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.

Sunday, January 7, 2018

Radical Drag of the Soul

I recently published this essay in the current issue of RFD, "Finding Center," which takes as its theme the need to engage evolving standards of inclusivity while honoring long-held core values. It touches on themes I've written about before, but it offers a new take on a ritual practice dear to me heart.

I enjoy a loose but ongoing connection with a gay men’s organization that I admire, respect, and hold in great affection. I remember years ago coming into the main assembly room at one of its gatherings to find silhouette symbols of major world religions hanging in the windows.

Notably because uniquely missing was the Cross. The Sanskrit calligraphy for the sacred syllable Aum was mounted upside down. I’m guessing there were no Hindus in the room to point that out. And then there’s the frequency with which gay spiritual gatherings get scheduled smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays. As for calling the directions--well, what overwhelmingly Euro-American New Age gay group hasn’t appropriated that particular ceremony from Native American spiritual practice?

I totally get the toxicity of Christianity for those who’ve suffered the homophobic, anti-erotic pronouncements that so often poison its well. And I’m the last person to fault queer men for piecing together ritual patterns and spiritual expressions we can live with from as many traditions as we find available. It’s our genius as faggots to deck our deepest selves out in borrowed fashions, our radical drag of the soul. We found something wonderful at the back of Aunty’s closet. She may not be too happy about what we’ve done with her Dior gown, but we know we look fabulous in it. Angels in America is as brilliant an example of that as you’ll find, but hardly the only one.

Still, I agonize a lot about appropriation and exclusion, twin moral perils of life as a privileged, white, cisgendered gay man. The more so when I officiate at a ritual I first created seven years ago and have been leading since--a Lingam Puja that borrows its name from Hindu practice, but strays about as far from authentic Hindu ritual as Mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral parts company with a Passover Seder. Instead of the smooth, abstract cylinder that stands as the focal point in a Shiva temple, the Lingam we gather around is a very recognizable sculpture of an erect cock. Then too, I’ve developed parts of the ceremony straight out of a high Episcopalian Eucharist--though no one who doesn’t make the connection for himself needs to know that. Sometimes I include readings from contemporary Buddhist teachers, or from Rumi and Hafiz. I am, after all is said, a slut who will pray with anybody.

My fellow devotees and I are risking the alienation of established spiritual communities left and right in this ritual. But the centrality of an anatomically accurate Lingam isn’t potentially an offense only to Hindus who see us ripping off a venerable tradition that doesn’t properly belong to us--a formerly colonized one, at that. A twenty-inch wooden dick on the altar makes it pretty clear that this ritual addresses humans who have a penis and have gathered to own and honor the Divine’s presence in the wondrous bit of flesh that hangs between our legs--“the exposed tip of the heart, the wand of the soul,” as our Prophet St. James Broughton put it.

I’ve spent the last sixty years falling deeper into the truth that the Sacred is in this body, in all of this body. In the specifics of this body. This heart. These hands. This cock.

I’ve spent decades striving to claim fully my desire for the tribe of those who experience a similar truth. My tribe. The tribe of penis-bearing humans who love other penis-bearing humans. Who through our experience of jacking alone and with friends, of frotting and sucking and fucking with each other, are diving deeper into how living in a body with a penis shapes our relation to the world, and our relationship to the Sacred.

None of this is unconditioned truth. It’s not the working out of some universal archetype. It’s a result of living in this body, in these bodies, with these bodies’ histories. It’s my embodied truth, not identical with, but akin to, the embodied truth of my comrades. To live out this truth in their company is the deep desire of my heart and soul. My cock is a key to the inner temple, and I long to gather with others whose cocks are keys to the inner temple. There are other keys to the inner temple. There is conceivably a point when the inner temple is opened so wide that keys are no longer relevant. But I need the companionship of those who know, from deep, embodied experience, how this key fits into the lock. Who know the feel of this key turning in the lock, the sound of this key opening the lock.

I don’t believe any of this this has to be viewed as an attempt at exclusion. I know some people will say this is a dodge. But I still insist on owning my experience and staying true to it. I’d be deeply uncomfortable with the idea of shutting others out of the circle--cisgendered and trans women, trans men, cisgendered men whose erotic lives aren’t focused on cock. But there’s no denying that the ritual I lead isn’t focused on them and their experience of the world. Instead, I’m open to welcoming such fellow humans into the circle as visitors, much as I might welcome a Hindu friend attending Mass as a visitor, much as a Muslim friend might welcome me to his mosque, much as the rabbi of the shul my partner attends in the summer would tell me, I’m pretty sure, that no matter how many times I come to services, no matter how many times I put on my prayer shawl, no matter how glad she is I’ve come, I’m still a visitor, and not a Jew.

People I respect have asked whether I’m not really perpetuating imperialist attitudes to world cultures by drawing on them. They’ve asked whether I’m not perpetuating patriarchy by encouraging cisgendered men to gather in celebration of the beauty and holiness of the Lingam. But imperialist patriarchy hasn’t flourished because white cisgendered men are comfortable with our bodies and bond successfully with other men. Patriarchal privilege and misogyny are founded, paradoxically, on the insistence that cisgendered men deny our own vulnerably embodied experience. Patriarchy demands that we pretend our unpredictable, permeable, changeable, leaky bodies are irrelevant to our privileged place in the world. Patriarchy wants us to see other men as rivals who either pose potential threats or can be dominated. I borrow from the wisdom and practice of as many traditions as I have access to. I reject the homophobic crap that virtually no tradition is innocent of. I claim my experience of God in my faggot body as my own and forge a community out of what I share with my fellow travelers. This is as anti-patriarchal as I know how to be.

2 comments:

FrankJanuary 8, 2018 at 9:32 PM
Amen. Well said. Elegantly said.
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AnonymousJanuary 21, 2018 at 4:44 PM
An honest and valuable piece of literature. I believe being mindful and devoting one's self to mankind via a sexual channel is the most one can give. Through a Phallic brotherhood is the way to the new world we are heading for. Thank you.
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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.