Thank God for Science and Religion!

Homemade sign in a neighbor's yard.

Sunday night I had a dream about anticipating a college science exam the next morning and being unprepared—unstudied of class notes and unread of class texts. It’s the standard post-school nightmare that I haven’t had for decades.

I guessed the cause was my plan to write this post Monday about Jeremy Narby’s book, Intelligence in Nature: An Inquiry into Knowledge, which I’ve referenced in two recent posts. There was a quote I needed to find which required my rereading all my underlined and checked segments—as it turned out, a delight for my morning prayers that day.

Those who know me as an activist, author, and minister may be surprised that in high school I was a member of Phy-Chem-Bios, my high school science club. What may surprise others, given the present (and I’d say ludicrous) divides between science and religion is that our faculty advisor was both science teacher and an evangelical Christian, one so dedicated that he had qualms about his future family inheritance of a nationally-known beer company, given his abstinence.

(One of my biggest “aha’s” reading Karen Armstrong’s A History of God was how scientists of times past were often people of faith, especially in Islam.)

The awesome insight I wanted to share with you was “that the human brain has many times more connections than stars in our galaxy” [p126]. That’s an “aha” from the inside out, or rather, way, way beyond!

The human brain…contains about one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. Each neuron can form thousands of links with other neurons [p126].

Furthermore, the brain is not limited to the skull. My gut alone contains about one hundred million neurons capable of learning, remembering, and responding to emotions, just like the larger brain in my head [p129]. … Having a gut feeling is not just a metaphor [p130].

Admittedly, this may be dated science, given the 2005 publication date, but it still gives me appropriate pause to wonder at the universe. I’ve remarked before about feeling the weight of billions of years of Big Bang stardust coalescing into stars and planets and systems that can give rise to life and its subsequent evolutions, including you and me.

I think of all the neurons I have wasted!

The word “religion” has a verbal ancestor meaning “to bind” together, and there are many ways to be bound—by conviction, community, commitment, commonality. For believers, Creation is added to the list.

Narby is not a creationist but rather appears to believe that matter and energy have a lifeward direction, life that requires inherent intelligence of some kind. And viewing other creatures as mere machines denies our material relationship with them, giving rise to exploitation, abuse, misuse, and more. Calling him a “shaman among scientists” [p49], Narby credits Darwin for demonstrating that relationship through his discernment of evolution.

Recent squabbles for “personal freedom” as science recommends wearing face masks and social distancing to prevent further spread of the novel coronavirus reminds me of the HIV/AIDS pandemic when a few, citing “pandemic fatigue,” claimed their personal freedom to ignore safe sex practices.

As an activist described this “right” to an audience, Roman Catholic scholar Daniel Helminiak became distraught and finally spoke out, “If you get infected, you will expect others to care for you, friends and family and volunteers, first responders and health care workers. And you will prompt rising costs of health insurance and health care that fewer will be able to afford.”

Religion and science remind us that we are all in this together, that we belong together, bound together in this marvelous universe and this most amazing life.

 

Related Posts:

In Memory of Trees

Contemplation in Science

Donations to Progressive Christian Reflections may be given safely by clicking here and scrolling down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

House Arrest

On my office file cabinet I have a magnet that scolds, “You’ve been bad. Go to your office!”

Of course this echoes what some of us heard as children, “You’ve been bad. Go to your room!” The isolation, the confinement, and the implied restrictions served as punishment to dissuade us from bad behavior. In more recent times it was called a “time out.”

In the olden days, when I was growing up, it meant no television, no telephone, no play, and for some, no dinner—this in the days when there was only one TV and one phone in the house, and no devices on which to play games or watch something in your room. Do we mistake our present isolation as a kind of punishment?

This is how those most privileged among us might experience the “stay-at-home” confinement of our worldwide pandemic. A slight inconvenience, but a nagging reminder of the dangers of our footloose-and-fancy-free days when we could do just about anything we wanted.

It reminds me of when I was once shushed by a favored aunt as a little boy. Me, trying to be the best-little-boy-in-the-world, an offender?! How could this be?

Now, don’t get me wrong. As an introvert, I appreciate time alone or time with a few. As a spiritual person, I know I am not alone, but surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses before God. As a reader, I enjoy hearing from all kinds of people. As a writer, I am gratified to have people read my stuff. Even this post I feared would sound like whining!

But I’m writing this because I know I am not the only one who feels discombobulated by the necessity of social distancing, limited physical contact, and fearful interactions. When I go to buy our groceries, I feel as if I’m on a risky venture. When I don my mask and sometimes gloves, I feel like I’m getting ready for a walk in space.  

I couldn’t bring myself to watch the prison drama series, Orange Is the New Black, because I find the idea of imprisonment depressing. The earlier prison drama series, Oz, also didn’t appeal to me, despite its erotic male content.

Long ago I had a dream in which I found myself in prison, cut off from all those people I cared about and cared about me. I thought, well, with so much time on my hands, I could get a lot of reading done! But, in the dream, I was too depressed to pick up a book.

Maybe all this reminds me of my years in the closet as a gay youth. Maybe it’s reminiscent of the limitations of an early adolescent political conservatism that was transformed by education and compassion and maturity. Undoubtedly it smacks of the confining Christian fundamentalism that held me down and held me back from truly enjoying the world and even enjoying myself until I was in college.

The apostle Paul had his own fundamentalism to overcome, one that prompted his initial persecution of liberalizing Christians. And he purportedly produced one of his finest epistles while under house arrest in Rome: Ephesians. Concerned with the partisanship within the early church, he eloquently argued that now, in following Jesus, Christians were one, overcoming any “dividing wall of hostility.” 

I pray those who believe in a fair and just representative democracy may share such a vision of unity in our present state of house arrest.

  

Related posts:

“Where Is Everybody?”

The Pandemic’s Monastic Opportunity

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program with Zoom sessions September 17-19, 2020 entitled 

An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. 

You are invited! The site’s dates include “reading weeks” beginning August 31^st in which you are invited to comment on the texts for the retreat and a final day “Sabbath” for rest and reflection on September 20^th.

Donations to this blog ministry may be given safely 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 © 2020 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

Creating Space

Fashion for social distancing?

When I first heard of social distancing to limit the spread of COVID-19, I thought we could bring back hoop skirts to keep others at a six-foot distance!  😉

“Creating space” was a common phrase among therapists and pastors alike when I was in seminary in the mid-70’s. Creating a welcoming environment for another was the intent of the metaphor. A form of this is what is now called “safe space,” and in olden days called “sanctuary.”

Our counseling professor illustrated this with a juvenile court assignment of a child who resisted any verbal interaction with him. The boy would simply wander around the office looking at things, playing with various items. Finally, Dr. Brown told him that he would be assigning him to another therapist. Upset, the boy insisted, “But I like coming here.” Asked why, the boy explained, “Because you’re the only grownup that leaves me alone!”

In the present pandemic of easy contamination, when we can’t “kiss it and make it better” nor offer “warm hugs” of comfort, creating space becomes all the more vital, as in “life-giving” or “life-preserving.”

A couple of years ago I wrote a blogpost about the hugs exchanged within our former congregation in greeting and departing and passing the peace.  What I’ve since discovered in our new church start is that younger people are less so inclined. There are still huggers, of course, but I’ve learned the discomfort of some who prefer another form of greeting, and rather than appear a sort of old vampire grasping for youth, I restrain my touchy impulses. Since then we have also learned a lot about avoiding touch from the “Me Too” movement.

Now the coronavirus has taught us, as the song by The Police goes, “don’t stand so close to me.”

Continuing my re-read of Henri Nouwen’s Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life in preparation for what may become an online spiritual formation course, I read this sentence of Henri’s on Monday as an example of such hospitality: “It is like the task of a patrolman trying to create some space in the middle of a mob of panic-driven people for an ambulance to reach the center of the accident.” “First responder” could easily be substituted for “patrolman.”

I thought of Henri’s own creation of space in his campus office when he removed shelves of books lest a visiting student feel overwhelmed in the belief the student had nothing to offer this well-read professor.

I also thought of my first Presbyterian pastor’s explanation of what constitutes social action. Christian compassion, Dr. Morse said, is expressed when you tend to a person’s wounds as you wait for an ambulance. Social justice is expressed when you subsequently investigate why it took so long for the ambulance to arrive.

Nowadays this would include finding and filling the gaps in our systems of medicine—exactly what’s needed in our present crisis. Obviously this would include examining political and economic solutions.

Henri harmonizes the German word for hospitality, Gastfreundschaft, meaning “friendship for the guest” with his own native Dutch word “gastvrijheid” which means “freedom of the guest”: “Hospitality wants to offer friendship without binding the guest and freedom without leaving him or her alone.”

Hospitality, therefore, means primarily the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy. … It is not to bring men and women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing lines. Reaching Out, 51.

I stumble over political “dividing lines.” I have a friend who seems to support President Trump no matter what. Yet my friend also once supported President Obama. As the present administration dismantled protections and services that might have helped the U.S. in this pandemic and now stumbles incompetently while blaming everyone else, “dividing lines,” like Trump’s infamous wall, makes me stumble. 

Creating space for the other is far from an easy task. It requires hard concentration and articulate work. It is like the task of a patrolman trying to create some space in the middle of a mob of panic-driven people for an ambulance to reach the center of the accident. Reaching Out, 51.

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

This Is Not My First Pandemic

An auspicious day to write this post: Good Friday, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Good Friday is when Christians remember that God suffers with us, as we recount the story of the betrayal, denial, and abandonment of Jesus, the injustice and indifference of the powers that be, the agony of suffering and death.

As you know, this is not my first pandemic. For most if not all of you, it is not your first pandemic either. AIDS is still with us, and has been for decades, though the more privileged among us have access to prevention and treatment.

Unlike the coronavirus of COVID-19, HIV is not casually or easily transmitted, but before that was known—even after that was known—those living with HIV were avoided and excluded and judged, given disposable paper plates and plastic cups at dinner parties if invited at all, refused touch and medical and pastoral care and governmental attention.

I hear many echoes of the AIDS pandemic in the present one. Calling it “the Chinese virus” reminds me of the first name for AIDS: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency, G.R.I.D., extending AIDS fear and prejudice and hate crimes to the whole queer community.  At one point it was related to Haitians because of an outbreak there. Or understood as a “foreign” disease because it may have evolved from monkeys and chimpanzees in Africa.

Even by the LGBTQ community, it was often considered the disease of those who lived in “the fast lane” of the gay world, and of those—regardless of sexual orientation—who were promiscuous or drug abusers.

Only when the infection appeared among those with hemophilia or who had blood transfusions did the public consider there might be “innocent victims.” The first major HIV/AIDS bill passed by the U.S. was named for an Indiana teenager with hemophilia, clearly such an innocent, but one who also had done his share of activism.

The public discussion about quarantines reminds me of the desire to quarantine those living with HIV/AIDS, even when it was known that HIV was not transmitted casually. Decades after the causes of transmission were known, a fundamentalist Christian friend of mine told me insistently, as if on some kind of moral high ground above the science, “I don’t believe it can’t be transmitted casually.”

The current admonition “be safe” reminds me of the AIDS admonition to “play safe.” Condoms and dental dams and sexual distancing were our version of face masks and social distancing. Both viruses can be carried and transmitted before symptoms occur, and it’s disconcerting in either crisis to see those who are not sick behaving as if they cannot pass it on to others, particularly the more vulnerable health-wise. 

Of course, the other difference between the retrovirus that causes AIDS and the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is that the first was almost always fatal. And because in the public view it was affecting and infecting already undesirable/immoral/inferior citizens, there was little sense of urgency within the general population for finding treatments or cures. The then U.S. president resisted even using the name of the pandemic. 

But those of us in the thick of it were frequently attending funerals, memorials, and “celebrations of life” of lovers and friends, neighbors and colleagues whose lives were cut short—often very short—by the inattention and indifference of the larger “society.” 

Thanks be to God for the political activism of groups like ACT-UP and the community centers created largely by LGBTQ people to serve PWA’s that eventually influenced a more compassionate response, thanks in part to the media willing to report their stories. Also helpful was when the Christian community began to recognize that “The Church has AIDS.” 

An extremely familiar parallel is how minority and poorer communities have been disproportionately affected by each health crisis. The latest pandemic is revealing the medical vulnerability of people of color, especially those who live on limited incomes.

An unpublished futuristic novel I wrote in 1992 entitled The Cure: A Post-AIDS Love Story explained that my imagined medically-developed multipart curative treatment for AIDS—which included an ingredient newly discovered in the part of the world most endangered by climate change—worked better on white males than people of color and women.

I quoted The Plague by Albert Camus about his protagonist doctor’s conclusion at the end of the book. I offer this now in thanksgiving for the first responders, health care workers and caregivers risking infection in the present pandemic:

Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

You may support this blog by clicking here. Please scroll down to the donate link below its description. Thank you!

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

SIGNS OF LIFE!

In the midst of the pandemic, I have been grateful to see these signs of life in our neighborhood:

Baby frog on our deck

Our neighbors across the street thank first responders.

The Atlanta BeltLine advises social distancing.

Neighbors Jonathan and Gabriela created a labyrinth on the BeltLine.

Church via Zoom

Luna our neighbor with Jenelle our pastor.

Lizard on our front porch pillows.

BeltLine art.

To Life, a toast for Passover!  To Resurrection, a toast for Easter! 

Be safe, be well, look for the signs of life in your neighborhood!

with gratitude for each of you, Chris and Wade

I was invited to contribute a meditation for Maundy Thursday to Ashes to Rainbows: A Queer Lenten Devotional that includes meditations for Ash Wednesday, the Sundays of Lent, and the days of Holy Week. Go to: https://justiceunbound.org/queerlent/

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.