We've Got the Whole World in Our Hands

 

As we approach the tenth anniversary of this weekly blog, I thought current readers would appreciate one of my earliest posts, from April 6, 2011.

During recess in the second grade, my friend Mary and I enjoyed swinging as high as we could on the swing set, singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” It’s a great song of comfort, basically affirming that, no matter what, God is holding us. Note the song doesn’t say God is in control, just that God is there for us. And I still believe that.

These days we have a better grip on what it means for God to hold the whole world because we have the internet and a 24/7 news cycle. Now we too have the whole world in our hands every time we log on.

The narrator in my as-yet-unpublished mystery novel so reveres the internet that, just as many of us only visit God on Sunday mornings, he only visits the internet on Saturday mornings. Comparing it to touching the forbidden Mt. Sinai, he drolly writes: 

The internet is such an awesome god—so extensive we can only glimpse a part of it, so powerful that it has crashed many a computer, so desirous that many humans and their marriages have been sacrificed on its local altars. Okay, I’m a little over the top here, but it’s an amusing analogy, don’t you think? 

My point is, like any powerful and overwhelming god, the internet must be approached guardedly, with respect, on appointed days and at appointed times, lest we take it for granted (as if our computers are always up) or believe we can domesticate it (making it entirely user-friendly). 

Just as the ancient monastics limited human intercourse of all kinds, even so, those of us who practice an ascetic lifestyle must limit our intercourse with the internet, lest it lead us into idolatry or distract us from reality. To switch mythological metaphors, the internet is the Medusa’s head of our time, a face whose tresses are cables rather than snakes, but still able to turn men to stone. 

Demonstrating a similar reverence, only recently has my spell-check stopped correcting me when I fail to capitalize the word “internet,” though it never corrects me when I fail to capitalize “god”! 

A retreat leader once scandalized my progressive theology—you know, the theology that tells you to have the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other during your morning prayers—by observing the omnipresent news cycle hooks us in other people’s stories before we know our own story for the day. And, during a retreat I was leading on finding space in our busy lives to rest in God, a woman had the “aha” moment that she was busy even in her prayers, listing the world’s concerns, as if the whole world were not already in God’s hands! 

Now more than ever, we have the whole world in our hands. And more than ever, we need to step back, take a breath, take moments of Sabbath rest, and resist the temptation to use Eden’s apple or the Silicon Valley’s Apple to be like the gods. 

Yet we are not absolved of responsibility. Now, also more than ever, the internet gives what we do and say the power to transform the world for good or for ill. 

We’ve got the whole world in our hands. If we are God’s, then that should be a comfort rather than a concern.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

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What Is Your Golden Record?

Equinox full moon rising behind the haze in New Mexico.

Photo by my friend Trudie Barreras. Used by permisson.

On this week’s 50^th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing, I invite us to consider, what are we—you and I—putting “out there” in the universe?

Week before last Wade and I were fascinated watching The Farthest, a documentary about Voyager I and II, still travelling through interstellar space with a “golden record” intended to depict earth and its inhabitants to extraterrestrial sentient beings. It’s amazingly diverse—amazing given the seeming narrowness of our vision these days. It includes audio greetings in more than 50 languages, a variety of musical offerings, and pictures of numerous plants, animals, places and actions to give the recipient a sense of life on Earth.

And I thought of each of us, what would our golden records be? What would we put out into the universe to represent our individual and communal lives? How would we summarize our life experience in images and words, tastes and aromas, touches and sounds, thoughts and feelings?

I considered St. Ignatius’s self Examen as a possible process to choose what best represents our individual experiences and choices, particularly Jesuit Anthony de Mello’s accessible Testament. Briefer still is my adaptation of his effort for a contemplative retreat, which I share with you in hopes you find these prompts useful in articulating what might be on your golden record:

1.These experiences I have cherished:

2.These ideas have brought me liberation:

3.These beliefs I have outgrown:

4.These convictions I have lived by:

5.These are the things I have lived for:

Numbers 1 and 5 could include images as well as words, though, with a little imagination, images could be included in any category. For example, liberation could have been felt hang-gliding, and conviction could have been the result of a baby’s smile. Outgrown beliefs could be pictured in a stack of books.

Another thought that came to me is that personally, my whole life could be summed up in the mantra that Jesus spoke to Lazarus: “Come out!” Come out of the closet, come to life, come out of your fear, come out of other’s expectations and even your own, come out of shame, come out of “resting in peace,” come out of isolationism, come out of narrow concepts and beliefs, come out and join the party, help the neighbor, enjoy abundant life!

So what is your life’s mantra(s)? And what are the contents of your golden record that you are putting out to the universe?

Only a handful of us may land on the moon. More vitally, all of us have landed on this oasis named Earth. So the question is, to what purpose, to what pleasure, to what hope, to what love?

The link on The Farthest is to the original trailer on PBS. For info on its present venue on Netflix, go to: https://www.netflix.com/title/80204377. It is also available on Amazon Prime. (I receive no remuneration for these links!)

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Photo copyright © 2019 by Trudie Barreras.

Earth, Air, Water, and Fire

Sunset on the Nile, January 1981 - crg

I offer four meditations from my book Communion of Life that celebrates the gifts of earth, air, water and fire. You will better understand how Celtic spirituality and Celtic Christianity deeply touch me.

Cycle One: Day 1 Earth

Sacred earth :

Holding us fast,

Whirling to keep us steady,

Shifting axis to temper climate,

Yielding nutrients of life.

Holy ground :

A grassy belly cradling us in rest,

A rounded, rocky bosom inspiring dreamers,

A birth canal whose current is destiny.

Grateful, grateful am I,

To stand, to sit, to lie on you,

To ride, to sail, to drive on you,

To look down, to look up, to look out

And see you there.

Sacred ground,

I remove my shoes in reverence.

Cycle Three: Day 10 Air

The sun’s glory

Wraps around us,

Dives into valleys,

Peaks behind ridges,

Slinks through city streets,

Explodes on beaches

As if through thin air.

The sun’s grandeur

Glows green through branches,

Bounces lavender off irises,

Mushrooms grey above factories,

Canopies blue on clear days,

Gilds with age,

As if through thin air.

The sun’s gospel

Proclaimed to earth’s ends

Effortlessly, gracefully,

Baptizing us all,

Just and unjust,

Believer and nonbeliever,

Grateful and ungrateful,

Enlightened and unenlightened—

Immersing us all

In our star’s splashing splendor

As if through thin air.

Cycle Two: Day 7 Water

You live within me—

In my eyes, in my flesh,

In my thoughts, in my movements :

My liquidity.

You cleanse me inside and out,

Rinsing each cell,

Flushing out toxins,

Boiling out sweat,

Crying out grief.

Most of me is you.

Before air, I knew you,

Bundled by embryonic fluids :

Echo of primordial waters

Where first were fused

Earth, air, water, fire,

The things that make for life.

As you held me,

Now I hold you,

Precious, unasked gift from eternity—

Living water.

Cycle Eleven: Day 44 Fire

You have been the center of our dance.

From bonfires ablaze to candles flickering,

Wildly we have swung around you,

Howling, shouting, singing, chanting,

Igniting our passion for uniting

For war, for the hunt, for community, for the gods.

Flame mesmerized by flame :

Our burning, restless insides

Stretch outside unfired clay

For flames of unity, at-one-ment in immolation :

The burning flash of bullets and bombs,

The stinging, fatal wound by carnivores,

The searing of the heretic at the stake,

The burnt offering of sacrifice.

Attacking the enemy,

Devouring our prey,

Excommunicating the stranger,

Slaughtering a scapegoat

Do not make us one.

We are one—

With one another and the gods,

With the enemy, the prey, the stranger, the scapegoat—

Clay lamps burning with the same divine starstuff

That prompts bowing in reverence and awe

Before one another.

To know more about how the book came to be, see my earlier post “Communion of Life.”

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by readers’ donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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Copyright © 2018 and Communion of Life copyright © 1999 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Communion of Life

Grant Park, where I often walk or run.

As a follow-up to last week’s post, “Thank You for the Body that Loves Me,” I present another meditation on our earthiness, another in a series of reflections from my earlier books that I hope may lift our spirits in this new year. The series opened with “Peace of Mind” and will continue throughout the season of Epiphany and, who knows, maybe beyond.

The late gifted editor Stephanie Egnotovich at Westminster John Knox Press helped me “birth” a number of books, for which I am grateful. In 1998, she came to me with an idea. Sitting next to someone on an airplane reading a kind of generic book on spirituality, she asked him about his selection. As I wrote in my acknowledgments of what became Communion of Life, “He explained [to her] that he had no religious background and was attempting to discover spirituality.”

“Why don’t you write something like that for spiritual seekers?” she asked me.

Not knowing this was a common plan for New Age books, I chose a mythology that no one would take literally, that everything consists of earth, air, water, fire. And I wrote 12 cycles of meditations on earth, air, water, and fire.

I was so self-conscious of this adventure that I showed them to no one until complete, and then only to Stephanie. She loved them, and took them to marketing at the Press. The marketing department loved them even more, she said, and though later admitting their limitations with this very different market, we proceeded with this experiment.

Stephanie herself paired my meditations with the outstanding art of National Geographic photographers, so I can honestly say without self-pride that Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium became the most visually beautiful book I’ve ever helped create.

Cycle Three: Day 9 Earth

Tangible earth,

You touch yourself through us.

We grasp your hand,

Stroke your fur,

Prune your branches,

Cast your stones,

Bury your seed,

Birth your children.

But it’s not just us,

It’s you in us.

You have developed your sense of touch

Within our bodies—

Communing through us

With air, water, fire,

In pleasure, buoyancy, and passion;

And communing through us with yourself

Delightedly, painfully, compassionately:

A communion of life

Giving rise to soul:

More than the sum of your parts.

Earth—in us, in me,

You have become sensual and sensitive.

Blessed earth!

Progressive Christian Reflections is entirely supported by reader donations. To support this blog: http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

Copyright © 2019 and Communion of Life copyright © 1999 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Thank God You Were Born!

"In your beginning..."

Or thank the cosmos!  Or evolution! Or your parents! Or “to whom it may concern”!

“Thank God you were born” is the message I often write on birthday cards or Facebook birthday messages. I intend it as my own thanksgiving for the birth of the person I’m greeting, but I realize it could be understood as a spiritual directive to the recipient as well.

As you might guess, this post is partly prompted by the American observance of Thanksgiving tomorrow, but it is mostly inspired by the words of an astronaut I heard last night watching PBS’s Beyond A Year in Space. Knowing the desert quality of much of the rest of the universe, seeing the “oasis” of planet Earth from afar, the astronaut said of life on earth, “When you’re born, you’re in heaven.”

Many of you know how much that sentiment resonates with me. In The Final Deadline: What Death Has Taught Me about Life, I wrote that if this is all there is, then, thanks be to God! But also, understanding that heaven is to be found in this life reminds me to see it, seek it, make it, create it, share it, and appreciate it.

I know that my suffering, though real and mine to claim, is minimal compared to the many who experience this life as hell through no fault of their own. But built in me is the ability for personal suffering to be turned into empathy and compassion for others. And I see this gift in those who have been through hell and back.

It was my own loneliness as a child and teenager that made me welcoming of others, to whatever extent I am. It was the denial of vocational goals and aspirations that made me wish better for future generations. It was the inequality and injustice I experienced personally that made equality and justice a wish for all, and prompted me to do what I could to help achieve it.

But this earth gave me a chance to breathe and to grow and feel pleasure and see beauty and hear harmony and dissonance, to know love, and to taste and see that life can be good. If and whenever these abilities are limited, there’s still a glimpse and a memory and a hope to sustain me, even inspire me.

It humbles me to know that dinosaurs reigned on this earth for 160 million years and were extinct for 66 million years before the evolution of mammals led to my distant ancestors. Humans almost seem like an afterthought or a blip in evolutionary time.

And it humbles me when I recognize our individual frailty and limits as I did last Wednesday sitting in a surgery waiting room as spouses and families and friends awaited word of their loved ones from their surgeons. Our time is brief, but oh-so-valuable, or all the more valuable.

A friend in mourning simply and respectfully described another’s death, “We all have a fragile grip on life, and she lost hers.” So, all the more reason to celebrate our birth days.

When I visited Nepal I learned that the local priest came to one’s house to offer a blessing the morning of one’s birthday. I can’t remember if the local priest was Hindu or Buddhist, but what a wonderful thing to emulate!

Birth days are a blessing, in and of themselves.

Thank God you were born!

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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

When Dinosaurs Fly (or The Taming of the Shrew)

In celebration of next month’s fifth anniversary of this blog, today and the Wednesdays of February I’ll provide a link to the most visited post of each year. For 2011, that would be: “Faggot”Jesus, with Put Yourself in the Nativity Story a close second.

Just for fun, I thought I’d post this dialogue that I wrote for Midtown Spiritual Community in Atlanta, presented on May 15, 2005. This is for the kid in all of us, a kind of Mardi Gras confection. I haven’t changed a word! You can tell I grew up watching Mr. Peabody’s Improbable History and Fractured Fairy Tales on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.

Narrator: Welcome to the primeval forest, inhabited by our evolutionary ancestors that have evolved out of the primordial soup which preceded it. Who woulda thought that such stinking slush could give rise to life? Even primitive forms?

Dinosaur: Hey! Who ya callin’ primitive?

Shrew: Do you have to talk so loud! You woke me up!

Dinosaur: I’m big, so I’m loud, you little shrew.

Shrew: I’m small, but I’m gonna outlive you!

Dinosaur: Who says?

Shrew: Natural selection.

Dinosaur: You mean “survival of the fattest”? Then I’m gonna outlast you and your pointy little snout.

Shrew: That’s survival of the fittest, not the fattest, you Darwinian failure! I’m going to evolve into something wonderful, I just know it.

Dinosaur: If Mother Nature can find you. You’re too small.

Shrew: And you’re too big!

Dinosaur: You’re doomed to eat insects and live in a tree the rest of your life.

Shrew: Maybe my life, but my descendants shall inherit the earth.

Dinosaur: The meek inheriting the earth. I say “ha”! I say “ha-ha”!

Shrew: You’ve gotta have dreams.

Dinosaur: My dreams are of leaving the planet.

Shrew: Becoming extinct?

Dinosaur: No, flying up in the sky. The last syllable of my name is “soar.” I want to soar in the skies.

Shrew: What’s a syllable?

Dinosaur: I don’t know. I don’t write this stuff.

Shrew: So, you’re going to fly?

Dinosaur: That’s my dream and I’m stickin’ to it.

Shrew: Why?

Dinosaur: I’m tired of throwin’ my weight around, that’s why. I’d like to be light as a feather.

Shrew: What’s a feather?

Dinosaur: See these things on my legs? Feathers!

Shrew: How’d you get them? Paste ‘em on?

Dinosaur: No. Born that way. Other dinosaurs made fun of me my whole life. Called me queer ‘cause I was different. But I see it as a step toward divinity.

Shrew: Divinity?

Dinosaur: God-like. To fly would be god-like. I want to be like the gods.

Shrew: What are gods?

Dinosaur: Those lights shining in the heavens at night. Those are gods. I want to reach for the stars!

Shrew: I bet my descendants will get there first.

Dinosaur: Oh what? [MOCKS:] Look, up in the sky! Is it a pterodactyl? A falling star? No, it’s Supershrew! Why would your descendants get there first? I already have feathers.

Shrew: But I already live in trees. And I can jump from branch to branch. It won’t be long before I sprout feathers too!

Dinosaur: What? A sort of “manifest destiny”? You shrews always had a cocky character.

Shrew: Look at you, you big lummox! How ya gonna get that tail off the ground?

Dinosaur: [LOOKS AT HER BEHIND] I’ll need a long runway, that’s for sure. Or a smaller caboose! [DREAMS:] I see myself becoming small and delicate and dainty. I want to sing rather than roar. I want to glide rather than stomp. I want to see far above and beyond this mucky swamp. I want to go south for the winter. [SIGHS]

Shrew: You wanna get smaller, and I wanna get bigger. [DREAMS:] I see myself becoming larger and smarter and powerful. I want to speak rather than squeak. I want to walk rather than crawl. I want to think outside this boxy swamp. And I too want to go south for the winter. [SIGHS] Oh well, I guess that will only happen when dinosaurs fly!

Dinosaur: You say that as if it ain’t gonna happen!

Shrew: I think your dreams are too big. Mine too. It’ll never happen!

Dinosaur: Ya gotta have faith.

Shrew: What’s faith?

Dinosaur: Faith is what I feel when I lay my eggs. I can’t see the next generation, but I know it’s there. Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Shrew: That has a nice ring to it. We gotta shoot for the stars, I guess.

Dinosaur: Either that or return to the muck. The sky’s the limit, and maybe not even that.

Narrator: And so Shrew and Dinosaur evolved happily ever after. The tree shrew evolved eventually into human beings, which may or may not be an improvement, and one can still see the mousy shrewishness in human eyes whenever they’re afraid of not surviving and become greedy and controlling. And, despite the megalomania of Shrew, Dinosaur’s descendants flew into the sky first, evolving into the birds of the air, and you can still see Dinosaur’s fierceness in the eyes of the hawk or the eagle or any mother bird protecting her nest. We have yet to see if human beings and birds will live happily ever after. And who knows what they’ll evolve into?

THE END

Here’s an earlier post appropriate for the beginning of presidential primary season in the U.S.: Gerasene Demoniac Announces Presidential Bid

Please support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description or by mailing to MCC, P.O. Box 50488, Sarasota FL 34232 USA, designating “Progressive Christian Reflections” in the memo area of your check or money order. Thank you!

Copyright © 2005 and 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.