BIG TEASE WOW, PART 3: PSYCHOLOGIST BILL GLENN

On Taking Pride in Oneself and Reimagining Salvation in the Episcopal Church

This weekend I’m offering a couple short teases from some interviews that I’ll be publishing here in the coming weeks and months. I hope you like what you see!

William D. Glenn is the chair of the board of trustees of the Graduate Theological Union, a consortium of schools of different faith traditions in Berkeley, Ca. A former Jesuit and long-time psychologist and AIDS activist, Bill has just written a memoir about the journeys and lessons of his life.

Bill writes a lot about people who have been mentored him, and I asked him about them.  

 [Fr.] Peter Fleming had been a scholastic at [Creighton] Prep when I went there in 1962. He was kind of a gruff guy, big, a commanding personality. He knew how to use his weight. But I had an intuition in theology studies that he should be my spiritual director.

So I went to him. And he treated me in the way I suspect, if I could personalize the divine, the divine would treat me.

Meaning what?

I couldn’t look at him. And he came over to my chair and lifted my chin up. It was such a gesture. And he said, “You have a right to be here and you have a right to approach all of your problems with dignity.” That was the most unheard of thing. “Dignity?” Are you kidding? I’m a homosexual!

And he attended to me for two years. Ad he protected me from the community superior. And he required that I claim my full self.

Mario was like the psychiatric version of Peter. Mario, the first time I went to him, I wrote about this, I couldn’t look at him either. And I said, well I’m here because I think I’m a homosexual. And he said, Do you mean you’re gay? And I said, Yeah I’m gay.

I couldn’t look at him the whole session, and I come back the next week, and this is how he begins the session: “I don’t want you to use that word in this room anymore.” And I said, what word? And he said, ”Gay.”

Why not? And he goes, “Because you use it like you’re bludgeoning yourself, and I’m not going to have blood on my sofa.”

I looked at him and I knew in that moment, Oh this guy is totally onto me. 

Later we spoke about Bill’s experience with the Episcopal Church.

How is that church different for you?
Partially it’s different because everyone is there by free choice. No one has to be there, no one has any sense of obligation to be there. So the community is there because they want something. There’s no remnant of Have-To.

And because they’ve done a lot of work in the last 50 years, there’s nothing in the polity of the Episcopal Church now that says to anyone, We accept you, but you’re not full members. Everyone is welcome in every ministry and at all tables. That’s  very freeing. I didn’t know how freeing until I experienced it.

I talked at Mass last Sunday and I’m preaching at the first Sunday of Advent, and it’s total freedom for me. Because I feel the man I am is who they are inviting to minister, not a version of the man I am or the closeted version or the version that’s also required to uphold dogmatic truths that I don’t believe in. There’s very little dogma that interests me. I think a lot of dogma was devised as a way of maintaining the patriarchy.

The term “salvation” is not meaningful to me. Grace is very meaningful, the person of Jesus is meaningful, divine presence in the world is meaningful. Love is so meaningful.

What is it about the term salvation that you don’t like?

It suggests that the creator created a flawed entity and it’s his responsibility to rectify the flawed entity by hanging Jesus on the cross. Jesus was the “expiation factor;” he had to take had to put the second person of the Trinity on the tree ignominiously to rectify his flawed creation.

That is not the way I understand things. I believe there’s terrible evil in the world and I’m part of it. But I don’t need to be saved from that evil, I need to transform the evil within me through the grace of God, through the person of Jesus. It’s not Jesus is coming down to save me. Jesus came to teach me how to be a human being and to live my life with integrity, honor, truth, courage, love.

That isn’t what salvation means in the dogmatic churches. It’s a really fucked theology, in my view.

Coming soon to subscribers to the Wow!