “loving your enemies” is obviously a stretch!

By stretching, a spiritual community becomes expansive and inclusive and nimble. A breath is a stretch, and Jesus was said to have breathed on his disciples his Spirit. That Spirit stretched their ability to share his story in the languages of strangers. That same Spirit has, throughout history, stretched at least parts of the church to welcome those it formerly resisted, excluded, marginalized, or persecuted.

And God’s mystery stretches our spiritual imaginations. In the apostle Paul’s words to the Athenians, God “does not live in shrines made by human hands” but causes us “to search for God and perhaps grope for God.”

Breathe. Stretch.

Doesn’t that feel good?

This was my post on March 12, 2014, and I thought current blog readers might like to read it.

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

Wonder

Luna enjoying our porch swing.

Others have come to the same conclusion, but in the sixty-six years that I have been given, I believe the essential ingredient of a spiritual life is wonder.

It can be found and expressed in many ways: worship, contemplation, compassion, activism, lovemaking, the beloved community, science, art, nature, and the recognition of the commonwealth of God, to name a few.

But the further away any of these get from wonder, they can become tablets of stone, stumbling blocks, millstones round our necks, a dutiful obligation rather than a pleasurable joy.

As I write this, Luna, our neighbor’s cat, is chasing something in our back yard. I have spent happy moments watching Luna from my home office windows as she approaches our yard with wonder, leaping up the tall, central Bradford pear tree, slinking beneath our hedge of privet shrubs, luxuriating in rubbing her back on our weedy grass.

Curious Luna looking through our back screen door.

From our front porch, I’ve enjoyed watching her go on morning walks with her family (yes, really!): a dog named Lexi, children with a literary and a biblical name, Darcy and Micah, their father Chris, a New Testament professor at Mercer University, and mother Jenelle, who is the organizing pastor of the newly-forming Ormewood Church.

Luna runs ahead and lingers behind, depending on what catches her attention in the moment. She exemplifies wonder. And I realize that we human beings know only a little more than she does about the nature of things.

The morning I write this, I greeted them again from our front porch during my prayers, after reading a couple of psalms and Matthew 18, which includes Jesus’ counsel to enter the kingdom as a child, remove their stumbling blocks, find the lost sheep, confront wrongdoing in yourself and in the community, and finally, forgive from the heart, even as we have been forgiven.

Luna helps me with my bulb garden.

Photo by Wade Jones

In silence I contemplated the very tall and old leafy trees before me, the tiny bird chirping on the railing, the runner going by, the found stones that line our gardens, only a little distracted by the passing cars, some of which take the stop sign at the intersection as a mere “suggestion.”

The week I write this, I awoke each morning to NPR reporting on various catastrophes, a high rise fire, several bombings and mass shootings, the investigation of the administration.

Despite all that, I found myself marveling (yes, I realize how antiquated the gerund) that all I saw before me, including me, has evolved.  What impetus organizes seemingly inert matter into living things, thinking beings, and seems to call for beauty and compassion and wonder?

Luna poking her nose under our grill cover.

A couple of days ago, I read how the liver regenerates itself daily as it carries out so many mysteries that ancients thought it was the seat of the soul.  And not long ago I read how disparate parts of the brain organize the various signals from our eyes into what we “see.”

No wonder the psalmist sang this morning, “The earth is full of the steadfast love of the Lord. By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of God’s mouth” (33:5b-6).

“Breathe on me, breath of God,” sings the old hymn.  What a sensual yet spiritual request!

“The glory of God is the human being fully alive.”  This popular quote from Irenaeus of Lyons hangs in our hallway, written by the hand of the calligrapher who once graced Mt. Calvary Retreat House in the hills above Santa Barbara before its destruction in the 2008 Montecito fire.

From dust to dust, ashes to ashes, our brief flicker in between is a cause for wonder.

A post in which I describe the “impetus” mentioned above as an “oomph”:

Richard Dawkins Has More Faith than I Do

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The Trouble with Oscar

A friend had a very old cat named Oscar. At age 22, Oscar died. My friend chose to bury his ashes in his front yard and plant a maple tree on his resting place. A cat that he’d never seen before came by and respectfully watched while he dug the hole, spread Oscar’s ashes, and planted the tree in his memory. The cat then walked away. Moments later, neighbors who had just moved into the neighborhood walked by and asked, “Have you seen our cat, Oscar?”

Not long after I was out running and heard a cat crying loudly, hidden on the sidewalk behind a recently-emptied trash bin. It looked unwell or injured.  I was headed home to shower and get dressed for work at a church I served as interim pastor. I don’t have time for this, I thought, thinking of the story of the Good Samaritan in which the lay minister and the priest ignored a beaten up traveler on their way from Jericho to the Temple at Jerusalem.

My vacationing neighbors’ cat had recently bitten me when we played while checking his food, water, and litter box.  So I was hesitant to pick up an injured cat that might be defensive, especially since I was dressed only in running shorts and shoes.

Home was not far, so I ran there, cleaned up, and returned in my car with water, tuna fish (my closest approximation of cat food), and my dog’s pain medication, leftover from a previous need. At first I didn’t see the cat, his having moved from the sidewalk.  At that moment, a neighbor happened to come out of her house on her way to work, and I told her about the distressed cat just as we found it again on a driveway.  The cat did not seem responsive either to the water or the tuna.

Lisa, the neighbor, thought the owners were out of town, but it had always been a neighborhood cat, left behind by the previous owners of the house, and many of the neighbors provided him food and water. I went up to the front door and found a note that the residents were out of town, a note which included a cell phone number, so I phoned and left a message.

It so happened that Lisa was a cat lover, owned a cat-carrier, and we shared the same veterinarian group, Ansley Animal Clinic. She offered to drop him off on her way to work and let the owners know.  Relieved, I went off to work myself.

A few days later, running in the neighborhood again, I wanted to find Lisa and discover how things turned out. I couldn’t remember which house was hers. Serendipitously, she emerged from her house once more, and I was able to learn the cat’s fate. He had been extremely dehydrated, and the speculation was that he had fallen into the trash bin a few days before and liberated by the refuse collectors the day I found him.  The vet gave him an IV to rehydrate him, and later that day, the owners retrieved their recovered cat. A small neighborhood miracle! And to think, I had not wanted to get involved!

Intending to thank the vet during my dog’s next appointment, I asked Lisa what the cat’s name was. “Well,” she said, “His owners call him ---, but all the neighbors call him Oscar.” I was so astonished by the name “Oscar” I totally forgot the other name.

Goosebumps all around. Yet another Oscar!

I believe we all have such stories to tell. They may or may not fit neatly into our theologies, but they surprise us with grace in a seemingly ungracious world. Toward the end of his career as a 20^th century Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner famously wrote, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or will not exist at all.”

According to Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, “A mystic is someone who has the gnawing suspicion that just beneath the apparent contradictions, brokenness, and discord of this everyday world lies a hidden unity.”

I couldn’t obtain a photo of any of the Oscars in this post, so for fun I’ve included one of the Abercrombie cats generated by college students that made the rounds on the internet and Facebook. 

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