Anchorhold

Welcome to a space for the spirituality of gay and bisexual men. We have within ourselves the resources for our healing, liberation, and growth. Connecting with each other, we encounter the grace to lay hold of a richer, juicier life. Losing ourselves in deep play, we rediscover the bigger, freer, more joyous selves we're capable of becoming. Here I share my interest in personal and communal ritual, making art that expresses my inner life, and an intentional practice of erotic spirituality.

Friday, December 13, 2024

On a Path with Little Light

A few candles protected from the wind by IKEA lanterns, once someone manages to get the butane lighter to function. Ten people doing our best to find the way in darkness. The glare of lights from an oversize indoor shopping mall just yards away. A ring of tents around us sheltering underhoused people on a damp December evening.

As always, the labyrinth is a teacher, with a new lesson every time. An ancient spiritual technology, far older than Christianity, but long adapted to Christian meditative use, as at Chartres Cathedral, where the pattern was laid into the pavement of the church centuries ago--and then rediscovered late in the last century after being long ignored.

You enter by the only opening available. You follow a single path in blind trust that it will take you to the center, and then back out again. You can't get lost. But you do need to pay attention.

Each time, it's different. You walk alone. Or you walk with a group. You walk with strangers and learn to pass one another with a silent gesture of acknowledgement. You walk alongside someone on a parallel course, until suddenly the turn in their stretch of the path transports them from your side far across the circle. You walk just adjacent to the center, and then the path winds you back out for another five or six turns before you finally arrive at the heart of things.

You walk on a cold night in December, in a year when it's hard to have faith that the arc of history is bending toward justice, along with a few others who also long for the coming of justice and peace and the deliverance of Creation. What you do with your feet, you do with your soul.

You listen to a siren on a nearby street. You pray for the distraught young woman who's shouting to everyone else in the encampment that she wants back what's gone missing from her tent. You can barely make out the pattern in the pavement. Sometimes you have doubts whether you've missed the turn. And then there it is, the place where you're meant to double back 180 degrees.

You reach the center, as chance would have it, just as the bell at the nearby church tolls six o'clock. The ten of you sing a Taize chant: "The kingdom of God is justice and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. Come, Lord, and open in us the gates of your Kingdom."

And then you retrace your steps, Wednesday night in the second week of Advent.

Sacred Intimacy: Companionship in Spiritual and Erotic Healing

Different practitioners use the term "Sacred Intimacy" to mean different things. It's important to remember that Sacred Intimacy work is different from therapy, and can't replace therapy. I'm not a therapist. I don't claim to offer services in any officially regulated modality. (Some Sacred Intimates are also practicing therapists, but they're clear with themselves and with clients which modality they're working in.) Put simply, I offer heart-centered companionship and deep listening.

For me, first and foremost, Sacred Intimacy means that what passes between us is holy. It's filled and enlivened with the presence of the Divine. I will do my best to be as present to you, as available to you for your good, as I'm capable of being. My intention is to be open to working in whatever modality we agree will be helpful to you. A session begins with a short conversation in which you explain to me where you're at, and what you hope to take away from our time together.

The emphasis is on healing, growth, and the expansion of your life. You may, for example, have issues of erotic shame that you want to work on, or grief, or body image, or intimacy. I may ask for clarifications and make suggestions. Together we agree on the starting point for the experiential work that will follow.

A session might unfold through breathwork, guided meditation, bodywork, intentionally focused erotic interaction, creative movement, the shared creation of ritual, artistic practice, psychodynamic role playing, or some combination.

I can't hope to be of service to you unless I feel competent in the role I assume, and unless I have the sense that what we do has potential to help you move forward with your declared intention. So our initial conversation may involve some give and take around what's possible and what's useful.

It's essential for your integrity and mine that we maintain full confidentiality and respect one another's boundaries. We enter into sacred space together at the beginning of a session. We leave sacred space at the end, and what's happened within the safe container of the session remains distinct from any interactions we might have before or after the session. What happens in the session stays in the session.

Every Sacred Intimate has his own understanding of the nature of his work. Just below you'll find a series of links to the web pages of a number of Sacred Intimates working in various cities and areas.

Finding Yourself, Claiming Yourself

I invite you to celebrate who you are, and who you want to become.

Think of the times your life as a gay or bisexual man has flowed without effort.

Think of the times you’ve struggled to lay hold of your life more fully.

Maybe those times feel like opposites. But they’re parts of a single cycle: sowing and harvest, labor and rest, preparation and enjoyment. We can’t work toward a fuller life unless we already feel some trust that life will rise up to meet us. We can’t sink deeper into our present joy and satisfaction in life without being reminded that it took a long journey to get here.

Please join me in considering a place where the two halves of this cycle come together: in the safe, empowering container of ritual space and ritual time.

What's an Anchorhold?

For centuries in Europe, a handful of men and women took a vow to devote themselves to the cultivation of their inner lives and to make themselves radically available to their communities for spiritual counsel. Committing themselves to remaining in a single dwelling for the rest of their lives, they were known as anchorites; the houses in which they lived were their anchorholds. Those who needed what the official channels of the religious establishment couldn’t provide came to the anchorhold for conversation and support.

Neither priests nor monks, the spiritual practice of anchorites and their interaction with those who came to them fell outside formal control of the Church. As a result, religious authorities often viewed them with suspicion. One of the best known of these dropouts from ordinary social and religious norms was Julian of Norwich, a woman who had a near-death experience in 1373 and spent the rest of her life thinking about what it meant, for herself and for the world at large. The book she wrote about her revelation, the first in English that we know for sure was written in by a woman, is an astonishingly daring and original rethinking of Christian theology: a vision of a God in whom there is no wrath, who is both Father and Mother of Creation, and who will somehow, by a miracle beyond our ability to grasp, eventually effect the salvation of every living being.

Men and women of spirit who fell between the cracks, anchorites practiced what in its own way was a profoundly queer inner life, following the instincts of their own experience, flying under the radar of the powers that claimed to control access to the Divine.