Wednesday, January 1, 2020

An Invitation in 2020


If you're like me, you continue to long for a world where queer men can thrive in a web of rich connection. Where we belong truly and deeply to a community grounded in transpersonal love. Where the utopian promise of the gay liberation movement that  burgeoned fifty years ago becomes a lived and visible reality.

When we're blessed, we get glimpses of that world. But we're still not there. We live in the tension between Already and Not Yet. We'll probably live the whole of our lives in that tension. For the time being--since the time being is all we've got--we can choose to be some of the change that we long for. My aspiration for myself, and my invitation to you, is to commit again in this New Year to the nurture of community--among queer men, and among all those our queer lives touch. 

True community is a dance between our individual longings and our deep awareness that we'll find what we're looking for only by being part of something bigger than we are--something that may unsettle us, knock us out of our preconceived sense of ourselves and remake us. Community is risk and adventure. It takes courage, because it opens the possibility that we can't control what will happen when we step outside ourselves.
You build community when you go to a meeting in support of a project you believe in, even though you've had a long day and just want some down time at home.
You build community when you walk into a nursing home to visit an elderly friend, even though nursing homes are probably the last places on earth you enjoy hanging out.
You build community when you respond kindly and graciously to the flirtation of men you're not attracted to, instead of shaming them with blunt rejection.
You build community when you let yourself be open to the possibility that a one-night stand might become a friend--or at least deserves a phone call to thank him for the time you spent together.
You build community when you follow through on the promise to check in with the men you met at a gathering that opened your heart, even when the intensity of that experience fades into the business-as-usual of your life back home.
You build community when you keep faith with the longing within you for a bigger, fuller, richer life: when you step up into the work of repairing your soul and repairing the world, of transforming them both, of making them both new.