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Collective Christian Memory

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T14:01:34+00:00February 14, 2018|

“Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” it is said, and a background in literature has taught me that in earlier periods writers often borrowed from one another without compunction or complaint. But I was shaken, early in my activist writing career, to discover another writer had “borrowed” something I had written for her Methodist curriculum. She put her name as the author because she had “adapted” it. I had felt similarly offended when I noticed Cat Stephens failed to acknowledge on an album that “Morning Has Broken” is an old hymn that he “adapted.”

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Darwin’s Epiphany on the Meaning of Flowers

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T14:01:34+00:00February 7, 2018|

The impertinence of youth caused me once to chide my father for spending so much time on his garden “rather than on something that lasts.” “What lasts?” was his wise response, making no apology. Possibly the better way to proclaim the Gospel is to “say it with flowers.”

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The Personal Face of God

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T14:01:24+00:00January 19, 2018|

God is not a “thing” to be grasped or known or understood absolutely; yet the entire witness of scripture and saints and Jesus is that God is within our reach.

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Poetry Makes Life Last Longer

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T14:01:16+00:00December 27, 2017|

Poetry Makes Life Last Longer Posted: 27 Dec 2017 02:00 AM PST "The breakers steady crash..." The end of a year seems a good time to reflect on time: what shortens it, what stretches it. The beginning of this year I eagerly read most of Alan Burdick’s Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation (2017). Though I recommend it, I found the text sometimes contradicted the title as I trudged through scientific studies and jargon.

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Thank God you were born!

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T14:01:15+00:00December 22, 2017|

Or thank the cosmos! Or evolution! Or your parents! Or “to whom it may concern”! “Thank God you were born” is the message I often write on birthday cards or Facebook birthday messages. I intend it as my own thanksgiving for the birth of the person I’m greeting, but I realize it could be understood as a spiritual directive to the recipient as well.

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Remembering our nation’s values in these troubled times…

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T14:01:00+00:00November 16, 2017|

The recent flap about athletes “taking the knee” during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice has been called disrespectful of our armed services. I realize the anthem’s imagery is of a battle, but our national anthem is about ALL Americans who have contributed to our nation’s character, from the seamstress who made the first stars and stripes to the seamstress who refused to give up her seat on a bus. The “land of the free and the home of the brave” values protest and the courage of activists. We actually have benefited from both. Important battles have been fought with picket signs, resistance, demonstrations, civil disobedience, and votes.

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Jesus, A New Adam

Jesus is the “new Adam”—not the innocent and perfect and beautiful Ken and Barbie doll of Adam and Eve.

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:38+00:00May 5, 2017|

For me as a progressive Christian, Jesus is the “new Adam”—not the innocent and perfect and beautiful (and initially sexless) Ken and Barbie doll of Adam and Eve; rather the tried and tested, unappealing and vulnerable and wounded one, acquainted with sorrows and grief, the bearer of the sins and injustices of the world—political, religious, and personal. Treasonous and blasphemous, betrayable and deniable, because compassion was all he held dear.

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“Peace! Be Still!”

The contemplative practices of those escaping “empire,” both politically and religiously…

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:36+00:00April 26, 2017|

How easily my calm was shattered as I started

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Altars in the World

The contemplative life is about finding altars everywhere!

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:32+00:00April 15, 2017|

The contemplative life is about finding altars everywhere. Celtic “thin places” where heaven shows itself on earth. Creatures who, much like Meister Eckhart’s caterpillar, are so full of God a sermon is unnecessary. Leonard Cohen’s broken places that let the light shine in. Strangers who are angels unawares. The “least of these” who are Christ himself. People who, as in Thomas Merton’s epiphany at a city intersection, do not realize they are walking around “shining like the sun.” Maya Angelou’s “caged bird,”

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Rage to Ecstasy: Praying the Psalms

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:23+00:00March 30, 2017|

That’s a gift of the Psalms, that praying them, we feel less alone. Those who wrote the psalms were imperfect, much like us. They didn’t know everything, but they had feelings about everything. And, like us, they had multiple situations and events to have feelings about, some good, even great, some bad, even evil. They reflect the human range of experiences and emotions.

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“Arrogant Autonomy (or) Loving Excentration”

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:18+00:00March 18, 2017|

I recently read that longer lived people tend to challenge themselves physically or mentally, and reading the first essay, “A Note on Progress,” tells me that this book will surely extend my life by a year. As I read and re-read the chapter, I confess my broken knowledge. Yet Teilhard’s erudition is made tenable by exquisite phrasing and enlarging metaphors. It is from this chapter that I take the title of this post.

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Remember the Gift

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:14+00:00March 11, 2017|

Teilhard de Chardin (yes, I’m still reading him) writes, “However personal and incommunicable it may be at its root and origin, Reflection can only be developed in communion with others. It is essentially a social phenomenon.” I would add, a social phenomenon over time, a communion of saints over the ages. In another context, he writes, “Coherence and fecundity, the two criteria of truth.”*

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Stay With Me

Transforming loneliness to solitude…

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:07+00:00February 25, 2017|

Loneliness is the wilderness for the writer, the artist, and the contemplative. Writing, creativity, and prayer are not ways out of the wilderness, but a way to make the wilderness blossom, to turn the ache of feeling lonely to a fulfilling solitude, transforming “lone” to “alone,” derived from joining the words “all-one.”

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Why I am praying for President Trump…

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:59:03+00:00February 17, 2017|

A Facebook friend puzzled over my last post, wondering if it implied a kind of us-vs-them outlook. What I intended was assurance to those of us apprehensive about the Trump-Pence inauguration, including possible Trump voters, who may themselves now face loss of health care coverage, rising prices, diminished Social Security and Medicare benefits, reduced personal safety, and international insecurity.

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Potlatch

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:58:58+00:00February 5, 2017|

As a youth I was fascinated by a custom practiced among Pacific Northwest Native Americans called the Potlatch. I capitalize the Chinook term here, though my OED does not, because it seems every bit as sacred as Christmas and Easter. Having accumulated much, a person (often a chief) would give away or burn all possessions and start afresh. Though my dictionary implies this was a show of wealth and prestige rather than generosity and humility, I’d say Christmas or any show of charity and humility is practiced with similar mixed motives, so why quibble?

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The Call to Celibacy

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:58:49+00:00January 12, 2017|

I distinguish between the “gift” of celibacy and the “call” to celibacy, which I will come to later in this post. The gift of celibacy is a debatable proposition. Is someone “blessed” with that gift or simply avoiding intimate relationships? Is it a rejection of God’s gift of sexuality and more broadly sensuality and embodiment, or a prioritizing of one’s energy and involvement and commitment?

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The Word We Need This Christmas

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:58:44+00:00December 25, 2016|

We’ve all been there. Trying to find the right word to say. The right word to say to a friend who has lost her mother. The right word to say in a letter seeking acceptance. The right word to let someone know how much you love him or her. It’s true that words are not the answer to everything. Sometimes silence is healing. Sometimes silence lets you think. Sometimes just listening, either to a friend or to God or to your own heart is all that’s needed. But when the silence is deafening, when the silence is lonely, we need to hear a word. A word of hope. A word of encouragement. A word of love. The Bible is the story of a God who tries a multitude of ways to speak to us. A voice in the wilderness. Commandments written in stone. Oracles of prophets seeking justice and mercy.

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Mary Doesn’t Do It Alone–Neither Do We!

By Chris Glaser|2023-10-17T13:58:39+00:00December 17, 2016|

In these uncertain times, we may feel overwhelmed by the needs of the world and the deficits of our leaders. The biblical story of Mary metaphorically tells us what to look for from God, “however we understand” our Higher Power. How did God help Mary—the Mary we seek to emulate in her willingness to bring something new into the world? God first sent an angel, a messenger from God who told her not to be afraid, explaining what was happening, how God was working out a purpose in her life, giving her vision of her sacred worth, as well as calling her out as an instrument of God’s in-breaking kingdom, or commonwealth.

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