Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

A God of Sensations

Most communication around God and the life of the spirit is visual or auditory. Cathedrals were built and artwork painted and sculpted to visually inspire awe and reverence. Biblical writers, preachers, theologians, teachers, and contemplatives have used words as bread crumbs leading to spiritual paths and insights.

But there is another way I believe God and spirit may be experienced: kinesthetically. It is primal and prerational, our first encounter with something beyond ourselves. It begins in our mother’s womb, immersed in embryonic fluids, nourished and protected by our mother’s flesh. We feel the pulsing of her heart. On a men’s retreat, I heard the Franciscan Richard Rohr speculate that men’s love of drumming may come from that early memory of our mother’s heartbeat.

I hope it’s not just me that takes pleasure in idiosyncratic kinesthetic experiences. It will date me, but as a child I took pleasure sitting in the car, enjoying its gentle rocking motion as a service station attendant wiped the windows clean. Before I could do it for myself, it made me feel good to have someone tie my shoes. And I loved going to the barber, with his gentle touching and trimming.

A source of humor for my partners and friends, as a child and as an adult, I enjoy the vibration of someone vacuuming. I used to follow whoever performed this task from room to room for the kinesthetic pleasure of it. It’s not the same when I do it myself, so it must have something to do with the feeling of being taken care of.

And being held, in a mother’s lap or a loved one’s arms, is best of all.

What prompts this reverie? For weeks now, painters have been pressure-washing and painting our complex, and today is our turn. We have a friendly relationship, though my Spanish is as wanting as their English. Despite my reliance on verbal communication as a writer and speaker, reader and listener, just their presence is enough for me to feel cared for.

And that’s true also of my experience of God. Though I read and pray, the good feelings come when I sit in silence, in contemplation, enjoying an intuitional feeling of being surrounded by God’s presence. I wonder now if that’s what Henri Bergson, the earliest process theologian I read in college, meant when he wrote that intuition is as necessary as reason. Intuition may also be primal and pre-rational. No doubt science can explain it, possibly through genes or neural patterns or evolutionary biology. But there’s also no doubt we can enjoy it.

Many search for a sensational and supernatural God, an overwhelming, intervening, and transforming God of drama and spectacle. Jesus noted that desire when he resisted those looking for signs and wonders, instead welcoming and healing souls most often with his gentle touch.

I enjoy a God of gentle sensations: a breeze on the hairs of my neck, the warmth of a loved one, the caress of the water as I swim, the sensuality of my sweat as I run. I believe that God’s gentle touch is built into our natural world.

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Chris will be co-leading a retreat for gay and bisexual Christian men at Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center, Thursday dinner Oct. 4 through lunch on Sunday Oct. 7, 2012, in Pennsylvania, open to the public. We will consider the “good things” of our religious traditions that help us thrive.

Check out my latest Huffington Post article: "That's What I Want in a Church!"

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

"Blessed Are the Job-Creators..."

More enervated than inspired by this year’s campaign season, I thought of writing a parody of Jesus’ Beatitudes (you know, “Blessed are the job-creators…”) or maybe collect Jesus’ sayings about the way things are and the way things should be and place them in contemporary U.S. contexts (such as the parable of the laborers in the vineyard whose time cards differed but whose pay was the same).

But the problem with parody is it’s likely simply to antagonize, and contemporizing Jesus’ sayings might bring heated debates why I chose this example rather than that example. And rage and contentiousness bring, as they say, more heat than light—in other words, more of what we have now.

Then, intending to open my Bible to the gospels, it accidentally fell open to Psalm 37. Reading it really helped me, and I had a strong desire to simply use it as my post today. I encourage you to read it all, but here are tantalizing excerpts that might offer much-needed equanimity for the weeks ahead:

Do not fret because of the wicked;

do not be envious of wrongdoers,

for they will soon fade like the grass,

and wither like the green herb.

Trust in the Lord, and do good;

so you will live in the land, and enjoy security.

God will make your vindication shine like the light,

and the justice of your cause like the noonday.

Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for God…

Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath.

Do not fret—it leads only to evil.

The wicked draw the sword and bend their bows

to bring down the poor and needy,

to kill those who walk uprightly;

their sword shall enter their own heart,

and their bows shall be broken.

Better is a little that the righteous person has

than the abundance of many wicked.

I have been young, and now am old,

yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken

or their children begging bread.

They are ever giving liberally and lending,

and their children become a blessing.

I do wish Christians—progressive and otherwise—would read the Bible more. I wish prejudiced Christians would read beyond the few verses by which they exclude others to the many texts that welcome the most vulnerable. And I wish they believed more of the Bible than the part that saves only them.

If you read the sayings and parables of Jesus, you will know who and what I am voting for.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Ayn Rand Was Consistent

Ayn Rand was consistent. She was an individualist and an atheist. Notice what I am NOT saying: I am not saying that an atheist is necessarily an individualist. In truth I am aware of more atheists who are collectivists than individualists.

Rather, I would say that belief in either God or spirituality goes hand in hand with collectivism. Spirituality is about “the whole enchilada,” a term the Watergate scandal helped popularize. It witnesses the connectedness of all things, that in the poet’s words, “no man is an island,” that, in Jesus’ words, “as much as you have done it to the least of these you have done it so to me.”

In biblical understanding, not even God is an individualist. God created companions, dwells among us, and invites us to enjoy the common spiritual wealth that is already available. In both Jewish and Christian understandings, God treats us collectively: if one sinned, all are collectively responsible in the Old Testament; in the New Testament God makes rain and sunshine fall on the just and the unjust. In both testaments we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, which requires compassion—identification, solidarity, justice and mercy.

The Reformed tradition of Christianity emphasized collective salvation over individual salvation, but this has been a theme of Christianity from the beginning. Despite the emphasis on individual salvation in present-day evangelical circles, Jesus was said to reconcile the whole world to God’s self. It’s not “all about me,” but “all about us,” and I would add that the whole creation is included in “us.”

This does not mean that I don’t believe in individual responsibility, but that we are individually responsible for the whole world, that every action we take or don’t take—“sins of commission or omission”—must be accountable to needs broader than our own.

I don’t know how anyone following the news does not cry or become indignant and angry at the inequality and injustice and violence, as well as grieve the losses of every nation in conflict or enduring calamity and the environment suffering global warming and deforestation.

Something else I am NOT saying: I am not saying that Christians who claim individualism over collectivism are not Christian. I am saying they are inconsistent.

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See also “The Making of You,” an earlier post. Today’s post appeared Monday in The Huffington Post.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Spiritual Care for the Liberated

“It would be an error to think that a liberated prisoner was not in need of spiritual care anymore.” –Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

This observation comes toward the end of Frankl’s autobiographical and psychological account of his time as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. Having described repeated traumatic events in the life of fellow prisoners, he turns to the trauma of suddenly being free: the feelings of unreality, bitterness, disappointment (when, for example, the person the prisoner most longed to see was no longer) and disillusionment (when others pleaded ignorance or relativized the prisoner’s suffering).

Frankl writes that the liberated prisoner needed to re-learn how to feel pleasure. On the first day of “freedom” the inmates went outside the camp gates and witnessed “meadows full of flowers” but later confessed to one another, “Tell me, were you pleased today?” “Truthfully, no!”

But a few days later, passing the same flowering meadows, hearing larks singing and seeing them rise to the skies, with nothing but earth and sky around him, he found himself kneeling and saying over and over again, “I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space.” He didn’t know how long he knelt, repeating these words, beginning to feel human again. But it is in that context that he writes, “It would be an error to think that a liberated prisoner was not in need of spiritual care anymore.”

The insight struck me as a hammer brought down full strength on an anvil. Without pretending to compare Frankl’s suffering to that of the rest of us, it is also true that those liberated from closets or fundamentalism or even church are still greatly in need of spiritual care. We too need a verse to chant, to sing, to pray, so that we may feel pleasure and awe as we come to our senses as “the human being fully alive” that is God’s glory.

And I would say we need one thing more.

The first sermon in which I included gay people by name among “the least of these” for whom Jesus cared, my text was the story from Acts of Paul and Silas in prison. An earthquake frees them, and the jail keeper prepares to take his own life, thinking they have escaped. But Paul shouts out, “Do not be afraid, for we are all here.” That was my sermon title, and I explained that despite their liberation, they take time to convert the jail keeper, recognizing he too is imprisoned. I’d like to think that, almost to the day that I gave that sermon 40 years ago, I still have some of that youthful idealism.

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