A Comfort Dream

Good neighbors!

As last week’s post published at 5 a.m. last Wednesday, I was awaking from what I would call a comfort dream. A beautiful Southern California day found me walking a favored walk, along the steep cliffs that line the coast in Santa Monica, overlooking the beach far below. It was here and on the sands below that I occasionally sorted out life as a young man—not to say I resolved everything or anything, but it gave me a place to walk and run, think and pray. Now living in Atlanta, this is the West Coast feature that I miss the most.

It was the place I began to reconcile my sexuality and my spirituality, my love of nature and my love of God. My first book, Uncommon Calling: A Gay Man’s Struggle to Serve the Church, described it as a welcoming and gracious sanctuary for all of me in a way the church was not yet. 

Harper & Row changed the subtitle I had, A Gay Christian’s Struggle to Serve the Church because the publisher feared that in those “early days” of the movement “gay Christian” might sound like an oxymoron! After four printings, the book was passed on to Westminster / John Knox Press, which accepted the original subtitle.

In the dream I enjoyed something along the Santa Monica business strip that was not and is not there: a several level store called Pickwick’s, a beloved old Hollywood bookstore where I used to enjoy browsing and buying books to read. I still have Pickwick bookmarks, which were inserted in every book I purchased there. I was introduced to Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in high school. It was among the countless books that encouraged my own writing vocation.

I forget who it was who said this—a writer, no doubt—that heaven should be a beach with a big library. I would add at least a wine bar, and there was a bar near the gay beach in Santa Monica, the S. S. Friendship, once frequented by writer Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy, who lived up Chautauqua Canyon, named no doubt for the adult education and social movement in the U.S. in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

So, in my dream, I was essentially in heaven. I believe it was Gertrude Stein who said of readers, “They have no need of heaven, for they have had books.”

Anyway, in the midst of our pandemic and the stress of the U.S. election process, my dream offered much needed comfort. That it came just as my last post was published seemed somehow auspicious. In that post I wrote of the integrity of science and religion, of nature and spirituality: calling us to remember we’re all in this together as inheritors of billions of years of evolution from the Big Bang to the common wealth and the common responsibility we share.

As if an incarnational exclamation point on this scientific and spiritual truth, Friday afternoon close friends/neighbors/members of Ormewood Church “res-erected” Wade’s and my mailbox after being dashed to the ground by falling trees a few weeks back, an urban version of rural barn-raising followed by socially-distanced wine on our deck.

In the meantime, Vicki, our mail carrier, had kindly walked the mail to us on our front porch or to the mailbox’s temporary location leaning against a Japanese maple that survived the earlier onslaught.

Photo by Cathie McBeth.

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

In Memory of Trees

The tree that was (in spring)

A few days before Halloween, Wade and I were awakened one very dark and early morning by a loud swooshing sound followed by a thud that shook the house. A neighbor’s (and our pastor’s) very tall oak fell across the yard of the neighbor between us and into our backyard, taking out two fences (ours was brand new!) and a good portion of our only tree there, compliments of the winds and rain of Hurricane Zeta, which took down 350 trees in Atlanta.

The Bradford flowering pear, doomed eventually to split anyway by its very nature, was the sixth tree over 26 years that I have planted in the backyard. Each full-grown tree fell or was irreparably damaged due to a variety of natural circumstances, including drought, storms, and high winds: a maple, a cottonwood, a weeping willow, and two cypresses.

Our pastor's daughter and cat Luna

strolling toward our backyard in the distance.

Photo by Rev. Jenelle Holmes.

Probably related to the earlier storm, a very old and tall oak fell late afternoon on Halloween across our street to our front yard, demolishing our crepe myrtle and dogwood and burying our fountain and its flower bed. Thanks to the pandemic (how often do we get to use this phrase in a favorable way?), no trick-or-treaters were endangered.

In both cases, our yards got the top part of the trunk with all its branches, making quite a mess. Ironically, this season our lawns and yards had never looked so good, and now—! Where we live, where the tree lands is the landowner’s responsibility, and homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover tree removal except at the very point it intersects with a structure.

Tree across Berne Street, our front yard on the right.

This event coinciding with the fearful pandemic and the contentious election, the biblical character Job came to mind. And, given how we were feeling about our yards, the phrase, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Virtually all who saw our wreckage said it’s a blessing we were not injured and that our house was not damaged. A couple of passersby and several friends told us we must have had someone watching over us. One older black neighbor, Mary, cried to see the damage, grateful to find we were not hurt, and Wade realized she needed a masked-but-non-socially-distanced-yet-assuring hug.

Several neighbors/friends/members of Ormewood Church helped us clean up what we could before we brought in the “big guns” of a tree service to clean and remove the debris this week. One of them loaned us a generator to keep our fridge running during two periods without power. As Mister Rogers always said, in times of crisis, “look for the helpers.”

View from our front porch.

You know my penchant for observing synchronicity, what some call coincidence and others name miracle. When all of this happened I was finishing up reading Intelligence in Nature during my morning prayers, researched and written by anthropologist Jeremy Narby. He compares the wisdom of indigenous animist shamans in the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil with worldwide scientific research discovering intelligence in other animals (not just the human animal) and in plants and microscopic creatures.

God knows a virus can outwit much of our national leadership!

Another bit of synchronicity: friends recommended and we watched (and also recommend) a Netflix documentary entitled, My Octopus Teacher, about a relationship of an octopus with a South African diver. Narby reports that “Octopuses have the largest brains among invertebrates, and scientists have noted their intelligence (p73).”

Narby explains that “intelligence” comes from words meaning “choosing between (inter-legere) and implies the capacity to make decisions.”

Anthropologists have pointed out that some cultures have no concept for intelligence, while others define it in ways surprising to Westerners, for example in terms of good listening skills, or a strong sense of ethics, or the ability to observe, interpret, and negotiate the social and physical landscape (p44).

In my view, then, intelligence is what spirituality is all about, especially “good listening skills.” For me prayer and meditation require good listening, not just for God’s “still, small voice” but to ourselves and one another in our own decision-making.

I grieved for the lost trees. The one in back outside my office window especially served as my “axis mundi” during morning prayers, my center of the universe. Just as trees send chemical warnings to other trees of impending predators, I’ve wondered if these fallen trees were trying to warn us of how we are endangering our climate, we who are the most invasive predatory species.

Sitting on the back-deck seconds before the tree across the street came crashing down, something jumped on my sleeve, grabbing my arm. Startled by either its talons or claws, I jumped up, dislodging whatever it was, a bird or a chipmunk. I never saw it. Then I heard Wade shouting from inside the house as I heard a splintering groan.

I wonder if the creature on my arm was simply escaping the disaster or was flung over our roof.

Or was it trying to warn me?

Damaged tree from my office window.

Related post: I Live in a Forest Called Atlanta

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.  

I Live in a Forest Called Atlanta

My shadow on my morning walk.

(Remember, shadows add a hundred pounds!)

You might not guess that I get tired of reading and writing and saying words. Several weeks ago, I dispensed with words for my morning meditation and simply paid attention, reverently, to the trees that I passed on my morning walk. That’s easy to do in Atlanta, where we live, so full of trees.

Shortly after moving here, I tried to glimpse our house from a plane and realized I couldn’t see the houses for the trees. Arriving in my hometown of Los Angeles on that trip, I realized I couldn’t see the trees for the buildings, concrete and asphalt—an exaggeration, of course, but not much.

I distressed my mother by telling a friend that, by contrast, southern California looked bleak and bare. Mom had come from Kansas, and to her California was a verdant paradise.

Atlanta’s streets curve and wind and go up and down because they follow the old paths through the forest created by native peoples, at least according to a book on the history of Greater Atlanta Presbytery. This is the only thing I remember from reading that book, which may be revealing! Those paths have endured a very long time, in reality and in memory.

Saint Thomas More’s fictional Utopians held “that the careful observation of nature and the reflection on it and the reverence that arises from this is a kind of worship very pleasing to God.” This is one of the reasons why I appreciate Celtic spirituality, its “thin places” where and when we may glimpse heaven in earth.

Enya’s “Memory of Trees,” comes to mind, Joni Mitchell’s famous lyrics “You paved Paradise to put up a parking lot,” and of course, Mary Oliver:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields…

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

In college, a tree on campus became my “axis mundi,” center of the world, as I sat beneath it reading texts for my religious studies courses.

As I write this, Wade is at a paper mill in Oregon in his role as an IT product manager for the paper products division of Georgia Pacific. He long ago reminded me that trees are a “renewable resource.” Companies like his go to great lengths to plant new trees where others have given up their lives for human products, otherwise they couldn’t remain in business.

This is true spiritually as well. We can’t spiritually “remain in business” if we forget the gifts of the rain forest as well as the tree outside my window.

As school children we learned the devout Catholic poet Joyce Kilmer’s famed lines, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”

Blogs are written by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.

Today, go find a tree to hug.

I will be co-leading a contemplative retreat April 27-May 1, 2020 to which you are welcome: https://app.certain.com/profile/form/index.cfm?PKformID=0x3039640abcd

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.