Progressive Christian Reflections by Chris Glaser: The Inner Light

A
beloved transgender member of Ormewood Church, formerly a member of Ormewood
Park Presbyterian Church, died unexpectedly last week, and, in addition to her
own outstanding “Message of Hope” about this longtime member, our pastor Jenelle
requested me to offer a brief reflection on her life based on our shared love
of Star Trek during her memorial service this past Sunday afternoon. Afterward,
her lifelong spouse gave me a beautiful Star Trek t-shirt commemorating its
various incarnations over 55 years, 1966-2021. 

In
recent weeks I had tossed about various ideas for my final post on this blog. Should
I re-post an earlier blog about LGBT Pride for this Pride Month or write
something new? I’ve decided that this reflection is a fitting way to end this
ten-year-long blog. 

Star
Trek, The Next Generation, was one of my binge-watched series during the pandemic, and
one episode in particular stood out, entitled, “The Inner Light.” For those who
want to watch it on Netflix, it is episode 25 of season 5. I had talked with
Jenelle about it at the time, and I discovered lots of other people liked it
too, receiving awards. 

The
episode is simply described: “Picard awakens to find himself in a village where
he is a well-known member of the community suffering from a delusion of being a
starship captain.” I watched it again to prepare. 

I
have come to think of Star Trek as a kind of “biblical stories of the
future.” They often relate to something going on in the present, offering
meaning and values and purpose, just as the Bible does. 

Spoiler
alert, but what occurs in this episode is that the current Enterprise has
happened upon an unoccupied alien spacecraft that sends a beam of memory into Captain
Picard’s head, causing him to faint, unconscious for half an hour. But during
that brief period, Picard realizes a whole lifetime on another planet. No one in
his village believes him to be a starship captain, no one affirms his own
“inner light,” thus the reason he is considered under a delusion. 

Instead
he is recognized as a community leader and scientist who tackles his host
planet’s own form of global warming, an unrelenting drought. He is married and
has children, and we watch them grow from infancy to adulthood, as Picard and
his wife age, and as Picard finally learns to play the flute. 

He
eventually finds a solution to the planetary drought and offers it to his
community leaders. Come to find out, their own scientists had figured out the
same solution, but the local leaders (read “politicians”) refuse to make
the hard choice to put it into practice, for fear of the average citizen. Again,
his own “inner light,” his own “aha,” is rejected. 

The
beam directed into Jean Luc Picard’s inner consciousness is the way the people
of this now destroyed planet have finally told their story, perhaps as a
warning for those of other planets. The people of the planet have been gone for
a thousand years, but their history and their lives have been preserved and now
communicated. Their inner light has become Picard’s (and our own) inner light.
The parallel with scriptures and sacred texts of every faith handed down to us
is clear, at least to me. 

What
really moves me about this story is that this is what I experience in every
death, including our beloved church member. With every death, we lose a vital (as
in “life-giving”) story about ourselves, about life, about the universe, about
the nature of things. We will miss their “inner light.” 

I
will miss her grin, cheerfulness, intelligence, wit, and welcome. I will miss
her story, her own inner light. Surely it was a reflection of the very nature and
nobility of God. 

Some
outside our welcoming community of Ormewood Church may have written off as
delusion her inner light. But she came to understand something about herself, her
gender experience and expression, and I would say, something about all of us
and about all of our gender expressions. 

Her
inner light has brightened our world on her journey into the inner light of God.
To quote the opening of Star Trek episodes: “Space, the final frontier…[our]
mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new
civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” 

Hallelujah!
Amen! Thanks be to God!

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

Though
this is my final post, more than ten years of posts 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. 

Comments
are still welcome on any post. 

Though
they may have been written with current events in mind, I intended them each to
be read meaningfully at any point in time. 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 512,500 visits, a count that does not
include 500 free weekly subscribers. Subscriptions have always
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may still be made through the links provided at the end of this post. Thank
you! 

Copyright
© 2021 Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution
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