Queer Men's Spirituality 101: A Five-Part Series

What is Queer Men's Spirituality? It's pretty simple. If you're reading this, you probably already believe that what happens in your body happens in your soul. Your sexuality and your spirit are an indivisible whole. It's about going deeper and claiming a bigger, freer, juicier life.

Tune up your inner life as a gay/bi/trans/queer man with this series of five 90-minute sessions, Sunday afternoons at 4 p.m., in midtown Toronto. Take stock of where you're at. Increase clarity about where you need to go. Build the personal practices that are right for you. Draw on your own inner resources for healing, liberation, and growth, in community with kindred spirits. All spiritual paths and traditions are equally welcome here.

January 27 Claiming Your Sacred Ground

Guided meditation, inventory exercises, and group conversation will help you clarify what brings you the deepest fulfilment and joy in life, and how you can invite more of it into your daily experience.

February 10 Building Your Sacred Space

Bring objects that are important to you for a "show and tell" session. Share ways to keep reminders of what really matters to you present in your everyday environment. Explore possibilities for creating and maintaining a simple home altar or shrine.

February 24 Creating Your Sacred Practices

Experiment with simple mindful routines that can help ground you in daily life. Learn more about how you can create well-designed, uncomplicated, authentic rituals for yourself that speak to your deep hopes and longings. Explore practies that can help you drop down out of your head into your heart-centered intuition.

March 10 Finding Spiritual Community

We aren't built to be happy in isolation.  Explore the potentials and challenges of creating spiritually engaged queer men's community that supports and nourishes your soul.

March 24 Cultivating Erotic Spirituality

Share a safe, supportive exploration of what it means to integrate our spiritual longings with our erotic energies and sexual experiences. (Much of this session is clothing-optional.)

As leader and facilitator of this series, I bring decades of experience as a teacher, a gift for listening from the heart, a deep knowledge of spiritual resources drawn from many world traditions, and a passionate commitment to the integrity of gay, bi, and otherwise queer men's spiritual journeys.

Men have offered these appreciations of work I've shared with them:

"David Townsend is smart, articulate, and genuine, a terrific teacher, thinker and facilitator. Warm, with a good sense of humour, accessible and engaging, he is a sweet asset to our community."-Richard, San Francisco

"David is a gifted ritual leader. He combines his exquisite and unique artistic talents with a deep reverence for nature and a rich connection to spirit."-Michael, New York City

"David has a gift for creating potent, content-rich experiences. He had us diving right in, and doing so with joy."-Paul, Boston

"David brings together the varied strengths of artist, scholar, and teacher, all permeated with a deep queer spirituality. He has the rare ability to both immerse himself fully in an experience and reflect intelligently and articulately afterwards."-Robert, Rochester, NY

"David was excellent at keeping us balanced between head and heart; he addressed intellectual questions and challenges clearly and openly, kept things moving, and brought us deeper into our bodies and souls." Lee, New York City

Register by sending me an e-mail (anchorholder@gmail.com). I'll respond with the location of the sessions and explain how to make full payment of CN $100 for all five sessions by January 21. Pay by January 7 for a 20% discount on registration. You can also RSVP on the Meetup group Queer Men Building Spiritual Practice Together. 

I'm Over the Maccabees: A Hanukkkah Prayer by Trisha Arlin

I'm over the Maccabees. I'm done with fanatics. I'm done with extremists who demand purity. I'm done with fundamentalists who shut women up. I'm done with religions that kill. I'm over the Seleucids. I'm done with invaders. I'm done with outsiders telling anyone how to live in their own country. I'm done with people telling me how to worship my God. I'm done with liars and rapists and powerful men. 

I'm over the Hellenists. I'm done with accommodation. I'm done with rich suck-ups. I'm done living in comfy bubbles. I'm done with pretending we're one of them.

I'm over Hanukkah. I'm done with Hanukkah bushes. I'm done with eight days of socks. I'm done with parties at the White House.

I'm done with cheap chocolate gelt. I'm okay with light in the darkness. And potato latkes. Oh, and donuts. Let's start there. Amen.

Photo: "Menorah" by Oscar Wolfman

A Queer Utopia: Supple and Turbulent, Chapter the Last

14

We sat out on the deck for another hour, watching the bats flit across the rising moon, above the fireflies that went on fucking their way through the grass down the slope, their lust lighting up the forest as ours had lit us up from within. Occasionally the talk ran back to the intensity of our lovemaking. But we floated together in pure, self-sufficient tranquility now. The glow we witnessed on one another’s faces lit up the deck as no torch could have. Eight men who’d made something none of us could have done on our own. Something that no two of us could have created as a couple separated from the rest of us. We’d made Big Love and sent it into the world, sent it coursing through one another’s hearts, joined heart and mind and cock in loving memory of the friend who’d brought us together. 

Pete was with us in spirit, and we’d resolved that he’d be with us in what was left of his body. The previous fall we’d released his ashes and watched them drift into the soil of the forest at our feet. He was all around us now, in the leaves and flowers of another green year. All but a small heap  that we’d treasured up, even before we’d figured out, amidst our afterglow in the spring, that they were destined for this last gesture of farewell. I guess we knew then in our queer, horny, grieving, loving hearts the destiny of these last remains, but hadn’t given voice to it yet.

Billy took the little phial of coarse grey ash from its place on the side altar. Our offering lay pooled and  glistening in our magic bowl: even Luke had managed to salvage a little of himself from where his seed had oozed down his thigh despite our best attempts, in the enthusiasm of the moment, to lick him clean. Uncapping the phial, Billy poured the contents into the pearly swirl of our lust, joy, hopes, and love. As he stirred it, the mixture darkened and went thick.

“Pete with us again,” he said. “The founder of our tribe. Our lover, brother, friend. The one we all carry now.” With that, he dipped his finger into the dark paste, drawing a line down either of his cheeks, and another horizontal stripe across his forehead.

“Pete over my heart,” whispered Jake, taking up the riff of our sexy, blissed-out jazz of the soul, smearing a little on his chest.

“Pete with us, every time we’ve cum.” Kurt stroked a dollop onto his limp cock, then over his heart, finally touching his finger to his forehead, a sign of love and loss between his eyebrows, a third eye of the wisdom and compassion born of our bodies.

“Every time we’ve cum,” Hank echoed, dredging out another portion and smearing it thick.

An invisible force drew me forward to the bowl. I rubbed my fingers together, exploring the grainy texture of  one man’s ashes mingled with eight men’s seed. It gave off a scent like moist soil after a spring rain, sweet and strangely earthy. It was the stuff of final payments, but the ground of new beginnings too. I was ready to welcome the future, mortal and precious, to welcome it as Pete had welcomed it and so opened it up for the rest of us. I crossed the circle to Jim. Raising my fingers to my forehead and gazing into his eyes as I hadn’t since he’d left me, I marked myself with the glory of everything I shared with Pete, shared with this circle of lovers, would share with whoever came to join Luke and me to build an impossible community of loving, horny men. Holding Jim’s gaze, I reached out to touch my muddy fingertips to his forehead, then turned to Rajiv to mark him as I’d just marked the man who’d been mine and was now his, then lowered my fingers to daub his chest. Jim’s arms rose to rest across my shoulder and Rajiv’s. I signed Jim’s heart and my own with the mud that still clung to my fingers before I entwined my own arms with theirs, completing awkwardly the uneasy trinity we all three longed and were afraid to form. 

Behind us the others crowded into a layered embrace with its own life, swaying with the shift of one man’s weight, righting itself, undulating again as one hip pressed against the next man's. Eventually one or another of us nodded off while still we stood there, slumping against his neighbour, waking again as his own fall was broken by the support of seven others. 

Finally, our complex flower broke apart. The mud that was all of us mingled together caked and fell from our faces and chests where we’d smeared it thickest; clung smooth to our skin where our touch had stayed light. Wrapping ourselves in the bright cloths that had fluttered from the rails, we settled onto the deck to lie tangled in each other’s arms, talking less as the night wore on, drifting into sleep, roused from slumber by the short, hoarse cry of the nighthawk and the faint sound of prayer flags fluttering above our heads, on through to the first chattering bird and the early dawn of a new day.