There’s a lot of provisional,
not-quite-consolidated experimentation in alternative queer ritual communities--along
with a light-hearted playfulness. After all, we’re making it up as we go along.
Good ritual has a thick, condensed
richness: it’s ambiguous and open-ended
and can mean different things to different people. Good ritual doesn't create a
charmed circle of those "in the know" that excludes everybody else.
But it does require a shared baseline of experience that lets people connect with
each other on ground that’s somehow familiar.
Good ritual improves with repetition: past
experiences of the same words and actions enrich your perception of the ritual
this time around. Rituals are only effective as long as they draw on the values
and expectations of the community that practices them. Good rituals don’t
belong to one inventor or leader. They belong to the whole community. They’re
not full of esoteric, exotic elements that only the officiant claims to
understand.
It's a lot easier to start with an inherited
vocabulary and grammar of ritual--the gestures, the words, the symbolic
objects--than to make it up from scratch. Without an already established
community to plug into--if you're trying with just a few kindred spirits to
create a new ritual from the ground up--the depth of the longing that motivates
you in the first place is probably grounded in your personal world of private
meanings. If you’re trying to create new ritual as part of a group of six or
eight, each of you is almost certainly drawing on a deep reservoir of
undeclared, maybe even unconscious, assumptions and desires.
That raises the stakes enormously. If, by
some long shot, all that unvoiced desire, all those elaborate individual
visualizations, get fulfilled without being explicitly shared and acknowledged,
the experience can be electric for everyone involved. But it’s much more likely
that one person’s fantasy of the perfect ritual will leave somebody else
feeling shut out, turned off, sidelined.
So you have to talk about it.
Not talk it to death: nothing kills good
ritual like attempts to nail down its meaning. You have to speak and listen from
the heart, and so begin to weave a web of shared understanding and expectations,
either before you enter together into ritual time and space, or else as an
early stage of the ritual itself. In either case, what you share becomes the
material for a kind of spiritual jazz improvisation that allows everyone a
chance to riff.
A tantric way of putting this is that you
need tapas--that is, a strong
container--in order for spanda--that
is, playful experimentation--to manifest itself authentically.
Good ritual practice in the major religious
traditions has hundreds or thousands of years of tapas to build on. We, on the other hand, have to create this
communal container ourselves, through mindful attention to each other and a
healthy dose of awareness that what speaks to me may not speak to you, or may
speak to you differently, or may begin to speak to you as we talk about it, and
vice versa.
Sometimes we borrow elements from
traditions we already know, practicing a kind of radical drag of the spirit.
When we do, we’ll probably find that the borrowings spark dramatically different
reactions. A bell may make me think of a Roman Catholic Mass, but remind
somebody else of the bell you ring when entering a Hindu temple, or the bell at
the beginning and end of a Zen sitting. The familiarity may be comforting to an
ex-Catholic, or it may be a stumbling block. Burning sweet grass may be
intended as a respectful homage to Native American practice, but it may strike somebody else as cultural theft. The
large phallus at the centre of the queer men’s Lingam Puja that I often lead can heal the shame of some
men in the circle gathered around it. But it may turn out to be a painful
reminder to others of the obsession with cock size and performance in commercialized
gay culture. Someone else may object to its appropriation of the central object
of veneration in a Shiva temple.
It’s not that good ritual challenges no
one. On the contrary, good ritual stretches us and becomes a tool for our
growth. But the benefits of ritual happen when we’ve transformed private fantasies
into shared meanings. Doing that takes perseverance and mindful attention.
When it comes to creating explicitly erotic
ritual, the stakes are that much higher. Many attempts to create mindful,
spritually grounded group erotic practice fall apart on the failure to get past
a collection of individuals acting out their individual fantasies, all the
while mistakenly assuming that everyone else involved will be on the same
wavelength. Things can fall apart quickly and completely when it becomes clear
that one man’s expression of the Divine is another man’s freakout.
Why would we be drawn to creating erotic
ritual in the first place? In part, because it’s a way to express and explore communally
the deeper meaning of our sexuality without reducing the magic and wonder that
flows from our unconscious to bloodless, disembodied talk. It’s a path to
healing, as we experience that we’re safe, we’re seen, we’re sacred--and as we
provide that safety and grace for others as well. It’s a path to growth, as we
practice the never-fully-mastered skill of simultaneously respecting boundaries
and reaching out across them to the internal worlds of our fellow travelers. It’s
a path to transcendence, as we connect with the fundamental humanity of other participants--their
longings, their anxieties, their capacity for joy, their generosity, their
vulnerabilities--regardless of whether we’d likely choose erotic encounter with
them as individuals or not. It’s a path to non-attachment, as we learn
simultaneously to honor our desires and to take them less seriously as the
mysteriously fluid and transient phenomena that they are.
Those of us who feel called to connect with
such ritual practice learn pretty quickly that the fantasies we bring with us
only take us the first leg of the journey. More or less immediately, we have to
start loosening our hold on long-treasured (i.e., hot) private scenarios, in
order to make space for the equally treasured scenarios of others. That, in
turn, gets us only to second base. As we speak from the heart, as we listen
with the heart, we start to understand that the adventure of what we create
with others in our circle is more enlivening than what we assumed we wanted in
the first place. As we construct a ritual practice one experiment at a time,
retaining what works, letting go of what isn’t so successful, we begin to mold
a container strong and flexible enough to hold us all: a ritual time and space
where we become more fully ourselves--and where, if we’re blessed, we lose
ourselves in something bigger and richer and more complex than anything we individually
could have asked or imagined.
