Reformation of My Heart

Our friends and
neighbors Cathie
and CJ's hearts.

Like last week’s post, this entry from my book reflecting on the spiritual writings of Henri J. M. Nouwen might help us cope with the worldwide pandemic.

It makes no sense to preach the Gospel when I have allowed no time for my own conversion. –Henri Nouwen, The Primacy of the Heart, p 4.

Recently, during a retreat, someone described himself as a “square peg trying to fit into a round hole,” a metaphor with which many participants identified. But one retreatant who worked at a nineteenth-century historical site pointed out something new to us. In constructing a wooden building of that time, he explained, you wouldn’t want a round peg in a round hole because it could expand or contract, depending on temperature and moisture. It was actually better to have a square peg in a round hole to maintain the grip between the pieces.

In trying to fit into monastic life, Henri was a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. He was an extrovert with an introvert’s calling. But the monastic life had a grip on him even if it wasn’t a complete or comfortable fit. This might also be your experience. Not all of us fit a monastic life, but maybe that’s all the better for its firm grip upon us. We are all called to monastic reflection, that is, moments we set aside for contemplation. If we can do this daily, we are all the more blessed.

Retreats are how we are most likely to fit the monastic way of life into our busy lives. It is there we may listen to sacred texts and to one another in new ways, as well as listen to our own hearts, our own centers, and to the God of our hearts. Unprovidentially, many of us want our retreats as full and busy as our everyday lives, and we anticipate a schedule of uplifting, stimulating talks, or we bring many books to read or plan many tasks to accomplish. But we need to find idle time lest we be distracted by time-bound idols.

In a previous book, Reformation of the Heart, I described two insights offered by participants in two different Henri Nouwen retreats I led the year following his death, one at Kirkridge in Pennsylvania and the other at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico. At Kirkridge, a physical therapist explained that a wound has to heal from the inside out. At Ghost Ranch, a ceramic artist told us that, in spinning a pot, the shape of the inside determines the shape of the outside. So it is with the human heart. Our wounded hearts must heal from the inside out. And the gospel we proclaim is shaped by how we allow the good news of God’s love to shape our own hearts.

The truth is, however, that healing and love occur in the everyday events of our lives as well as on retreat or in what I call in my workshops “monastic moments,” brief opportunities to look inward. Healing and love may come to us in conversations with our friends, in caring for others, in serving a just cause, in catastrophic personal or public events, in life’s many interruptions, irritations, distractions, sorrows, and joys. Yet to have ears to hear, eyes to see, and hearts to feel, we need moments of quiet reflection to allow those many ways in which we experience healing and love to consciously convert our hearts so that we may be healers and lovers, better proclaiming the gospel.

+Heal my heart, so I may offer healing. Love my heart, so I may love.

I invite you to register and attend an online course/retreat I will be leading in September as part of the Spirituality Program of Columbia Theological Seminary entitled, “An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality.”

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Copyright © 2002 and 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite.

The Pandemic's "Monastic" Opportunity

I’ve postponed to next week a previous reflection about meditating on the psalms, a spiritual practice routinely followed in monasteries. But, given what I’m about to say, it may become all the more relevant.

Emails from blog readers and the cancellation or reconfiguration of local personal or religious gatherings has taught me how further isolating the coronavirus, or COVID-19, can be. To several readers, already isolated because of health or age or retirement, I’ve written this could be our “monastic” opportunity to experience the value of being “all-one” (where the word “alone” comes from) as well as resting in God, taking a break and a breath and a breather, especially important resisting a respiratory infection.

Those of you who have attended workshops or retreats or even committee meetings with me know my fondness for those present to take what I call “monastic moments” to consult their own hearts. I especially find this helpful when I pose a question or problem to a group and wish to avoid the person who speaks first distracting us from our own answers or solutions. A moment of silence allows each one of us to prepare our own thoughts and feelings for sharing with the group.

We need more moments of silence to consider who we are and whose we are—and here I don’t just mean God, but our spouses, our families, our communities of faith and otherwise, everything from our neighborhoods and cities to our countries and our environment.

The limitations prompted by our present pandemic offer each one of us a very personal “existential crisis”—a phrase much bandied about in our political debates these days. We are given an occasion to ponder vital questions: Why are we here? What do we value most? Who do we want to become? What do we believe in? Whom do we love? What do we live for?

Many of us need more than a monastic “moment” to consider if not answer these questions. We need a contemplative retreat, a temporary withdrawal from our busy world of interactions, entertainment, nonstop news, activities, and problem-solving. This may be our 40-day sojourn in a wilderness, our valley of the shadow of death to recognize that God is with us—even here.

And, I would say, we need a retreat “leader,” a guide, someone whose spiritual counsel we trust. Right now, mine is Kathleen Norris and her book The Cloister Walk. Over the years, my retreat leaders have included Henri Nouwen, Thich Nhat Hanh, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, The Dalai Lama, Richard Rohr, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther King, Barbara Brown Taylor, Mahatma Gandhi, Evelyn Underhill, Thomas Merton, and especially Jesus—to name a handful of hundreds of guides who have taught me something about myself, about God, about you, about our world.

Who is your “go-to” spiritual guide whose writings you may once again dive into in your social distancing? You don’t have to find yourself alone.

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Copyright © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. 

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.

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

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

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

"Listen Up!"

For fun, I asked Wade to take this staged photo 

of me "meditating" in South Africa last August!

Benedictine monk John Main has reminded me of something I first learned reading one of Gore Vidal’s historical novels. Reading silently to oneself became a thing only in recent centuries. “The spoken word is the essential medium for the communication of the gospel,” Main wrote in 1982, the year he died. He explains:

…To meditate is to listen to the word. In the early days of our literate culture, the link between the book and the spoken word was not broken—St. Benedict warns his monks not too read too loudly while at their private lectio; and St. Augustine was reading aloud from his Bible when his great awakening occurred. Today our books are too private experiences that rarely communicate themselves to others. --Letters from the Heart: Christian Monasticism and the Renewal of Community, p 19.

I did not intend to offer two spiritual imperatives in a row on this blog. Last week’s “Be Still!” was a reflection on another book of Main’s. I ran across both books on my shelves, having no idea how I came by them and why I haven’t read them till now. This second one has a bookmark from Newman Bookstore in Baltimore, so maybe I purchased them on a speaking trip there, one of my favorite cities. If someone gave them to me, I thank them!

In a conversation about speed reading with fellow English majors in college, I remember now retired Episcopal priest Gary Hall commenting how we needed to “hear” literature at least in our heads to get the full effect intended by an author, as we were not reading simply for information. Tom Boomershine has argued the same for scripture, coaching readers in the art of re-telling rather than simply reading a text. Oral transmission was the original way many of these stories and teachings were “traditioned,” or passed on, after all.

John Main suggests “that tradition becomes just a historical memory when it is not one with personal experience.” That’s why I often invite listeners to hear a biblical text as personally addressed to them.

One of my novice mistakes was asking the brothers at Mt. Calvary Retreat House not to read to retreatants from my then congregation during mealtimes, explaining that one of the reasons church members go on retreat is a chance to talk among themselves. I had no idea I was denying those church members the monastic experience of listening.

I’ve written that the most challenging monastic vow for me would be that of “obedience,” thinking little of how the word obedience comes from a word meaning “to listen,” to attend to what another is saying.

We use the phrase “listen up” when we want to convey something vital, something important, possibly urgent. How true this is also of things spiritual.

For Main, in his other book, Word into Silence, silence is needed to catch the deepest cries, ahas, and awes of our hearts, of our world, of our universe. He writes, “The qualities we need in this fundamental encounter between ourselves and the ground of our being are attentiveness and receptivity.” [p 34] Main later adds:

The understanding of prayer that makes it merely a matter of telling God what we want or need and reminding God of our sins of omission only compounds our alienation from reality. For this was the liberating message Jesus came to bring: “I bid you put away anxious thought about food and drink to keep you alive and clothes to cover your body. Surely life is more than food, the body more than clothes (Matthew 6:25).” [p 65]

Main writes that the Lord’s Prayer was “a series of rhythmic phrases in the original Aramaic,” thus memorable. I have found each phrase can serve as a centering word, a mantra. Mine lately has been “Thy kingdom come.”

Along with other centering prayer advocates, Main believes such a mantra can quiet the mind and welcome a “reverential silence.”

Please check out the related posts, “Be Still!” and “Be Careful!”

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.

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

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

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

An Early Christian #MeToo and #TimesUp Movement

Reading Laura Swan’s The Forgotten Desert Mothers as the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and the like-minded #TimesUp movement (that also includes equal opportunity for women and minorities) were getting underway, I couldn’t help but notice the parallels with the women who, alongside the Desert Fathers, went out into the desert to pray, only to be overlooked and overshadowed by a patriarchal version of church history.

I am re-reading Swan’s book in preparation for co-leading a contemplative retreat with Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program director Debra Weir, which I referenced  in last week’s post. It is one of two texts we selected for the course, the other being Thomas Merton’s Contemplative Prayer.

It does not in any way diminish their genuine religious devotion to be struck by how many of the women evaded sexual abuse, forced or arranged marriages, and culturally-expected duties of women in the fourth and fifth centuries by pursuing their callings/vocations. And though, like MeToo and TimesUp, it was often women of privilege and wealth and education who initiated the exodus from mistreatment and exploitation, the monastic communities they founded became refuges for the poor, the sick, the marginalized, orphaned, abandoned, mistreated, and homeless.

Meeting recently with Debra for planning our retreat, I told her I was in awe how much the women sacrificed to follow the Christian way of giving up their possessions, land, and financial resources to the poor, denying themselves even the simplest luxuries like beds, food, and other-than-simple clothing for the sake of their spirituality and their sense of justice.

Some of them cross-dressed to escape and avoid detection, joining male monastic communities as supposed eunuchs, or traveling to distant and unfamiliar places where they were unknown. Others simply resisted their family’s wishes and practiced their asceticism in the family home or on family-owned property. Many led their family members into Christian faith and practices themselves.

Unlike their male counterparts, fewer of their sayings have been preserved in the church’s memory, but what is preserved is their benevolence, their service to others, saintly attributes, and sincere devotion.

Quoting Joan M. Petersen, “Their delight was in self-control; their glory was to be unknown; their wealth was to possess nothing… Their work…consisted only of attention to the things of God, prayer without ceasing, and the uninterrupted chanting of the Psalms.” The “things of God” included the upbuilding of the Christian community and its ministry to the world in the name of Jesus, serving “the least of these.”

Decades ago John Boswell taught me that LGBT people of earlier times were drawn to monastic communities for similar reasons. These were places where they were not expected to marry, and where they could find opportunities to serve the greater good. Though Boswell recognized the church had a patriarchal bias in terms of its leadership and teachings and history, he questioned the impression that it was only men who shaped the church and its theology. Men who dominated the culture and religion, he observed, were reared by women, taught by women, related to women, influenced by women, sometimes married to women, and served in spiritual communities alongside women.

One of multiple examples of this was how Gregory of Nyssa, considered one of the early Christian theologians, was absolutely influenced and inspired by Macrina the Younger, his elder sister, who encouraged his baptism and his memorialization of her community’s monastic way of life in the Short and Long Rules. Macrina was following in her grandmother’s footsteps, Macrina the Elder, who worked closely with the local bishop. According to Swan, he and his brother Basil “acknowledged [Macrina the Younger] as the primary influence in their theological education, and each finally embraced ascetic and monastic observance.”

When the church became entwined, sometimes strangled, by the culture of the Roman empire, the Desert Mothers and Fathers sought to “re-member” the Christian community’s countercultural roots. After all, its teacher, Jesus, was executed by Rome; it faced accusations of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6); its acts of compassion contradicted a worldview of self-interest; and it suffered persecution for refusing to bow to the gods of Rome, including the emperor, considered a god. Christians then were considered “atheistic” because they believed in only one God!

#MeToo and #TimesUp are countercultural movements that resist a world in which women are demeaned and exploited. In a church that has often followed the culture’s lead in the treatment of women, these movements should remind us of our own countercultural roots in which we are “no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female…for all of you are one… (Galatians 3:28).”

Related Post: “Peace! Be Still!” 

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

Beside Still Waters

This week marks the seventh anniversary of beginning this weekly blog!

 “Be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred.”

Try this on for Lent, the forty day period leading to Holy Week, which begins today, Ash Wednesday:

“Be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred.”

How long has it been since you allowed your Good Shepherd to give you rest in green pastures beside still waters, restoring your soul? The “still waters” of the 23^rd Psalm are waters gentle enough to drink from to safely quench our thirst; the Hebrew means “waters of rest.”

To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.

O my God, in you I trust.

Nothing compares to a contemplative retreat in a monastic setting, surrounded by fellow pilgrims and an authentic monastic community. Trying to capture that ethos once more, I read again the reflections I wrote after a men’s contemplative retreat at St. Bernard Abbey in Cullman, Alabama, and a Hildegard of Bingen retreat at Sacred Heart Monastery, also in Cullman.

The respective experiences elevated not only my spirit but my prose, and I’m certain this post will pale in comparison—both to the experience and to the poetry required to capture the rhythms of words, songs, and silence of a monastic community.

O Lord, open thou my lips.

And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

Especially welcomed to join the sisters in the chancel area of the church at Sacred Heart, and given their gentle guidance in saying the offices that punctuate their day, helped us taste the pleasure and the power of reciting psalms and prayers together. We thus stepped carefully into a stream of a centuries-old tradition.

As I wrote in one of my papers, the contemplative retreat unveiled again for me how the multitude feeds the boy with the modest lunch, the reverse of the boy whose peasant’s lunch fed the multitude through the blessing of Jesus. I felt surrounded and nourished by “so great a cloud of witnesses.”

When we are listening, God speaks to us in a myriad of ways, and God was echoing all over the place at both monasteries and their grounds. Silence, scripture, songs, lectio divina, the Daily Office, readings, prayers, homilies, teachings, and conversations offered me voices from the past (memories, tradition, spiritual guides) as well as from the present (fellow pilgrims, colleagues, fellowship). Even the silence was deafening. And outside, the sounds, smells, sights, breezes, warmth of day, coolness of evening of the natural setting completed the feel of God’s embrace.

The afternoon that began our 24 hours of silence midway through the contemplative retreat, I spent much longer in the sanctuary of the church than I imagined I would. I pleasured in the profound silence. I started constructing my final paper in my mind, but then reminded myself that this was not what the silence was for.

The silence was simply to be unconstructively in the presence of the sacred. To be “useless.” To welcome the “schola” (“free time”) of “scholar.”

That silence unveiled a second kind of silence for me, the need for Sabbath, a time of no work, no activity, no planning, only recreating, allowing myself to be re-created and refreshed and renewed, hopefully in God’s presence. Since that experience, I’ve given myself some slack in my ever-present need for accomplishment, turning off my laptop to avoid work and the internet from time to time, relaxing my workouts and runs, reading more for fun than I’ve done in the past.

Peace! Be still!

Be still and know that I am God.

Come, join us beside the still waters of the Sacred Heart Monastery April 30-May 4, 2018. I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat with Debra Weir, Beside Still Waters, to which you are welcome. For more information, click on the title or copy and paste into your browser: 
https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x2611000212a

For previous posts to read for Lent, click on or copy into your browser:
https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com/search?q=lent  (Scroll down for multiple posts. At the end of the collection you will find a couple of posts included simply because they used the word "lent"!)

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Or mail 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 © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.  

Self-Examination and Childhood Quirks

With Celtic Cross at Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta.

Photo by Wade Jones

This weekend I am looking forward to seeing those of you coming to Kirkridge for its Celebration of LGBTQ Lives over the past 40 years. One or two places are available, but call rather than register on the site: http://www.kirkridge.org/?e=event&eventId=26746&rDate=1504878949

My recent post critiquing white supremacy prompted a reader to provide a link to his Facebook post about his own white privilege. It was a remarkable self-examination, profoundly confessional, that would inspire all white people to consider our unearned advantages in this world. I believe his thoroughgoing analysis can lead to positive action.

But I have known others stymied by over-analyzing themselves, and I have tried to avoid this myself.

I had a friend in a congregation I served who had trouble committing himself to any church event, program, or mission. He would always say, “I’m re-examining my priorities.” He would miss or leave early or show up late for a meeting or day-long workshop or weekend retreat because he could never fully commit himself. Even when he enjoyed a long-term relationship, he and his partner had date nights for outside encounters.

When I was a child I had what my family kindly referred to as a benign “quirk,” occasionally looking up for no apparent reason. It was only toward the end of my mother’s life that I explained why. Every time I had a sinful or uncharitable thought, I would look up to God, asking forgiveness.

It is said that Martin Luther was so fastidious accounting for his sins that his confessor grew frustrated and impatient. It was this very obsessive practice that may have led him to his breakthrough about being saved by faith in God’s grace alone.

I had to give up my childhood quirk for similar reasons. Not only was it burdensome, but one I had to practice surreptitiously in public, even though I attended a Christian school, lest I be written off as just too weird! I had to trust God’s grace.

According to Thomas Merton, though examinations of conscience were practiced by Stoics and Pythagoreans, and played a role in Rabbinical and Muslim spirituality, it did not appear to play a role in early Christianity.  After the twelfth century it began to play a much larger role.

In between, after the Roman Emperor Constantine’s embrace of the faith in the fourth century, self-examination seemed needful as church and world colluded and collided.

Merton writes in Mystics and Zen Masters: 

St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Gregory recommend a daily examination of conscience. Yet St. Gregory attributes more importance to habitual self-custody, living in the presence of God, and a general spirit of prayer, than to psychological self-analysis at fixed times (p 160-1; italics Merton’s). 

He claims that the monastic tradition emphasized “discernment of spirits” to reign in “passionate thoughts from which faults may arise,” rather than “examination of dubious psychological motives” after a fault has been committed.

What I substituted for my quirk of “looking up” was beginning my day in prayer and not concluding my prayer with “Amen,” so I was in God’s presence all day. I had no idea that I was practicing St. Gregory’s “habitual self-custody, living in the presence of God, and a general spirit of prayer.”

I can guess what you, the reader, are making of all this: “What a spiritually precocious child!” Or, “What an obsessively religious child.”

But, rather than precocious or obsessive, spiritual or religious, I think I—as a fearful, introverted, sensitive, and queer child—was simply looking for the safety of God’s presence.

The truth is, I always know God is present, even when or especially when that challenges my thinking or behavior, actions or attitudes. In my better times, I also “feel” God’s presence.

Thus I find Celtic spirituality to my liking in its emphasis on “thin places” on earth where heaven and the sacred can be revealed and witnessed, and I am grateful for body- and earth-centered spiritualities that resist separating spirituality from bodily and earthly experience, and I appreciate the mythological import of the stories of Creation and Incarnation and Resurrection which all recognize the holiness of our bodies and our earth, and I am thankful for liberation theologies which challenge me to seek justice for every body and all creation.

I confess my sins have all come from my failures to recognize God in all, including myself.

With colleague Debra Weir, I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat open to all April 30-May 4, 2018, at Sacred Heart Monastery in Cullman, Alabama, entitled “Beside Still Waters.” Sacred Heart is a welcoming community and a beautiful place. Please come!

Please support this blog ministry: 

http://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

Be sure to scroll down to the donate link below its description.

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

Monastic Vows

Thank you for the record number of visits and responses to last week’s post, “Married at Last!” and the “likes” and comments on Facebook about my birthday and our wedding!

I am passionate in my admiration for the contemplative life. I could not have done what I have done as a gay activist both in the church and the culture were it not for my morning prayers and personal retreats, times to bask in God’s unconditional, overwhelming, and transformational love.

And I have always had a rather romanticized desire to be a part of a monastic community. I believe I could handle most of the vows required of monastics.

I’ve got poverty down, having been self-employed doing free-lance church work, including writing and speaking and editing, for most of my career, and now writing a free weekly blog with a large readership whose donations so far this year total just $850.

And the vow of stability required by some monastic communities would also be within my reach, being an introvert and a creature of habit as well as being loyal and steadfast.

Those who know me or have read my books may find this difficult to believe, but I could even handle celibacy or chastity.

But to take a vow of obedience would be for me most challenging of all.

In birth order theory, being the youngest of my family, I would be the revolutionary, the rebel, even the prodigal. While I’m not quite all that—after all, I’m the only child of my parents whose vocation has been upholding their Christian faith—yet I am a progressive Christian, which means I resist being told what I have to believe and how to behave!

What helps me is understanding that the word “obedience” itself comes from a root word meaning “to listen,” and I’m pretty competent at that, not only as a pastor and friend, but also as one whose prayers are more about listening than speaking.

One could say that the Christian vow of “obedience” is much like the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” Jesus commanded us to “watch,” or “watch and pray,” as he asked of his disciples in Gethsemane, seeking always God’s will and God’s way and God’s commonwealth.

Years ago, I found myself praying to God, “Bring me closer to you,” but then I quickly added, “But not through anything bad.” Much of spiritual intimacy is predicated on suffering, when spiritual intimacy is provided to alleviate suffering. Jesus healed the masses with his hands and his words, words that reminded them of God’s benevolence, giving us life and love, mercy and grace.

My mother was the first to encourage my reading of monastics, just as she did much of her life. But it was not until the 84^th and final year of her life that she told me, “You know, I’ve always believed God loves us all, but I only recently have come to believe that God loves me personally.”

Surprised, I said, “Mom, haven’t you been reading all my books?!”

For her, this was a kind of a spiritual “arrival.”

It may just take me 84 years of life to fully believe it myself.

Find out how to support this blog ministry by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you! Donations of $100 or more will receive a gift signed copy of my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium.

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

Lauds and Lost

A week ago today I walked toward the St. Bernard Abbey Church for 6 a.m. lauds, the morning service of the Benedictine monastery in Cullman, Alabama hosting a weeklong men’s monastic retreat led by Carl McColman under the auspices of the Spiritual Formation Program of Columbia Theological Seminary.

Then I saw the sun’s first rays midst the mists arising from the pond just to the left of the doors I approached, casting in profile an empty, inviting bench on its shore, as in the picture above, taken the next morning when the mists were not quite as billowy. Mists are a mystical draw for many, accounting for the covers of many books on the spiritual life, including my own Communion of Life, maybe because mist is iconic for divine mystery and metaphor for the unfathomable.

Surrounded by greenery of trees and shrubs and grasses, I sat on the bench awaiting the full penetration through these mists of the light of the red morning sun on the horizon beneath an otherwise clear blue sky.  I heard the day’s opening praise of diverse birds and insects: warbling, chirping, quacking, whooping, thrumming, buzzing, whirring, shrieking, as well as the occasional plip-plop from some unseen and unknown water creatures.

The incense of the day was a blend of recently cut grass, distant manure, brackish water, wisteria, and dewy freshness. I looked down at my feet to discover a mosaic of moss, roots, sandy soil, seed casings, stones, grass, and shimmering water. I took deep breaths not only with my lungs but with all of my senses.

O Lord, open thou my lips.

And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

The next morning during our full day of silence I went for a run through the forests of the monastery’s extensive grounds. I began near the pond as a long, thick snake quickly slithered across my path from shore to shrubs, my first sign of danger on the grounds. For the remainder of my run, I carefully scanned the path in front of me and avoided planting my feet in piles of leaves or thick grasses that might conceal another unwanted surprise.

The paths were wide and shady, and seemed well-marked, giving me a false sense of confidence. Monastic modesty prevented stripping off my shirt till I was well into the woods. Passing two fellow retreatants further assured me that these trails were friendly. Following “The Big Loop,” I assumed it would provide an ample run as well as a safe return to civilization, emboldening me to take a narrower side path that diverged from the main trail.

But that was not my first mistake.

My first mistake was not looking at the map of the trails provided in the guest house. I’ve walked and run solo many a trail, from my days in a junior high nestled among foothills to high school and college walks, hikes, and runs on the cliffs, beaches, mountains, and deserts of California, and since, in multiple venues that travels and speaking trips have afforded. But as I passed again and again the same landmarks, uncertain where to turn or run, I grimly noted the irony that this is also what happens in the spiritual life. We fail to check the maps others have provided.

I was lost.

Adding to the challenge was one stretch of road I passed along several times where a buzzing bee or wasp, presumably protecting a nearby hive or nest, kept bumping into me, buzzing my face, shoulders, and chest. The last time I was stung, though by an African hornet, my entire body broke out in scary, reptilian scale-like hives, rushed to a hospital by an EMS unit. My EpiPen was home in Atlanta. I used my t-shirt to keep brushing it away, careful not to do so violently enough to prompt it to sting, ultimately sprinting for all I was worth each time I passed.

I knew I had to go downhill, but the rivulets where waters had run were misleading, as were the up-and-down trails. The main stream was my clue to the flatlands, but I was not always beside it. I had (unintentionally) been running more than two hours, so the sun was directly overhead, unable to give me direction. Earlier I had followed a trail labeled “Farm Road,” which I presumed led to the farm on the grounds of the monastery, but I had been dissuaded to pursue it by an official-looking locked gate with no pedestrian access through or around it.

Now I was trying to find that gate again, but I couldn’t quite remember where I had passed it. Intuition told me that road would lead me home.

I broke my silence and said loudly, “Can anybody hear me?” hoping that someone else was on one of the nearby trails. In a whisper I prayed, “Please God help me!”

O God, make speed to save us.

O Lord, make haste to help us.

Following a counter-intuitive urge, I went a different way on this road too often travelled and stumbled onto the gate again. This time I ignored its authority, climbed it and ran further down the road. Soon I was rewarded by the sound of a passing car. I came upon a highway, and across a field, saw three people consulting over farm equipment. One of them crossed the field to give me directions. I was four miles from the monastery.

I began running, but fearful of dehydration, also thumbed for a ride. Though my shirt was back on, how many people want to pick up a sweaty runner? Finally a local man looking for work offered me a ride. Though the evidence was clear he enjoyed smoking, my gasping lungs were grateful he chose not to. After driving me deep into the monastery grounds, out of his way, he offered me his hand and said his name was Lance Jones. I told him I would pray he finds a job. 

I will never forget his name.

Because we were still observing silence, I went directly to lunch unable immediately to tell my companions about my fearful adventure. No one knew I had been lost. One of my fears had been that, when I was finally missed, they would have to waste time to find me.

O God, come to my assistance.

And my mouth shall show forth thy praise.

+ + +

I will be guest preacher during this coming Sunday’s 11 a.m. worship of Ormewood Park Presbyterian Church in Atlanta.

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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.

Finding Walden Where You Are

I offer an excerpt from my paper for a Christian Poetry weekend course I recently took through the Spiritual Formation program of Columbia Seminary. The paper was to be about one’s own spiritual pilgrimage. 

Writing is my central spiritual discipline. Kathleen Norris considers writing her form of lectio divina. This is where and when and how I figure out the why and the who. The word “saunter” is believed to come from the practice of spiritual pilgrims meandering here and there on their way to holy sites, and that’s what I do, in words, hoping that I might happen onto a sacred place or two in the process, perhaps encounter God, or the Word made flesh, or the Spirit’s pentecostal gift.

I do not outline beforehand, I do not “plan” the outcome, but “wait for the Lord” and the serendipitous gifts of water from rock, manna from sky, quails overhead, a still, small voice or “the sound of sheer silence,” the providential beauty of lilies, the promised land and commonwealth of God, the birthpangs of all creation.

Like Emily Dickinson, I don’t need to go somewhere to witness these wonders—I experience them in my room, in my case, a tiny office off the garage with a window to see outside. I identify with Mary Oliver’s reaction to friends suggesting she visit Walden, in her poem of that name.  I checked Mapquest and found she lives just three hours from Thoreau’s paradise, the transcendentalist prophet whom Oliver characterizes:

They do not hear that far-off Yankee whisper:

How dull we grow from hurrying here and there!

She resists making the trip, realizing she can do so in her imagination, reminded by his book of that name:

Going to Walden is not so easy a thing

As a green visit. It is the slow and difficult

Trick of living, and finding it where you are.

I understand her resistance to friends’ suggestions she go there, because some of my friends have suggested I visit the monastery in nearby Conyers, when indeed, I live in some ways a more monastic lifestyle than if I had been a monk! Such is the life of the writer, the self-employed, those who work from home. 

And besides, as I tell those attending my workshops and retreats, the “trick” is finding Walden “where you are,” finding the contemplative life within one’s own space and schedule and work.

Progressive Christian Reflections is an authorized Emerging Ministry of MCC supported solely by readers. Please click here to make a tax-deductible donation. Thank you!

Consider using a post or quotes in personal reflection, worship, newsletters, and classes, referencing the blog address when possible: http://chrisglaser.blogspot.com.

Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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

Jesus: Introvert or Extrovert?

Reading Susan Cain’s book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, was like coming up for air! Or eating an entire box of See’s chocolates at one sitting, enjoying every morsel! As one friend said to me on Facebook, reading the book was her own “coming out” experience.

You see, I am an introvert who nonetheless manages to play the extrovert—I do enjoy people, after all—but then needs a rest, alone, in quiet, probably why I’m a promoter of contemplation. Throughout my life, however, I have felt constantly compared to what Cain calls “The Extrovert Ideal,” sometimes by my own hand, and sometimes at the hands of others, including American culture and the church. For example, I realize now that preaching or even speaking from a manuscript is not deficient, as I have been told, but my strength. Oh, for President Obama’s teleprompters!

Acknowledging the need for both extroverts and introverts, Cain, an introvert, strikes a blow (though that’s usually an extrovert’s temperament) for the necessity of introverts. Studies suggest that introverts are usually “high-reactives” to stimuli, and thus need to limit our exposure. Another word that is used is “sensitive.” We need time to observe, reflect, and consider situations, people, and events prior to speaking or taking action.

That’s why I insist on a “monastic moment” of silence when I pose a question to people in a workshop or retreat, a moment to turn inward, consult one’s own experience and feelings and thoughts, before opening general discussion. My experience has been that others are quick to express their thoughts before I have had a chance to consult my own experience. I thought Sir Thomas More’s Utopia had it right when its legislature vigorously debated a concern but waited till the next day to take action! Cain writes, “Congress…is made up of some of the least sensitive people in the country” because to get elected and re-elected virtually requires an extrovert’s temperament.

That’s also why I wrote a post two weeks ago about experiencing spiritual community outside of church, what I had thought of calling “spirituality for loners.” Several pastors took me to task on Facebook, though in previous posts I have acknowledged that church and worship are worthy spiritual disciplines.  But as I have discovered the need for silence in my own spiritual practices, I have looked for more silence in worship, and when it is interrupted or when worship gets raucous it sounds to me like fingernails scratching a chalkboard. And I reclaim words I found appealing in college, words from Alfred North Whitehead, “Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness.”

The post opened me to pleasant conversation with Sam Troxal, a young and gifted blogger, and with a role model pastor and author, J. Barrie Shepherd. Barrie, a regular reader of this blog (I am proud to say), has written many books of poetry whose daily rhythms encouraged me to pray regularly long ago. I appreciate the fact that in poetry, pauses are as vital as words, and an economy of words are carefully, thoughtfully selected to convey exactly what is intended. In my book of “secular” poetic meditations, Communion of Life, I called poets “secular mystics.”

Barrie sent me his recent book, Between Mirage and Miracle: Selected Poems for Seasons, Festivals, and the Occasional Revelation, urging me to read his poem about church, “Why I Still Go,” which meaningfully concludes: 

For all my weary, reasoned doubt,

the continuing disillusion and despair

of this already blood-drenched century,

for all my anger at her blind echoing

of the worst that hides in all of us,

come Sunday morning, somehow,

I still find myself in church.

I have questioned whether it is the church’s “blind echoing” of prejudice against LGBT people that prompts me to seek other counsel and other forms of worship. But it is also true that the expected conformity and the lack of silence and gentle voices are also factors. And what presents itself as teamwork, collaboration, or democratic process is too often an opportunity for extroverts—sometimes with less experience and expertise, or worse, less compassion and wisdom—to outtalk and occasionally bully others! 

So I’ve been wondering about whether Jesus was an introvert or an extrovert. Obviously I may be projecting, but I believe he was an introvert. He was certainly a “high reactive” to religious hypocrisy and “sensitive” to religious outcasts. When tempted in his solitary sojourn in the wilderness by relevance, sensationalism, and power, he resisted. Though followed by multitudes seeking healings and teachings, he found lonely places to pray or a boat from which to preach. He called 12 disciples, and taught them privately. Perhaps it was the temperament of being introverts that Jesus shared with “the disciple whom Jesus (especially) loved” who gave us the most mystical gospel. But without extroverts like Peter and Paul, the world may not have been evangelized.

That may be the power of the Spirit, that gives even introverts the gift of speech. Yet it is also the Spirit’s gift to hear God’s voice in “the sound of sheer silence” that follows the storm, the earthquake, and the fire.

Copyright © 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. Check out past posts in the right rail on the blogsite.

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