Inviting the Kami

On a bright, warm afternoon yesterday, last week's polar vortex behind us, a Rose of Sharon needed attention. It was my way of looking forward in hope to the burgeoning of a new year. 

In winter, when the leaves have fallen, you can see branch structures you only guessed at in summer. But you can only estimate what will happen when the earth warms again--what remaining bud will take up the challenge in answer to your pruning.  My friend Erika's instinct is vastly better than mine, but even a consummate expert can only prompt a tree or shrub to respond. You're inviting a living thing into a partnership. 

It's not the only way to prune. You can, instead, try to wrestle a hedge into geometric submission. It will look just about the same in winter as in high summer, just grey and thin instead of green and dense. You can create a garden that unilaterally imposes your own will on the landscape. 

At one end of the continuum, the vast and elegant sterility of Versailles. At (or near) the other, the tea gardens of Kyōto, where every tree, every stone, and the garden as a whole, is a You to which the gardener responds--a divinity, a kami, owed veneration and respect, a Presence that makes a reciprocal claim on its caregiver.

The care of the soul isn't all that different. The repressions of orthodox religious strictures  prune inner life down to held-in-advance notions of human experience that shear away everything outside their preconceived lines. Some strains of Christianity might well be near the head of the line on this score, but before you name it as the singular culprit, maybe talk to some queer Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and/or Hindus about their struggles to get free of the homophobia they've experienced from within their traditions of origin, and about the internalized toll it can take.

There's another way of shaping the soul--with careful attention to and respect for what's already there. Waiting patiently until the branch structure reveals itself in season. Inviting it to become more itself, to become more fully what it has always been, or has been growing towards. And there is no aspect of our inner life of which this is more true than of our erotic desires, and how we choose to express them.

On this eve of a new year, ask yourself not what you want to impose upon yourself, but rather what is arising from within you, waiting to burst out in leaf and flower in its own time, in ways you can imagine, but which you cannot entirely predict or control.

God Expects Just One Thing of You...

... that you should come out of yourself insofar as you are a created being and let God be God in you.

---Meister Eckhart

From Fantasy to Ritual Practice

Coming up on Winter Solstice, the rhythms of nature call out for ritual observance. And I'm thrown anew deep into my fantasies of how I'd like to mark it with a community of men who love men. Over the years, I've found some of what I've longed for--but never all of it at once.

There’s a lot of provisional, not always 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 communally explore 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.

On Buddhas and Buttholes

Nathan, my tattoo artist earlier this fall, looked at the earlier piece I had inked on my left shoulder eighteen years ago and urged me not to bother having it retouched. I needed his advice, since I’ve never seen it. At least not right side around. The mirror is the best I can do.

Without telling you the whole story of how the design came to me, it reads, “Destroyer of Illusion.”  The script looks sufficiently Indo-Himalayan, the pattern sufficiently abstract, that lots of people curious enough to ask me about it assume it’s not in English. The letters striate from the perimeter into a tightly described circle, a part of my body visible to others but not to me. I take it on faith that it’s there.

Well, maybe you get the idea... 

“Destroyer of Illusion” can mean a lot of things. When the phrase started running incessantly through my mind, I pictured Keanu Reeves in The Matrix as vividly as the warrior boddhisattvas of Tibetan Buddhism. (God knows, he's hotter.) Only later did I get it that those three words, and the design I’d made of them, were teaching me a lesson about acknowledging my First Chakra. Big surprise--embodied wisdom isn’t always a matter of cognition, or of self-awareness in a dominantly intellectual sense. Sometimes it’s a matter of going down into the earth and into the silent, unseen roots of our life, rather than up into the clarity of an elevated realm of light. It’s a matter of trust that it’s not only safe, it’s even essential, to be seen from another perspective than that of our own ego.

“We go down, like moles, claws scrabbling in the soil,” sing The Hidden Cameras. “The journey goes down, not up,” writes Pema Chödrön. “A man walks upright, and the food in his body is shut in, as if in a well-made purse,” says Julian of Norwich. “When the time of his necessity comes, the purse is opened and then shut again, in most seemly fashion.  And it is God who does this, as it is shown when he says that he comes down to us in our humblest needs.” 

Clarity is Overrated

As we approach the longest night of the year--as more or our life is lived amidst shadows, and out of the clear light of day--maybe it's a good time to focus on the vital, enlivening importance of what we don't know. 

Western rationalism is deeply invested in Figuring It All Out. If we don't know it yet, we will in the future. And if we don't know yet, that's a problem. But onward and upward. 

"I think, therefore I am," proclaimed Descartes. Who also said that since animals aren't rational, they're simply automata. So hey, treat them like objects, and raise them by the billions in hideous conditions. Rational humans are lords of creation. Clear-cut those forests so first-world consumers can wipe our asses in comfort and order merchandise online for packaged home delivery to our hearts' content.

What a sad, impoverished, dystopian universe we've projected onto the Creation that we're all a mere part of. And what a sad, constricted view of the self goes along with it. 

It's the extraordinary and layed depths of our souls, which we'll never ourselves fully know at a conscious level, that impart richness to our glorious, and mortal existence. It's what's half-visible in the shadows, in moonlight, in the shifting light of fire kindled in darkness, that mirrors who we are at the only partially known core of our being. It's what's stored and only half-inventoried in the endless rooms of our memory that allows us a lifelong adventure of the inward journey.

Photos from past years of the Kensington Market Festival of Lights, Toronto

The Acknowledged Christ

I hope you’ve had the experience, at least once in your life, of being blindsided by Somebody showing up where you’d least expect. 

Mountains in a sudden flash of sunlight across a harbor. 

An impulse at a Hare Krishna parade to join the chanting from the sidelines, good Methodist that you’ve always been.

The eye contact between you and the unknown woman who’s just pulled you back onto the curb out of traffic you didn’t see coming.

The desire to kneel down at the back of a church, when you haven’t darkened the door of such a place since you were sixteen.

The realization, in the middle of a random sexual encounter, that both of you (or all of you) are in the Presence of something vastly bigger and more important than a short spell of uncomplicated pleasure--that your trick is looking back at you with the face of God. 

The sacred, grace-filled letting go in the last days of a lover’s life that Mark Doty describes with such heart-opening clarity and vulnerability in Heaven’s Coast.

The flash of lightning across the night sky of a quiet mind in the meditation hall, nice Jewish boy from LA that you are.

The kind of experience that leaves you stammering something like, “Oh--it’s You again.”

From my own perspective grounded in the Christian tradition, these experiences are already foreshadowed in the vagueness of biblical accounts of the Resurrection. No two Gospel accounts tell the same stories. Mark, the earliest of the four Jesus narratives that eventually got included in the Bible, doesn’t have a resurrection account at all, just an inexplicably empty tomb from which two women flee in terror at dawn. My favorite is the story from Luke of two disciples on the road to Emmaus, who fall in with a stranger to whom they tell the news of Jesus’ death. The stranger starts laying out for them everything in Scripture that predicted the Passion. That evening, they sit down with him to a meal, from which he vanishes, in the same moment that they recognize the risen Lord “in the breaking of the bread.” 

There’s plenty of space in that story, for me: I don’t know what the fuck would show up in the Polaroids that nobody took. I just know that the encounter broke lives open, as it breaks mine open.

This isn’t about a resuscitated corpse. In Christian terms, this is about the Second Person of the Trinity taking flesh at times and in places you never saw coming, setting ablaze the ordinary world of our material existence. After all, it was God’s flesh all along, before we were given a life lease on it. “He comes to us as one unknown,” wrote Albert Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus. It’s about “the acknowledged Christ” (the phrase belongs to Indian theologian M.M. Thomas), ever present in the world, shoring it up from below as well as drawing it up from above, known across cultures by a thousand different names, though none can ever comprehend him/her. The One who vanishes from sight most completely in the dogmatism of those who think they have sole possession of the truth. 

Ocean of Wisdom. 

Ghandiji. 

Shiva, Krishna, Ram, Sita, Ma Durga.

George, on the streetcorner.

Cernunnos, horned Lord of the Dance.

The concept of “the acknowledged Christ”--the presence of the Second Person of the Trinity in the cultures and religions of the Subcontinent--is a staple of the ecumenical theology of Indian Christianity. M.M.Thomas (1916-1996), a lay member of the southwest India’s Mar Thoma Church and perhaps the most influential Christian theologian of modern India, brought the term into common usage in his books The Acknowledged Christ of the Indian Renaissance (London, 1969), Man and the Universe of Faiths (Madras, 1975), and My Ecumenical Journey: 1947-1975 (Trivandrum, 1990).  

Not One and Not Two

Nathan at work at Pearl Harbor Gift Shop, Kensington Market, Toronto

Back in May, I posted a meditation that ended with the assertion, "There is trinity around us, and trinity within us." I chose this week to inscribe a symbol of that on my body.

Two weeks ago I shared here the image of a Celtic interlace phallus. I first encountered it on the wonderful blog, now long discontinued, of a visionary who went by the name of Corvus some ten or twelve years ago. On that site he offered beautiful, rich directions for men's communal sex magick rituals. (Corvus, wherever you are today, Blessed Be.)

In its very structure, that cock-knot is a meditation on what it means to find trinity within. It's made of two intertwining endless loops, each self-contained and yet wound around and into and out of one another to manifest a third thing. Each complete in itself, and neither complete in itself. What's more, each depending on the Third that is the background on which they're inscribed--whether on stone, or on skin.

The first loop is Phallus, the second loop is Phallus, and the surface on which they rest is Phallus. And yet these three are one Phallus.

When we dive deeply into our innate erotic capacity, we're never truly alone. The relationality that's wired into who we are  at the core of our being is always with us, even in the most private act of self-love and self-pleasure.  I am the perceiver, but I am also the perceived. I am the lover, but I am also the beloved. I am immersed in my own consciousness, but my consciousness is built on all the interactions I've had with the world and others in the world, from the moment I took my first breath. And in the interaction between the one and the other, there is always a Third.

This is why the experience of solosexual bliss can become a meditative gateway into the Mystery of our lives. When men fully embrace this truth, masturbation isn't devalued as a substitute for "real" sexual expression. And sex with our partners is an extension and a sharing of the riches we contain within.

From Our Very First Breath

 "From our very first breath, we are in relationship. With that indrawn draft of air, we become joined to everything that ever was, is and ever will be. When we exhale, we forge that relationship by virtue of the act of living. Our breath commingles with all breath, and we are a part of everything. That's the simple fact of things. We are born into a state of relationship, and our ceremonies and rituals are guides to lead us deeper into that relationship with all things. Big lesson? Relationships never end; they just change. In believing that lies the freedom to carry compassion, empathy, love, kindness, and respect into and through whatever changes. We are made more by that practice."

--Richard Wagamese, from Embers

Dickhenge Revisited

Twelve years ago, this shrine blossomed at Easton Mountain. It was my joy to tend it and offer its sacred hospitality to the men gathered there.

Summer's Harvest

 

A Manifesto

If you’ve never read the work of Fenton Johnson, start now.

Geography of the Heart, Johnson’s chronicle of his three-year relationship with a beloved who succumbed during the Plague Years, is one of the finest AIDS memoirs ever written: passionate, wise, enraged but shot through with  a faith that love is stronger than death, and grief ultimately more fundamental to our lives, and to our getting of wisdom, than anger.

Keeping Faith: A Skeptic's Journey is part reminiscence of growing up Catholic in eastern Kentucky--quite literally over the back fence from Thomas Merton’s Gethsemane Abbey--and part comparative exploration of the Christian and Buddhist monastic traditions.

But while you’re waiting for copies of these to arrive--if you don’t simply download the e-books--you can read “The Future of Queer: A Manifesto” in the January 2018 issue of Harper's. 

It’s a cri de coeur for what we lost (and what we desperately need to find again) when we as queer men settled for a place at the table of Business as Usual, in a materialistic society obsessed with advancing the small, isolated selves that we misrecognize as the essence of our life. It’s a call to value friendship over the conventions of marriage. It’s a call to say no to late capitalism’s rape of the planet and cooption of our souls.  It’s an uncompromising assertion that the one best hope for the earth, and for a society that doesn’t consume itself in untrammeled greed and mutual suspicion, is for us to reject  the comfort of the mainstream and to become more truly queer. 

Queer in the sense that the Buddha was queer, leaving his family behind in his search for the Noble Truths of our existence. Queer in the sense that Jesus was queer, setting aside the ties of blood relations to embrace the poor and the marginalized as his true family.

It’s an exhortation to dream, believe in, and desire a world that’s not yet made. And you need to read it.

Ave verum Corpus

  

To parody the divine Bette Midler, this shadowbox includes two of my favourite subjects: incarnational theology, and cock.

The Real Truth of the Matter

 “Do not praise your own faith so exclusively that you disbelieve all the rest. If you do this, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotent, cannot be confined to any one creed, for he says, ‘Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of Allah.’ (Quran 2:115). Everybody praises what he believes; his god is his own creature and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently, he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.”

Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240), as quoted by Karen Armstrong

As a God Might Be

Wallace Stevens' long poem of 1915, "Sunday Morning," is about the reenchantment of a world where worn-out belief systems have broken down. It opens with the image of an affluent woman enjoying Sunday morning at home--which is to say, not heading for church. Each section of the poem meditates on the collapse of orthodox religious faith from a different angle.

Section VII of the poem hit me like a thunderbolt when I read it at the age of 20:

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

Not as a god, but as a god might be,

Naked among them, like a savage source....

I recognized what I'd wanted long before I read those lines, and what I've wanted ever since: a community of embodied, erotically alive spiritual seekers. A band of ritually-minded queer men who don't wait for the Sacred to drop from the sky to find them, but who build it one intentional act at a time, from the ground up.

Stuart Wilde gets it: "How do you make something sacred?  You say 'This is sacred' and you treat it that way."  Radical faeries have understood it for decades. So does Brent Plate, who wrote

A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to its Senses.

Declaring what's sacred and then making it so isn't the same as New Age woo-woo dogmatically claiming eternal authenticity for a tradition that has been around since Time Immemorial (or sometime in the twentieth century, whichever came first). It's about birthing the soul through the actions of the body and the body's relation to material objects. It's about what I sometimes like to call "ritual literacy." It's often about starting simple and small: setting up a sacred image and bowing to it every morning. Lighting incense under the glow of the rising moon. Writing a prayer on a strip of paper and tying it to a branch. Work with what's around you: a few bricks laid side by side can become an altar. A shell from the beach can become an incense burner.

You don't have to have an explanation why you're doing any of these things. You don't have to know what a prayer is. You trust the god who leads you blindfolded deeper into the Mystery of existence. More to the point, in Wallace Stevens' words, you treat the object of your devotion "not as a god, but as a god might be." You figure it out later, and perhaps only partially. 

We can bring this experimental, ad hoc reverence to our erotic life, just as we can to other aspects of our experience. We can place a hand on the heart of a lover at the beginning of an encounter, in recognition of his infinite value. We can pray naked. We can wear a ritual garment. (Call it fetish wear if you want.) We can chant a mantra to consciously focus our erotic energy. We can ejaculate into a bowl with friends and then pour it out, mixed with water, onto the roots of a tree at the edge of the forest, to affirm that our life is one with the Earth. We can say a word of gratitude for the surge of Life through our bodies. Through conscious breath and slow, intentional touch, we can turn arousal into a form of meditation.

In the story of Jacob's ladder in Genesis 28, the angels don't come down from heaven and then go back up. They start by ascending from the earth.

Problematic

For years, I didn't recognize it as abuse.

Then I did. 

And now I'm no longer so sure. 

Or better: now I'm no longer sure calling it that serves me well.

When I was sixteen, I confessed to the pastor at First English Lutheran Church that I had "homosexual tendencies." It felt less absolute than telling him I was homosexual. Without missing a beat, he responded, "I know, and I can cure you."

And so began eight months of weekly counselling sessions, full of half-digested bits of homophobic 1950s Freudianism. The affectionate physical gestures gradually travelled further up my thigh. April of the next year, he jerked me off in the front seat of his car. He wanted me to reciprocate; I was too frozen to do it. I couldn't even open the tissue he'd handed me. I kind of hope the cum stains on the upholstery were obvious enough to be awkward for him afterwards.

Part of me sat there, ninety percent out of my body and in my head, wondering whether this was somehow part of the treatment. 

I felt virtually no conscious guilt about it--oddly enough, because I was little more than a bundle of guilt about every other expression of my raging sexuality, every mere twinge of desire toward other boys and men. But afterwards, I needed over two years to take another stab at making sense of my existence as a sexual being. Maybe if you wanted, you could label my lack of consciously registered guilt as dissociation. I don't really care.

I was thirty-five when I turned to a friend at dinner at said, "You know, that was abuse." Bemused, she replied, "And you're just figuring that out?"

As of course it was. An abuse of his role. An abuse of the privilege that accrued to it, and of the trust it encouraged.

But the violation wasn't the sex. The violation was the deception and the mixed messages. The confusion about who this was for. The constant self-doubt over whether I should trust him. All of this was contained in germ in his first, unhesitating statement, "I know, and I can cure you," with its enticement into further self-loathing, and its patent falsehood, which on some level I sensed from the beginning. What was he thinking? Did he really believe that was possible? What did he imagine he meant by "cure?" I don't think he was cynically calculating, that he was consciously lying to win me over.

I know I wasn't the only teenage boy he "counseled." And I wonder now whether his own need for same-sex contact may have been linked to the suicides of two prominent members of the congregation, middle-aged men, husbands and fathers, within a year or so of one another during his tenure.

He was a man in his late forties, with a wife and four sons, whose worldview had been shaped by the expectations of the1950's and the smugly oblivious sexual repression of mid-twentieth-century bourgeois American Protestantism. I think he was trapped in his own morass of sexual and intrapsychic confusion--a man whose seminary training had offered him nothing of the vastly more flexible awareness of sexual orientations and preferences available half a century later.

If I was abused, I was abused by the culture we were both trapped in, as much as I was by him.

What's more--and here's where I risk wading into someone's dogmatic outrage: calling what happened with him "abuse" drains my story of real agency on my part, and scapegoats him for his deeply flawed behaviour amidst the intolerable hypocrisy of a world not of his making, nor mine.

The fact is, I was as desperate for sex as I was terrified of finding it. And I'd had the hots for him for two years before my ill-starred confession. I'd puppy-dogged him every Sunday morning, finding excuses to stop by his office between services, borrowing his elementary Greek textbook as much to ingratiate myself as because I actually wanted to learn the language. I'd eyed his tight, compact build every time he was close to me in a clerical shirt.

I'm not sorry he jerked me off. I'm sorry he sent such impossibly mixed and confusing messages about what it meant. I'm sorry I grew up in a culture so desperate to deny the reality of adolescent sexuality, and the possibility of adolescent sexual choice. I'm sorry I grew up in a religious milieu that left him no more appropriate or less self-deceptive a way of coming to terms with his own desires. I'm sorry that the train wreck of his erotic life contributed to a pretty serious derailment of mine, which took decades to fully process.

I know of no more nuanced or compassionate memoir of non-coercive adolescent abuse than Martin Moran's remarkable book The Tricky Part, and the one-man stage performance he created out of the book's material. Moran faced something of a push-back for displaying what some readers and viewers saw as his insufficient anger and condemnation of his perpetrator. What Moran experienced as a boy was far more invasive and prolonged than anything in my story. But his deeply exploratory narrative of compassion and self-forgiveness was about transcending rage and condemation as well. It was about reclaiming his own boyhood longings and the role they played in what transpired--not in order to excuse the man who took advantage of him, but in order to take his own story back.

Moran has no problem with the word abuse, nor do I. But I'm increasingly aware, not only from my own story, but from the stories of other men's early sexual experiences, that for some of us, shame and guilt stem at least as much (if not sometimes far more) from the damage the taboo itself does as from the early experiences that the taboo condemns.

So what I'd now prefer to say is that I had a problematic early sexual experience. I want to sidestep forty years of the recovery movement's standard, too-broadly-applied pronouncements, which haven't served me any better than the trust I placed in the first man who brought me to orgasm. I wasn't a victim. I'm not a "survivor." I was an agonizingly confused kid who couldn't name what he wanted, who found himself with a man  in a clerical collar three times his age who couldn't name what he wanted, either. 

Listening for What's Below

No matter how often you've sat in a Heart Circle, the facilitator will always remind us why we're here: to speak from the heart, not from the analytic mind. To speak from personal experience, not from grand theories; from our feelings, not from abstract ideas or elaborate stories. To speak only when we're holding the talking stick. We don't respond directly to one another--though what someone else has shared may call forth what we need to share in turn. 

Those guidelines sounds simple, but practicing them isn't. The separation of heart from head--like toxic masculinity's separation of heart from cock--is a false dichotomy, useful till it's not. How we feel about what's out there in the world is still what we feel. Stories about what's happened to us in the past can be the vehicles we need for our feelings in the here and now.

Speaking in the Heart Circle is a skill, an art of mindful living and relating that comes more easily with practice. What doesn't get articulated as explicitly at the beginning of most Heart Circles is how to listen. The mindful silence we practice when we're not holding the talking stick is at least as essential to what happens in the Circle as right speech. But it's even more subtle.  (Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr has been talking all this week in his daily meditations about deep listening as a spiritual practice.)

First of all, we practice holding space for the emotions of others while keeping the reactive impulses of our own egos in check. We resist the impulse to jump in with active comfort in the moment.  We're not there to fix anything, but just to allow someone to be heard. We're not there to assuage grief or mitigate anger, nor to put words to our pleasure in witnessing someone else's happiness or love. We're there to deliver a silent message: you're safe. You're seen. You matter. You matter to us. 

We learn patience listening to shares that may be loose, circumstantial, rambling. 

We need to practice patience, because no matter how often the guidelines for the Circle are rehearsed, we don't always stay within them. We can't, because our inner lives are shot through with the times that our heart and the subtle, manifold layers of our minds work together, and indeed, need to work together. Experience and stories about the world are all mixed up. Feelings and ideas flow into each other. So sometimes we sit listening to shares that are loose, rambling, full of detail that distracts as much as it illuminates.

And then maybe we start to realize that all that detail with which we've started to lose patience is there because the speaker is doing the best they can in the moment. We're never wholly present to ourselves, and sometimes all that rambling is the path someone has available to get to what's below. They may not be conscious that they're rambling. They're doing the best they can. And our patience becomes more than mere tolerance for someone's not-always-skilled practice. We recognize that the extraneous details aren't the true content of the share, but simply the vehicle, the only vehicle available right now, for what's travelling with all that seemingly unrelated or unnecessary free assoication.

We learn to treasure what's below, what's out of sight, or out of sight for now to the person who's speaking. We treasure it for them as they become more aware of it themselves. By sitting silently, we become more aware in the process of ourselves, and of what another's words are eliciting in us.

We allow it all to take its own good time to emerge, in a circle of queer men who sit together as midwives to one another's inner treasures.

Sheela-na-gig

She squats facing you on the walls of medieval churches and castles in Western Europe, not only in the areas of Celtic predominance that New Age fantasies have come to associate with pre-Christian matriarchal spirituality and power. In the village of Kilpeck in Herefordshire, she's a goofy little cartoon of a crone reaching forward from behind her legs to spread her labia wide.

What the hell? 

A warning against lust? 

A talisman to ward off evil? 

The Church as Mother of the Faithful? (OK, that's a stretch, if you'll pardon the pun.)

She's a riddle, that girl. She's keeping it to herself. Whatever her secret is, it's important. 

At our retreat last week, she sat on the altar at the other end of the Temple from the Lingam. We needed her there, as a talisman against toxic masculinity, and to remind us that we're only part of the Mystery. That without her, we wouldn't be here. And that, indeed, she's within us too. When we're permeable, when we're open. When we're treasuring what isn't ready to emerge into plain sight, within ourselves, and within each other.  When we're bringing forth what's within us, and (as Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas) what we bring forth will save us.

Five Sweet Days in July

Fifteen open-hearted explorers. 

The rolling hills of the Maryland Panhandle.

The sound of birdsong.

Rain on the roof of the barn that became our Temple.

Imagination, playfulness, and generosity.

Vulnerability and courage.

Wisdom and compassion.

Surprise and wonder.

(Banners by Barrie Petterson)

 "Explanation separates us from astonishment."

--Eugène Ionesco