Anchorhold

Welcome to a space for the spirituality of gay and bisexual men. We have within ourselves the resources for our healing, liberation, and growth. Connecting with each other, we encounter the grace to lay hold of a richer, juicier life. Losing ourselves in deep play, we rediscover the bigger, freer, more joyous selves we're capable of becoming. Here I share my interest in personal and communal ritual, making art that expresses my inner life, and an intentional practice of erotic spirituality.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Holy and Perishable

For over six years, my altar's been falling apart.

It was a ruin when I first adopted it--a 60's-style backyard brick hearth, long disused, cracks already opening in the mortar. I swept it clean and filled it with votive candles and incense the night of Summer Solstice. My neighbours have year after year remained quietly tolerant that every morning I ring a bell and kneel in front of an eyesore fifteen feet from their kitchen window.

Every summer, I've removed objects and added others, as I do to the indoor altar that becomes the focus of my practice September through May. This year, I've included no Christian symbolism, though every day I begin by crossing myself and reciting the formulas traditional to the monastic morning prayer of Lauds. Red, white, yellow, and black stones for the four directions surround a small Shiva Lingam. Behind that sits a small, corroded bronze Indonesian Buddha, missing an arm and part of its chest--a reminder of the transience of all things, including our understanding of the Friend who makes our lives possible and gives them meaning.

Tibetan Buddhist monks proclaim this lesson of transience by spending weeks constructing mandalas of coloured sand--which they then sweep back into chaos and pour into moving water.

The collapse of my repurposed shrine continues. Yesterday morning as I knelt, a cluster of bricks had skewed loose from the wall, wobbling under my touch. They're going nowhere for the moment, but the frosts and thaws of the coming winter will take their toll. The floor of the main chamber is already one course shorter than when I first consecrated it. The lower chamber, once the firepit, holds a compost of undisturbed garden detritus dedicated to the Goddess's endless cycle of generation, decay, and rebirth. Eventually, everything above that I've prayed over and venerated will collapse into it.

When it does, I will take it as an invitation to give thanks for the lesson and to look for the Sacred in another corner of the garden.

Monday, August 18, 2014

Jonathan's Circle

“When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.” — I Samuel 18: 1, 3-4 NRSV

The story of David and Jonathan is one of the slim list of relationships in the Bible that give queer people a chance to see themselves reflected in the sacred scriptures of the West. (Nehirim, the lgbtq Jewish spirituality group, has printed "Jonathan+David" and "Ruth+Naomi" bumper stickers!) But you don't have to go as far as reading erotic love into the story of David and Jonathan's iconic bond to register the undefended tenderness that passes between them. Amidst the militaristic retinue of Jonathan's father King Saul, who's already shown the first signs of paranoid tyranny, Jonathan takes the risk of handing over to David, the beautiful young shepherd who has won the king's favor, not only the garment that marks him as the king's heir but even his means of defense: he takes off his armor and hands it over.

The moment when Jonathan strips off his protection, and meets another man face to face and heart to heart, is the inspiration for a new initiative to bring men together at the place where their sexuality and their spirituality converge--a place where most of us feel, or have felt, apprehension, shame, misunderstanding, danger, and confusion, in a dominant culture that puts a Berlin Wall between sex and spirit, without genuinely respecting or honoring either. Frank Dunn, an Episcopal priest and counsellor in Washington, DC, has announced the formation of an innovative take on men's consciousness-raising groups like those that blossomed a generation ago out of a Men's Movement that never completely fulfilled its potential.

Dunn's proposal is for something more focused and more fundamental than many of those groups of the 1980's and early 90's ever achieved. He's encouraging an open, undefended sharing of the links between participants' individual sexual practices and their spiritual journeys.

Imagine digging deeper into your pride and your insecurities about life in your amazing and not-so-perfect male body. Imagine digging deeper into what moves and excites you sexually in order to understand how those longings and pleasures are connected to your relationship to the Sacred. Imagine feeling safe to do that out loud, in a circle of men whose experiences might be similar to yours--but also may well turn out to be radically different . Imagine being surprised by what you hear. Imagine being open to expanded perspectives. Imagine looking at your own view of the world from outside of yourself, as it's reflected back to you by other participants, with wisdom and compassion. Imagine doing all this not just in heady conversation, but dropping down into your body, by group consensus through yoga, meditation, movement, massage, structured erotic exchange, breathwork, chant, co-created ritual, any or all of the above.

That's a brief sketch of what Jonthan's Circle offers. You can learn more by visiting the group's new website: www.jonathanscircle.org.

Sacred Intimacy: Companionship in Spiritual and Erotic Healing

Different practitioners use the term "Sacred Intimacy" to mean different things. It's important to remember that Sacred Intimacy work is different from therapy, and can't replace therapy. I'm not a therapist. I don't claim to offer services in any officially regulated modality. (Some Sacred Intimates are also practicing therapists, but they're clear with themselves and with clients which modality they're working in.) Put simply, I offer heart-centered companionship and deep listening.

For me, first and foremost, Sacred Intimacy means that what passes between us is holy. It's filled and enlivened with the presence of the Divine. I will do my best to be as present to you, as available to you for your good, as I'm capable of being. My intention is to be open to working in whatever modality we agree will be helpful to you. A session begins with a short conversation in which you explain to me where you're at, and what you hope to take away from our time together.

The emphasis is on healing, growth, and the expansion of your life. You may, for example, have issues of erotic shame that you want to work on, or grief, or body image, or intimacy. I may ask for clarifications and make suggestions. Together we agree on the starting point for the experiential work that will follow.

A session might unfold through breathwork, guided meditation, bodywork, intentionally focused erotic interaction, creative movement, the shared creation of ritual, artistic practice, psychodynamic role playing, or some combination.

I can't hope to be of service to you unless I feel competent in the role I assume, and unless I have the sense that what we do has potential to help you move forward with your declared intention. So our initial conversation may involve some give and take around what's possible and what's useful.

It's essential for your integrity and mine that we maintain full confidentiality and respect one another's boundaries. We enter into sacred space together at the beginning of a session. We leave sacred space at the end, and what's happened within the safe container of the session remains distinct from any interactions we might have before or after the session. What happens in the session stays in the session.

Every Sacred Intimate has his own understanding of the nature of his work. Just below you'll find a series of links to the web pages of a number of Sacred Intimates working in various cities and areas.

Finding Yourself, Claiming Yourself

I invite you to celebrate who you are, and who you want to become.

Think of the times your life as a gay or bisexual man has flowed without effort.

Think of the times you’ve struggled to lay hold of your life more fully.

Maybe those times feel like opposites. But they’re parts of a single cycle: sowing and harvest, labor and rest, preparation and enjoyment. We can’t work toward a fuller life unless we already feel some trust that life will rise up to meet us. We can’t sink deeper into our present joy and satisfaction in life without being reminded that it took a long journey to get here.

Please join me in considering a place where the two halves of this cycle come together: in the safe, empowering container of ritual space and ritual time.

What's an Anchorhold?

For centuries in Europe, a handful of men and women took a vow to devote themselves to the cultivation of their inner lives and to make themselves radically available to their communities for spiritual counsel. Committing themselves to remaining in a single dwelling for the rest of their lives, they were known as anchorites; the houses in which they lived were their anchorholds. Those who needed what the official channels of the religious establishment couldn’t provide came to the anchorhold for conversation and support.

Neither priests nor monks, the spiritual practice of anchorites and their interaction with those who came to them fell outside formal control of the Church. As a result, religious authorities often viewed them with suspicion. One of the best known of these dropouts from ordinary social and religious norms was Julian of Norwich, a woman who had a near-death experience in 1373 and spent the rest of her life thinking about what it meant, for herself and for the world at large. The book she wrote about her revelation, the first in English that we know for sure was written in by a woman, is an astonishingly daring and original rethinking of Christian theology: a vision of a God in whom there is no wrath, who is both Father and Mother of Creation, and who will somehow, by a miracle beyond our ability to grasp, eventually effect the salvation of every living being.

Men and women of spirit who fell between the cracks, anchorites practiced what in its own way was a profoundly queer inner life, following the instincts of their own experience, flying under the radar of the powers that claimed to control access to the Divine.