Balancing Act

I work in a building on one of the busiest commercial corners in mid-town Toronto. Starting in my block and heading east, luxury retailers have stacked up the last few years thick as cockroaches: Louis Vuitton next to Tiffany next to Coach, and so on down the block; Cartier is across the street. To the west there's a different mix: a sequence of public institutions and university buildings south of the street, on the north side toney new condos and a posh hotel, punctuated by relatively downmarket eateries left over from thirty years ago. Between the museum and the Royal Conservatory of Music lies a surviving ribbon of a greener Victorian Toronto: Philosopher's Walk, following the dale of a creek that now flows invisibly through a subterranean culvert. An Edwardian stone and wrought iron gate bows away from the sidewalk, creating a little eddy out of the main pedestrian flow, an invitation into the tranquillity of the the footpath leading south, away from the traffic and bling.

One afternoon about two weeks ago, a man knelt beside the gate, a random selection of stones at his side. Before him, more stones rose as he'd left them balanced, in columns of three or four. A field of focused energy radiated around him. At its centre lay only his union with the work of creating  equipoise and stillness.

There was no question of our pulling him out of his task. Instead, he drew us in. I misread him at first, emptying the spare change from my pocket into the satchel he'd set to one side, before it sank in that his practice had nothing to do with solliciting money, on a street where half a dozen people a day ask me for a handout. Or perhaps: that if it did, the heart of his enterprise lay securely beyond any expectation of the donations he might take in. It existed for itself. It was pure gift. As I dropped my few coins into his bag, he said while making eye contact only a moment, "I love you," and went back to the work of finding the still point hidden in the heart of the jagged, angular rock he was holding almost motionless over the one beneath it.

Later that day, he'd gone; the stones remained.

Total Immersion

 

(Provenance unknown; shared by Hoppergrass)

 

On an Autumn Afternoon

Right of Return

Saturday afternoon: as the sun prepares to set on this Day of Atonement in the Jewish year 5775, those of us who attend the final service of Ne'ilah will meditate one last time on the New Year call to t'shuvah--"repentence," but more literally, "return": return to our original natures in their divinely ordained goodness. The repentance of the High Holidays doesn't grovel in self-loathing. Instead, it points toward the ways human nature is meant to do better and is capable of doing better. Which is why I go back, year after year, gentile in a Jewish congregation that I am. I find there an invitation (one I never answer fully) to be the best of myself. For me, that call often gets lost in my own Christian tradition, especially in the pieties of Lent, tinged with self-loathing as they still all too frequently remain.

The sober self-assessment this day invites us to exercise is grounded in the fundamental goodness of who we are at our core, of who we were made to be. That core includes the discovery, the rediscovery, and the living out of our authentic sexuality and gender identification. Our core embraces the force for good, in ourselves and in the world, that acting on the truth of our sexual being can be.

T'shuvah calls you to repair the self, not to deny the self or to turn it into some other self. T'shuvah calls you to show kindness and respect; to embrace your own capacity for desire and pleasure as miracles to which the proper response is gratitude and celebration, within yourself and in erotic communion with others. It calls you not to shame others; not to belittle them; not to evaluate and use them as objects.

It calls us to affirm the best of who we are and to resist everything, both inside and outside ourselves, that denies our right to return to the truth of our queer souls.

That scrutiny of who we are at our core surely also includes a close look at the complex, often painful heritage of our early religious upbringings. The impulse to walk away from traditions that served us badly is strong. Sometimes walking away from a spiritually abusive heritage is the healthiest thing queer men can possibly do.

But I know from my own experience that the alienated rage I felt for so long towards the Lutheran tradition of my childhood and youth screened a deep pain--the pain I felt at losing the riches it held along with the abuse it doled out. For me, t'shuvah--return--has meant finding a way back to embrace again what  fed my soul as a child and as a young man. My own queer t'shuvah eventually meant claiming my right to return to religious language and symbols that from my early childhood on were woven into the truth of my soul.

My path of return is all the more queer because it wanders on its course through rich traditions not my own--and guided, this day and this evening, by the sound of the shofar in the wilderness.

 

(Photo by the late Oscar Wolfman.)