Ten Minute Christ

A singing bowl from Nepal given me by a 

Buddhist colleague when I completed an 

interim ministry at MCC San Francisco.

I am struggling to write about a book I first mentioned two weeks ago, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, a 1970 book by Abbot Zenkei Shibayama. There are so many stories and insights that I would like to list for you, as I did with the remarkable Cloud of Unknowing. But I feel called to do something more: to somehow translate Zen into progressive Christian experience.

This effort recalls my college class on Asian Religions, taught by Professor Miyuki, a Japanese Buddhist. I was quite proud of my midterm paper for the class, but was dismayed that my professor deigned to give it only a “C.” Having read more about Zen training since, I realize this was the slap in the face that a Zen master might give a disciple, to awaken something in me.

But at the time, my rational, dualistic and discriminating side got the better of me and I met with the professor to explain that everything I had written came from the texts for the class. In accented English, he told me in words that “should” have been my complaint, “You just don’t understand.” In other words, I just didn’t get it.

As the Zen Master Enkan said to a scholar monk of the Sutras (Buddhist scriptures), “Your knowledge is not of any use, is it? It is like a small lamp under the shining sun. It seems to have no light.” As Shibayama explains, “In the face of real experience concepts are like flakes of snow fallen on a burning fire.” He describes words as “just the conceptual shadows of the facts.” As a writer, this is another blow from a Zen master!

So, for my final paper, I simply told a story, drawing from the intuitive, creative side of my brain rather than the rational, academic side. I don’t remember the story, but I remember that my guide in the story, who was also myself, was a little girl.  Professor Miyuki loved it, and gave me an “A,” and I think an “A” in the course as well.

Zen tries to recover the satori, or Enlightenment, experience, believing that Buddhist scholars “tended to place too much importance on the metaphysical or philosophical interpretations of the sutras.” Zen Master Sekito and his disciples were blocked along a mountain path by vines and creepers. The monk ahead turned to Sekito asking for his sword to clear the way, and the Master handed it to him blade first. 

“Stop the nonsense! Let me have the hilt!” the monk demanded. Sekito’s reply was sharper than the edge of the knife. He said, “What is the use of the hilt?” The monk could not utter a word in reply. We are apt to stick to the hilt which is of secondary importance, and miss the Truth altogether (p 26-27). 

This story made me think of how often we Christians “stick to the hilt,” the Bible, our theology, and miss Truth altogether. Scottish theologian P.T. Forsythe held that, “Prayer is to religion what original research is to science.” Spiritual practices open us up to Truth, even in scriptures. As Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplative Prayer, “God’s presence cannot be verified as we would verify a laboratory experiment. Yet it can be spiritually realized as long as we do not insist on verifying it. As soon as we try to verify the spiritual presence as an object of exact knowledge, God eludes us.”

Shibayama suggests, “Zen does not remain simply the core of Buddhism, but it works to deepen and revive any religion or philosophy. For instance, there can be a Christian Zen…”

For four or five years I served as spiritual leader of Midtown Spiritual Community here in Atlanta, a spiritually eclectic group, and their mission statement expressed a desire to have a direct experience of the divine. During the contemplative retreat I co-led a few weeks ago, participants told us they preferred our experiential emphasis on spiritual exercises over academic presentations.

When I served as interim pastor of MCC San Francisco, I occasionally sat with their Buddhist group, following the spiritual exercise of zazen. Shibayama explains that, in Japanese, “za means to sit cross-legged, zen, to calmly concentrate one’s mind.”

He says we are to directly realize that “All beings are primarily Buddhas,” and by this he does not mean simply humans or even all creatures, but all entities, from atoms to galaxies. He tells us that there is another saying in Zen, “If one sits for ten minutes, he is a ten-minute Buddha.”

Immediately my heart flew to the “ah-hah” that if Christians could sit still in contemplation for ten minutes, and realize our own incarnations of Christ, we could be ten-minute Christs! It would give a whole new meaning to the Resurrection and to the triumphal return of Christ to this world—beliefs that are often doubted by progressive Christians.

But, like the Desert Mothers and Fathers, we wouldn’t be doing this for ourselves alone. Buddhism teaches the practice of six virtues: generosity, observing precepts and other good deeds, patience and forbearance, zeal, meditation, and true wisdom. Generosity and good deeds are sometimes singled out. And generosity and good deeds are what singled out the first followers of Jesus and attracted others to our faith.

I’m sure what I’ve written here has stepped on a few toes in Zen Buddhism as well as in progressive Christianity, as I am a faulty and limited blogger. I apologize. But just as Zen wanted to enliven Buddhism, so I think a Zen way of practicing our faith could enliven Christianity.

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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. 

Help Me Understand

"I am the mountain. The mountain is me." --A homemade Zen saying.

Look closely for me at the bottom of this photo of the Matterhorn, taken in 1973. 

I did not have the faith to move this mountain, but I did have the faith to be in awe.

Zen almost silenced me. Or it did, and still I’m blogging!

I’ve written several posts about a book on Zen Buddhism I’ve just completed reading. I found myself becoming quieter and quieter as I read a brief section each day during morning prayer. Part of it was that Zen was telling me to shut up, just be. And part of it was that the whole enterprise had the effect of a Zen koan like “the sound of one hand clapping” to still the mind.

I especially loved this example of Zen mondo (questions and answers): “What is it ultimately?” “Willows are green and flowers are pink.”

“Willows are green and flowers are pink.” I wish I had thought of that when asked some outlandish question during Q&A’s in the church or equally, in the LGBT community, on whether one can be gay and Christian. Or another, “Only those who know it know.”

“Willows are green and flowers are pink.” Also a good answer for thorny theological questions like, how can a good God allow suffering in the world?

“The ‘beauty’ of Zen is the inner power that unites nature and life from within,” Abbot Zenkei Shibayama writes.

I have only an inkling of what that means—some intuitive, receptive neuron in my brain that may or may not get it.

And that’s why I became quieter and quieter as I read. I often get quiet when I don’t understand something, which has saved me from embarrassing moments of pretense.

But I liked it. Like witnessing a magnificent waterfall cascading from verdant cliffs down the face of a grey stone canyon wall to a valley below. Like hearing a musical composition caringly played that lifts the soul to cosmic, heavenly realms. Like the final gasp of an instance of prolonged lovemaking so profound as to put the most elevated sacred texts to shame.

I don’t need to understand something to see its beauty.

Years ago, I occasionally worked with another activist who sometimes questioned my thinking with the words, “Help me understand…” Given the context of our connection and other put-downs of me, I always thought the words were patronizing, as in “Help me understand how you can come to such a crazy conclusion.”

Only recently have I thought perhaps the phrase came from PBS and NPR, whose news interviewers often use the phrase, “Help us understand…” to aid interviewees to better explain their thinking to viewers and listeners.

A seminary professor with whom I served on a school committee told me privately that I sometimes seem to speak aloud mid-thought, mid-thinking process, so that what led to my conclusions were unclear. Perhaps that’s what was happening with my fellow activist. Perhaps that’s what happens on this blog!

Long ago I learned that my own need to understand something could be a means of control. In college, French existentialist author and philosopher Albert Camus spoke to me when he described “true understanding as ‘standing under,’ receiving without being in control (as understanding or ‘superior’ knowledge often implies).” I wrote this in Henri’s Mantle (p 94).

So I have been standing under Zen Buddhism, hoping a little of its wisdom and beauty will gently fall on me.

A final thought from Abbot Shibayama (A Flower Does Not Talk, p 122):

Zen asks us to open our eyes to the realm where subject and object are not yet separated, and I and you are one; and then to live and work in this new dimension.

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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. 

"A Flower Does Not Talk"

One of our orchids.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Today and next Wednesday I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and the second from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.

It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality.

This seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21^st century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko Kudo.

I took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this, a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good role model.

As I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend, Linda Culbertson, recent executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.

Suzuki evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words, I find this comforting.

He then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined “bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”

“Zen tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”

Yet the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after all the same.”

Hallelujah!

The book’s title is that of the author’s poem:

A Flower Does Not Talk

Silently a flower blooms,

In silence it falls away;

Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,

            the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.

This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;

The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

I think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you! Click on: 
https://mccchurch.org/ministries/progressive-christian-reflections/

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

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

"A Flower Does Not Talk"

One of our orchids.

The whole world today, both East and West, seems to be going through a period of convulsion, a time of travail, as it seeks to give birth to a new culture. There cannot be one simple cause for the tensions in so many parts of the world, but one of the major factors may be that while remarkable progress has been made in the use of new scientific knowledge, we human beings have not developed sufficiently spiritually and ethically to meet the new conditions.

It is most urgently required, therefore, that we must work to create a new human culture by striving for a truer understanding of humanity and a higher level of spirituality. 

This seems to echo the observations of Teilhard de Chardin, writing just after World War II, and speaks to our own time nearly two decades into the 21^st century. But it comes from a book written in 1970 by Zenkei Shibayama, a Zen master and then abbot of Nazenji Monastery in Kyoto, Japan. The book is titled, A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays, and was translated into English by one of the author’s disciples, Miss Sumoko Kudo.

I took this from my bookshelves very early morning of the Saturday I write this, a little more than a week before leading a contemplative retreat, which I should continue preparing for, but I prefer to write this post, to be published a week after the retreat. The title possibly appealed to me because I am a little anxious about my impending leadership. In her helpful book, Be Still: Designing and Leading Contemplative Retreats, Jane E. Vennard writes that the best way to lead contemplation is to be a contemplative. A flower that does not talk seems a good role model.

As I read Shibayama’s preface and Daisetz T. Suzuki’s introduction, I wondered how I had never read this book that has sat alongside my books of Eastern wisdom for at least three decades. I was moved to find that the introduction was the famous D. T. Suzuki’s last writing, having completed it the day before he took sick, dying the day after that at the age of 95.

Only when I sat down to write this post did I see “Culbertson” handwritten on the title page and realize that this was either a loan or a gift from my friend, Linda Culbertson, executive of the Presbytery of the Pacific.

Suzuki evokes a smile with his very first sentence, “Zen claims to be ‘a specific transmission outside the scripture and to be altogether independent of verbalism,’ but it is Zen Masters who are most talkative and most addicted to writings of all sorts.” As a would-be contemplative who obviously loves words, I find this comforting.

He then writes how Zen Masters enjoy bringing their readers “to bewilderment with their apparently irrational and often irrelevant utterances.” I underlined “bewilderment” because yesterday I used a fanciful version of the word preparing a guided meditation for the retreat, writing, “We will flee from the familiar to the wild-ness and bewilder-ness of the wilderness.” Suzuki asserts that their purpose is to lift students to “the higher way of observing things.”

“Zen tells us to change or reverse our usual way of understanding,” he writes. “Zen always aspires to make us directly see into Reality itself, that is, be Reality itself, so that we can say along with Meister Eckhart that ‘Christ is born every minute in my soul,’ or that ‘God’s Isness is my Isness.’”

Yet the author, Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, cautions in his preface, “We should not too easily conclude that there is just one Truth, and that East and West are after all the same.”

Hallelujah!

The book’s title is that of the author’s poem:

A Flower Does Not Talk

Silently a flower blooms,

In silence it falls away;

Yet here now, at this moment, at this place,

            the whole of the flower, the whole of the world is blooming.

This is the talk of the flower, the truth of the blossom;

The glory of eternal life is fully shining here.

I think I’ve found my personal reading for the retreat.

I will be speaking during the 11 a.m. worship this coming Sunday, May 13, 2018 at Ormewood Church in Atlanta.

Related Post: A Flower’s Tears

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you!

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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. 

Et II, Benedict?

The 50^th anniversary of the promise of Vatican II prompts me to remember Pope John  XXIII with fondness, nostalgia, and reverence. His life experience, according to John W. O’Malley’s recent New York Times op-ed piece, helped him know “diversity, turmoil, sin and evil firsthand, but he also knew goodness as he found it in people of other faiths and no faith.” That’s among the reasons he initiated Vatican II, though he did not live to see it through to its conclusion, let alone its implementation.

I grew up with anti-Catholic sentiment preached from our Baptist pulpit, but a saving grace was my mother’s reading of Catholic alongside Protestant writers. As a young woman, she had enjoyed a positive relationship with nuns who cared for her frequently hospitalized mother in their small town Catholic hospital.

I was home sick from school when a news bulletin flashed the news of Pope John’s death on our Packard Bell television set in 1963. Though only 12 years of age, I immediately felt sad, knowing a unique light had left our world. In 1973 I visited his tomb in the crypt underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, noting fresh flowers. It moved me in a way no other gravesite on my first trip to Europe did; his was the only grave at which I cried. On my most recent visit to Rome, I was glad to see he had been promoted upstairs to the main floor, now in a glass coffin. At first I wasn’t sure it was him, so I asked a guard, “Is that Pope John XXIII?” “Most of him,” the guard replied with a wink. That same visit we also saw a living pope, Pope John Paul II, old and frail.

There was resistance to the changing nature of the church signaled by Vatican II, with its intended consultative collegiality among bishops, priests and laity, ecumenical emphasis, interfaith dialogue, vernacular liturgy, and other attempts at modernization that made it less of a dinosaur still breathing fire at the Enlightenment.

My friend, David Mellott, Dean of Lancaster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, suggests to me that Pope John could not have initiated reforms on his own had there not been a “sensus fidelium” in the Roman Catholic Church, “the sense of the faithful” that wanted change. It could be said that, had Pope John lived, that same “sensus fidelium” might have prompted even him to be more cautious in Vatican II’s application.  (Anyone who has served in ministry knows almost every congregation says it wants change until changes are actually implemented!)

In Vatican II, “The church validated for the first time the principle of religious freedom and rejected all forms of civil discrimination based on religious grounds. Thus ended an era of cozy church-state relations that began in the fourth century with Emperor Constantine,” the Georgetown professor, Jesuit priest, and author O’Malley observes. This is a very good time to be reminded of this in the United States.

In his 1986 autobiography, Confessions of a Parish Priest, diocesan priest and novelist Andrew Greeley tells of sneaking into the conclave of Vatican II with a faked pass and witnessing a battle between the conservative, turf-defending Roman Curia and the bishops who served the broader church, aided by more progressive theologians like Hans Kung and Karl Rahner. His analysis was that Vatican II irrevocably asserted that the church can change.

Greeley also mentions the present pope’s involvement in Vatican II, listing alongside Kung and Rahner “a much younger Ratzinger (who now conveniently forgets his contribution to the Council)…”—and Greeley wrote this before Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, when he was the Vatican watchdog for orthodoxy as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

In a 1977 book that I used years ago for my morning reflections, Zen and the Bible,  Japanese Jesuit priest J. K. Kadowaki, lauding Vatican II, also refers to that much younger Ratzinger whom he met when doing research in West Germany:

While there I was invited by the Catholic theologian, Professor J. Ratzinger (now a cardinal), to lecture on “Zen and Christianity” to a group of his doctoral students.  … Toward the end of the seminar, Professor Ratzinger said, “How interesting it would be if we could compare the ideas of Zen with those of the Bible. If that could be done, it would be a great event, not only for the dialogue between Zen and Christianity, but also in respect to the ideological exchange between East and West.”

That’s in the spirit of Pope John XXIII and of Vatican II, though Pope Benedict might prefer to forget this too.  Now that Pope John has been beatified on his way to sainthood, progressive Christians might hope that he may intercede for the whole church—Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal devotions, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.  Please click here to learn more about this ministry and/or make a donation!

Many thanks to Dr. David Mellott for reviewing a draft of this post and contributing his wisdom from his Roman Catholic training.

Check out Glaser’s latest article on The Huffington Post: “Flag Pins & Crosses: ‘Mine Is Bigger than Yours!’”

A Flower's Tears

The flowers I was contemplating.

I had a great idea (or so I egotistically thought) for a justice/politically-minded post last week that would have pleased many of you, but I decided “what the world needs now,” as the song goes, is Zen! Last Wednesday and today I am revisiting two posts that are Zen-like in orientation, one from 2018 and this one from 2016. I pray they bring peace to our troubled souls!

I had just read a quote from landscape artist Thomas Cole: “Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

A woman on public radio announced Beethoven’s pastoral sonata, #15.

Then I heard something drop. I looked up from my tablet and realized the bouquet of flowers in front of me was losing petals. The before-dawn early morning was so quiet I could hear a petal fall.

This prompted me to compose this poem:

A flower’s tears

are the dewdrops

that drip, orb by orb,

as sun rises.

A flower’s tears

are the raindrops

that stream, string by string,

as storms rage.

A flower’s tears

are the petals

that drop, one by one,

as life renews.

I was sitting at our dining room table, a very solid oak sturdy-legged altar that once served as Wade’s grandfather’s butcher block. Long before we met, Wade had painstakingly sanded (and sanded) and refinished this table that seats four and can be extended by way of built-in leaves for eight just as comfortably. On all five windows of the pentagonal room hang patterned stained-glass, framed in various shapes in wood whose peeling white trim contrasted with the colors of their homes that no longer stand.

The morning I write this, I rose so early that my usual place for morning prayers was too dark to read, so I chose this alternate sanctuary.

And then I read: “Henri taught me that the characteristics I had identified with religion are just the outer circle. What really matters is a fundamental attitude of seeking to do something that is valuable to yourself and to the world.” Henri Nouwen’s nephew Marc van Campen wrote this in Befriending Life: Encounters with Henri Nouwen.

Moved by awe at this magical moment, I thanked God that life is filled with such opportunities to experience the world “as if for the first time” and then to express that mystery in writing, in art, in service.

“Nature has spread for us a rich and delightful banquet. Shall we turn from it? We are still in Eden; the wall that shuts us out of the garden is our own ignorance and folly.”

I will be leading a virtual, at-home retreat open to the public for Columbia Seminary’s Spiritual Formation Program September 17-19, 2020 entitled An Open Receptive Place: Henri Nouwen’s Spirituality. You are invited!

Donations to this blog ministry may be given 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 © 2016 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved. 

Invisible Means of Support

Years ago, a Japanese steamship for the first time went up the great Amazon river in South America. It was a long voyage, and they ran out of drinking water. Fortunately a British ship came by. The Japanese ship asked them by signal, “Have you drinking water to spare?” They signaled back, “Put your buckets down into the water, if you please.” The surprised Japanese crew did as instructed, and sure enough, it was drinking water. For the Japanese crew who were used to seeing small rivers in Japan, the River Amazon was too big for them to recognize as a river. They thought they were still in the ocean. Aren’t we, without realizing it, making such mistakes every day? 

—A Flower Does Not Talk: Zen Essays by Abbot Zenkei Shibayama, 93-94. 

This story reminds me of an exchange between the journalist Bill Moyers and the mythologist Joseph Campbell in The Power of Myth. After Campbell confirms his experience of “hidden hands” helping him when he is “following [his] bliss,” Moyers asks, “Have you ever had sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support?”

Campbell replies, “Who has no invisible means? Yes, he is the one that evokes compassion, the poor chap. To see him stumbling around when all the waters of life are right there really evokes one’s pity.”

“The waters of eternal life are right there? Where?” Moyers asks.

“Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time,” Campbell answers.

In both stories, that of the ship’s crew and that of the person who has no invisible means of support, the waters of life are right under their noses—the first in potable water and the second in metaphorical waters of life, both potentially salvific. Both needed guides to help them see this.

The Moyers-Campbell exchange occurs in their conversation about the idea of bliss in Sanskrit, which Campbell regarded as “the great spiritual language of the world.” He explains:

There are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: Sat, Chit, Ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being” (p 120, The Power of Myth).

Shibayama writes that Zen Master Hakuin taught that we mistakenly try to look outside ourselves for Enlightenment, for Buddhahood:

Like water and ice,

There is no ice apart from water;

There are no Buddhas apart from beings.

Shibayama explains further, “If it is really like the relationship of ice and water, then we are Buddhas as we are. So he goes on to say, ‘It is like those who, being in water, cry out for water, feeling thirst.’” What follows is the story about the Japanese ship on the Amazon.

The organizing pastor of Ormewood Church, the Rev. Jenelle Holmes, gave an intriguing sermon during Eastertide about Simon Peter plunging into the Sea of Galilee when he realized a risen Jesus had just told them where to drop their nets for their big and only catch of the day, and awaited them on the shore with a meal prepared.

As I was still anxious about plunging into co-leading a weeklong contemplative retreat, I told Jenelle that her sermon really helped me. I needed to just plunge in the waters and trust that I would find Jesus on the shore, in the midst of those attending, in the silence that would surround us. After all, we had titled the retreat, “Beside Still Waters.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was following my bliss and relying on my invisible means of support, as were all who came on the retreat.

Frederick Buechner clarifies the nature of bliss for many of us: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Find out how you can support this blog—thank you!

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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. 

At Most a Lighthouse Can Beam an Instant

A friend caught my surprise when the congregation

applauded my ordination at Christ Covenant MCC, October 2, 2005.

I miss a custom I created for myself when living in Southern California. New Year’s Eve parties left me wanting some more meaningful way of observing the passing of an old year and the welcome of a new year. I did not want to “pray in” the new year as we did in my Baptist church with us kids keeping one eye open to see the sanctuary clock silently clap its hands together on the number 12. 

But the ticking of a clock or the descent of a ball in Times Square felt artificial, so I began watching the sun set as I walked along the beach in Santa Monica every New Year’s Eve. I would spend the time revisiting the events of the past year and imagining what the new year might bring, thanking God for the good and the bad as well as the possibilities. It was something I could do alone, well before the parties. And it felt more natural. 

This bit of shoreline is the sanctuary where, in college, I ruminated on my sexuality, spirituality, and call to ministry. This is where I thought I’d like to be reincarnated as a seagull so I could stay near the shore and see my friends on the beach occasionally! This is where I stumbled onto a gay meeting place long before I knew about gay bars. This is where, on a day off from my church work, I would do a long run and work out on the outdoor gymnastic bars. 

This is a walk I’ve shared with many friends, including some of you, and others you might know, such as John Boswell, Isabel Rogers, and Malcolm Boyd. This is the walk that Henri Nouwen declined, insisting instead that we sit down on my sofa and “have a really good talk”! 

This is where I walked weekly on Thursday evenings with a partner to share whatever was on our minds and hearts. This is where we walked one Easter after worship, ending up at Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy’s hangout, the S. S. Friendship, bumping into an old friend there whose partner we learned had died the previous week, who gave me the Easter message I needed to hear, “He died in my arms. I felt him leave his body. That’s why I’m sure I’ll see him again.” 

This is where I took my mom and her dog for her last walk along the shore a few weeks before she died, where she mischievously chose an ice cream cone over lunch. And this is where at least some of my ashes will be scattered. 

Though I live far from that shore now, I go there often. 

There is no lighthouse there, but in college I composed this poem using the metaphor, which feels all the more apt in later life: 

            To Be the Sea 

The sea beside, I stand alone,

By seasons, wait and search

To be discovered and to discover

In boundless quest.

The sea has all at any time—

No search nor wait.

 

At most a lighthouse

Can beam an instant

Before bowing to the sea.

 

This post originally appeared as “New Year” on January 1, 2014.

Please visit my website: https://chrisglaser.com  

My final post on my blog “Progressive Christian Reflections” will occur next Wednesday, June 30, 2021. More than ten years of posts will remain available to you on the blogsite, https://chrisglaser.blogspot.com and I encourage you to enjoy them. I regret that I never created an index of post titles, but the search engine in the upper left corner of my blog can help you find posts of interest by typing in a subject, topic, name, scripture reference, religious season or holy day. Or you may work through them by year and month listed in the right column. 

Though they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to be read meaningfully at any point in time. You may continue to contact me at my email address used by the delivery service or by leaving a comment on a particular post. FeedBurner has announced it will discontinue all subscription services sometime in July, the occasion for my timing. It has been a pleasure writing this blog, but now, I believe, is a time for silence, something I considered when writing the Zen series. 

I assure you I am well, content, and thankful to God for this extension of my ministry. Thank you for your interest, comments, correspondence, and contributions. I am grateful to Metropolitan Community Churches for recognizing this blog as an “Emerging Ministry” and ProgressiveChristianity.org for reposting many of my reflections, as well as the dozens of Facebook pages that allowed me to provide links to particular posts. I am grateful for the free services of Blogspot, Google, Facebook, and the delivery service, FeedBurner. I am grateful for artist and friend Becki Jayne Harrelson and my husband Wade Jones for their technical and moral support. 

To date, the blog has had 512,000 visits, a count that does not include almost 500 free weekly subscribers. Once donations were possible, the highest annual income ever was $2,000. Subscriptions have always been free and the blog non-monetized (no ads). Permission has always been granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Donations may still be made through the links provided at the end of this post. Thank you! 

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

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"Hey Kids! Look at the Too-lah! Look at the Too-lah!"

Wade looking at the Indian Ocean along 

Plettenberg Bay, South Africa, last summer. (crg)

On a recent visit with my family of origin, I heard the usual stories rolled out by my older siblings, putting me in my proper place as the “baby of the family.” One sibling surprised me by a new take on an old story. Being the youngest, I sat in the front seat of our old Hudson with our parents on a cross-country drive, apparently considered a privileged position by my sister and brother. At one point, given my vantage point, I saw a body of water and turned to them in the back seat, exclaiming excitedly, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!” We long ago decided that “too-lah” must have come from the word “toilet,” then my only frame of reference for a body of water.

On this telling, however, one of my siblings added the word “condescendingly”—that I had “condescendingly” turned to them to announce this wonder. Miffed, I replied, “How can a toddler be condescending?” My other sibling had a different interpretation, that I was simply imitating the tone my parents took to convey something exciting to us kids.

This story came to me as I am currently reading The Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross. A bookmark not many pages in reminds me I’ve tried to read it before. In the past I’ve made the common mistake of understanding “dark night” as simply a period of suffering externally imposed, but, at the same time, it is a spiritual practice detaching ourselves from anything that is not God (including moving beyond our mental images of God “to the state of the progressives”), while welcoming God’s transforming love of our souls. At least, that’s one way of putting it.

One by one and day by day, as I read the sins or “imperfections” that may come with the spiritual life, I am realizing that I am guilty of each one of them. The first listed is pride, how the contemplative novice may be so excited by what she or he is learning that they prematurely become spiritual teachers rather than doers. That very nearly silenced me as a writer of these “progressive Christian reflections,” much as reading and writing about Zen Masters in recent years almost nudged me to enter their silence.

I realized that my readers may be enduring what my siblings did when I was a child, hearing, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!” I get so excited by what I’m learning, if not always practicing, that I want to write about it.

I overheard a monk acerbically say of spiritual author Henri Nouwen, “I wish he would stop writing about wanting to pray and just pray!” In his book, Reaching Out, Henri offered a kind of defense, which I’ve quoted before:

I found some consolation and encouragement in the words of one of the most stern ascetics, the seventh-century John of the Ladder, who lived for forty years a solitary life at Mount Sinai. In his chapter on discernment, step 26 of his spiritual ladder, he writes: “If some are still dominated by their former bad habits, and yet can teach by mere words, let them teach…For perhaps, being put to shame by their own words, they will eventually begin to practice what they teach.”

A half century ago I visited a progressive Baptist congregation whose pastor offered a good job description of his work. Along with other ministerial responsibilities, he was given time to explore theology and spirituality on behalf of the congregation and share those insights from the pulpit.

So, even if I may not have the exact word for God or the exact words or best practices for the spiritual life, I can still lean over the front seat of the Hudson and shout excitedly to all of you, “Hey kids! Look at the too-lah! Look at the too-lah!”

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

The Thoughtful Pause

My quote from Viktor Frankl in last week’s post about our very human desire to leave “an immortal ‘footprint in the sands of time’’’ made me remember a poignant archeological find. Fossilized footprints of several human-like ancestors crossing volcanic ash millions of years ago were discovered in Africa.  As archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey described her discovery, at one point only the female paused and briefly turned, as if to gaze in another direction—at a scenic vista? Looking back toward home? The road not taken? Toward an ominous sound? Then the footsteps continue on an otherwise straightforward path. Leakey concluded, “This motion, so intensely human, transcends time.”

I was deeply moved to think that her momentary pause was recorded in the sediment of ground for all time, now known by people like me she would never know or even imagine but whose imaginations are captivated by her mysterious turn. Was hers an “ah-hah” moment, a sentimental reflection of things past, a vision of another possibility, or simply a cautionary glance? 

The image is an icon, the story is a parable, a Zen story or koan whose inscrutability is the very thing that attracts me, causing my own thoughtful pause, stilling what Buddhists call my “monkey mind.” 

In the preface to my book, Communion of Life: Meditations for the New Millennium, written for spiritual seekers rather than a particular faith group, I write of “the thoughtful pause.” I mention poets as “secular mystics” whose choice of words and cadences, like scripture, require a thoughtful pause after each phrase or line to allow seeds of comprehension to germinate. For me, the thoughtful pause is the food of the spiritual life. 

Lord knows we need thoughtful pauses, bombarded as we are continually by IMs, texts, tweets, e-mails, news, spam, ads, pop-ups, radio, TV, cell phones, iPads, iPhones, iTunes, honking horns, rumbling condenser units, sirens, overhead planes, police helicopters, and shrill beeps telling us our food is ready, the dryer is done, our time is up! I could go on Walt Whitman-like with several pages of things that vie for our attention, but you get the idea. 

To take a moment to turn, to gaze, to think, to contemplate, to reflect, to really see—is almost countercultural. Yet that’s a purpose of the contemplative life. During workshops I encourage what I call “monastic moments” for people to turn inward to consult themselves, their stories, their heart before engaging in dialogue. Otherwise, too often, someone else will speak up before others can formulate their own thoughts, their own answers. 

Jesus often searched out a lonely place to pray. If he needed to do so, given his apparently natural affinity for the sacred as well as the relative quiet of first century Palestine, think how much more we need to find such places!? And he said, “Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door…” The room implied is a pantry, at the center of a house, with no windows—in modern terms, no distractions, no Windows (sorry, I couldn’t resist). 

My youthful prayers were filled with words. Now my prayers are filled with silences. I need the silence to offset the noise of my life, to (in the words of technology) re-set, re-boot, refresh. 

The woman who turned so long ago reminds me of all the saints whose thoughtful pauses gave rise to insights passed down to us. And she reminds me what I also need.

Copyright © 2012 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Donations to this ministry are welcome! 

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Gay and bisexual Christian men are invited to join Chris Glaser and David Mellott as they lead a retreat on “Claiming the Blessings! (Despite the Burdens)” Oct. 4-7, 2012, on the scenic grounds of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center in Pennsylvania. 

Readers of this blog are invited to check out the new content on Chris Glaser’s homepage.

Fresh Takes on the Lord's Prayer

Early morning fog on the Ganges, January 1983.

Sitting in a literal fog out on our deck, reading of Darwin’s investigations into the propagation of flowers which attract different pollinating insects by using different colors or scents or shapes, somehow gave me fresh takes on the bits of the Lord’s Prayer, with which I concluded my morning prayer time.

The literal fog is still outside my windows, but the words I am writing now are coming out of a metaphorical fog of uncertainty and unclarity. I feel rather like Pooh trying to think really hard. Forgive me if you consider this exercise sophomoric, the blather of “a wise fool.”

“O God, mother and father of us all” (my modification of the prayer) now flashes as a primordial, unknowable kindling of life eons ago which we have colloquialized and anthropomorphized as “father” or “mother and father” to make our origin familiar and friendly and immediate.

“Who art in heaven” reinforces this unknowability both spatially and temporally. Heaven is a kind of heavy fog that neither lifts nor is penetrable, as inscrutable as a Zen koan.

“Hallowed”—but it is a sacred space, to be revered and remembered—“be thy name”—even if unnamable and unknowable.

“Thy kingdom come” has been a seeming eternity in the making, and will be a seeming eternity in the becoming, yet is instantly in our hearts as we believe it.

“Thy will be done” suggests agency and purpose, something (to me) more knowable than origins as we witness life and love, compassion and consciousness as pinnacles of experience.

“In earth / on earth” from the atom to the cosmos, from the cell to civilization, a driving and unstoppable force unites us. The Big Bang is still banging, like the reverberations of a Tibetan singing bowl.

“As it is in heaven”—not Plato’s realm of ideals, more like “harmonizing with the ultimately real” or true, the Tao (the way) as understood by Kung Tzu (Confucius), the way of life that gives “visible expression of the ultimate reality hidden in the universe.” (Merton quotes.)

“Give us this day our daily bread.” In the midst of this cosmic enterprise, we still need bread, and art, and wisdom.

“Forgive us our trespasses” when we overlook the larger picture or step on another’s property, holdings, or dignity.

“As we forgive those who trespass against us.” Help us let go of our sense of personal ownership of what we have been given, and share its grace.

“Lead us not into temptation.” Never for a second think we are not part of some cosmic dream that calls us to recognize our worth, the value of our time, and our call to add worth and act worthily.

“But deliver us from evil.” Save us from willful ignorance and from the “unquestioned self” in ourselves and in others, including our institutions.

“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever.” Not mine, but ours to share, in memory and in hope of the greater good.

Where is God? you might ask. Why, in all of this, of course!

An earlier post: The Lord’s Prayer—What It Means to Me

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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. Photo from a religious studies tour of India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal.