Sunday, June 20, 2021

On Behalf of Our Fathers


This Father's Day, I know that some queer men have never experienced anything less than love and unconditional acceptance from their fathers. I rejoice for them. And at the same time, I'm somewhere between incredulous, wistful, and envious as hell.

We each have our story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us about our own.  Or furtively imposed their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...

My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been over fifty years since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was 8. I've spent my whole adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted relationship with him. Like reverse-engineering an onion one layer at a time, from the inside out. 

So it was a huge grace when, some summers back, I experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that had ever come alive in me before.  During a journalling exericse at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish. Non-Jew that I am.

If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, the Kaddish is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of parents.  The most observant say it every day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the death. The odd thing is, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they loved in all his or her individuality.

But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning. You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead, you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant funerals.

That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next. 

All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died over half a century ago. I'm sometimes still bemused that a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest needed with unhesitating instinct to borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the workshop--a man who gave me more of what one would hope to get from a father than most others in my life.

And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we pilfer. But it's not simply that I can imagine my appropriation of the prayer offending some, simply because I don't have a right to it by heritage. 

It's that I recited it  in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering meadow. Standing before this sign of linkage between my spiritual and erotic life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. In the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible.

I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish for my father,  and on behalf of my father, changes nothing of that, and changes everything.


GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO  THE DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS, AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.


MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.


BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.


MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.


MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

Saturday, June 5, 2021

Encounter With Eros: A Guest Post by Michael Gvamos

 Deep gratitude to Michael Gvamos for sharing this beautiful reflection on the connection of his erotic energy with the Source of All Things. Michael's previous guest post, on his extended hermitage last year, appeared here last August 7. Michael observes that he felt he was transcribing it more than writing it himself, at 3 a.m. shortly after completing the Body Electric School's weeklong intensive, The Dear Love of Comrades.


I woke up at 3 AM, my hand stroking my raging cock. It was as hard and full as I can ever remember it being. It was like a power unto itself – asserting itself; demanding attention, insisting on being dealt with and reconciled with – my Life Force declaring itself in its full power and manifestation. It was a beautiful, awesome and thunderous spirit to behold. 

I do not own it; it inhabits me. I am but the earthly vessel – a limited, rickety and beautiful container. My Life Force is beyond male and female; yet is both at the same time. I acknowledge and honor it by stroking – moving the energy/power; transferring it into my body. I stroked it for quite a while – riding the energy, celebrating its spirit and power – being thrilled and humbled by it. Participating with it but not owning or possessing it. Stroking it; feeling the ecstasy and the danger at the same time. For the first time, feeling a freedom, a pride, a communion with it without shame, hesitancy or recoil. “Pride” does not capture it – it is “happiness with the fact that I am the custodian of this awesome and thunderous power.” Having a fascination and infatuation with it – knowing it is unusual, unique and special – humbled and reverent towards it power and responsibility. Thrilled at getting to play with it – to be able to ride the waves of ecstasy – both physical and spiritual. At the same time knowing that such power exacts a terrible price; there can be no ecstasy without suffering. Knowing that this force is what is best in me – that which drives me and compels me to love myself, to love others, to love this world; to feel, imbibe and soak up this world, as beautiful and broken as it is. 

As it is, my Life Force is very small and insignificant in the big picture of the world. But at the same time, it is vital and crucial to me and those in my spiritual/emotional circle. Irreplaceable but miniscule. I have never felt so unified, whole and healed. I am humbled and reverent to the Power that has guided me to this moment. I know that I consciously choose to participate with that Power, even as I am possessed by it. My body seems a fragile and inadequate vehicle; but one that has learned to welcome, celebrate, dance and surrender to our symbiotic relationship. As I stroke my fully alive Phallus, I both seize and surrender to the Power of my Life Force. 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!