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.