On Behalf of Our Fathers

I know that some queer men have never experienced anything less than love and unconditional acceptance from their fathers. I rejoice for them. And at the same time, I'm somewhere between incredulous, wistful, and envious as hell.

We each have our story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us about our own.  Or furtively imposed their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...

My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been fifty years since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was 8. I've spent my whole adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted relationship with him.

So it was a huge grace when the week before last I experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that's ever come alive in me before.  During a journalling exercise at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish. Non-Jew that I am.

If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, Kaddish is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of parents.  The most observant say it every day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the death. The odd thing is, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they loved in all his or her individuality.

But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning. You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead, you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant funerals.

That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next.

All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died just over half a century ago. This last week, I've continued to chew on why  a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest would with unhesitating instinct borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the workshop--a man who over the last several years has given me more of what one would hope to get from a father than probably anyone else in my life.

And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we pilfer. But it's not that I can imagine my appropriation of the prayer offending some simply because I don't have a right to it by heritage.

It's that I recited it  in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering meadow. Standing before this sign of linkage between my spiritual and erotic life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. In the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible.

I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish for my father,  and on behalf of my father, changes nothing of that, and changes everything.

 

GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO  THE DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS, AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.

BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.

MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

Shared Sexual Energy in Mid-Life and Elderhood: A Guest Post by Ken Stofft

Why is the shared experience of erotic, sexual energy an important resource for queer men in their passages through mid-life and into elderhood?

Because unless we tap into that reservoir, we miss out on some of life's vast riches.  If we don't experience our full sexual energy, which is more than the sex act, we become limited in our relationship to ourselves and to others and don't enter as fully as we can into the profound mystery of life itself.  

Entering my 40's,  I was in my mid-life crisis. I felt isolated and driven by fear. I read William Bridge's Transitions, which I found greatly helpful.  That book started me off onto the right path of self-awareness. Although I was still drinking like a fish,  a major self-assessment told me that something had to change. The start was full of tears, anxiety, confusion, anger, disorientation. It took me another decade to take my first step, which was to get sober.  Then the 'work'  had just begun.  I entered unchartered territory and needed empathetic ears to hear my story, and to receive witnessing from someone outside of myself as I stumbled and worked my way up from what seemed like a bottomless pit.  I felt revitalized and on my way to new beginnings.   

In my early 60s, I entered into elderhood.  I went through another major transition and am still working my way through this time, which I consider the apex of my life.  I am clearly facing my mortality and have entered into this new dialogue with curiosity and a sense of playfulness. 

Both periods of time demanded my attention, and I knew then, as I know now, that self-awareness comes gradually and is a never-ending adventure.  So, I live today with a great deal of curiosity about myself and others, and with that overwhelming mystery we call life.   

Since those early days of mid-life, I've discovered the importance of my sexual energy--my life force. It is what flows or is inhibited in me, my source of creativity and vitality. It includes sex but is far more than simply enjoying sex. It is almost impossible for me to define what it is, but I know it is what I share with all others who are nurtured and sustained by the earth. It is the way of nature.  Birth, death, re-birth, death, the endless cycle.  It is the way of nature.  Birth, death, re-birth, death, the endless cycle.  My sexual energy is the source of my creativity and my power to simply be me. 

 

I've also discovered that I need other kindred embodied spirits to join me, and me to join them, in this journey of deeper, clearer self-awareness.  I discovered my need for a 'community', people that I want to surround myself with and  want to bond with.  It is this energy that feeds and nourishes its members when such a community exists.  And when there is a sense of safety, a freedom from judgment, shame, and guilt, I can let down my guard and reveal who I am.  It has taken me decades to feel comfortable and safe in my body, and it is due  not only to my own courage to be me, sexually alive, but to the people I've met on the way, and who surround me today. 

Since mid-life, and now as an elder, I have found certain elements  need to be nurtured.  I breathe into my belly.  I sit in meditation.  I reach out to others and listen to them when I am in need.  I touch and am touched physically by myself and with/by others.  I dance, and I have playful sex. I have found that breathing into my feelings is far, far more helpful than suppressing them; living in my body with excitement and joy is paramount.  The importance of shared sexual energy in these major transitions in life is primarily about “letting go” of the armor I have accrued over a life time, giving  myself permission to be seen, heard, touched, and to witness the same with others, becoming ever more deeply self-aware, and having the courage not only to own who I am, but to revel in who I am. More often than not, it is not a matter of having a one explosion of insight, but transitions are mini-events that accumulate, sometimes subtly, sometimes surprisingly, but always opportunities to be re-born.

I've learned that sharing my sexual energy, not only in sex, but in the way I live my life with passion and as much authenticity as I can muster, sharing my emotions, sharing my touch, sharing my beliefs, sharing my emotional vulnerabiltiy, is the only way for me to live.   

I have delved deeply into my sexual energy to create my own form of yin/yang, male/female, my own masculine identity that I believe is the most authentic for me.  I lived my life in fantasy and vicariously through books. Now I live it in my body passionately.   

I believe it's my sexual energy that also afforded me the ability to create my own spirituality rather than living in a traditional religious context, which I had found suffocating and unhealthy in its denial of  bodily pleasures its negativity about sex.  When I became sober and began to open to the fact that I was indeed a sexual creature, I faced a multitude of options that could have taken me in a different direction.  If I had allowed fear to rule my life, I never would have learned more about who I am and what I need in my life to simply be me.  I'm very grateful for having discovered a liberating, self-loving path for myself. 

What do I recommend?  Each man's path is his own.  What I have found most helpful I have listed above: breathing into the belly, sitting in self-assessment, moving/dancing, bonding physically and emotionally with others, finding others who are empathic, and always bringing curiosity as a gift of wonderment.

In what ways do you express your sexual energy? What do your sexual fantasies tell you about yourself?  When you are aroused, is ejaculation important and necessary?  How are you a passionate and sexually alive man when you're not having sex?   Is there a spirituality that nourishes and feeds your sexuality? If so, what is it?  What does your sexual energy say about the kind of man you are, and want to become, as you move through mid-life and into the status of elder?

 

Ken Stofft coaches men in exploring issues related to their sexuality: www.transitionpower.com