Three Visions

Three times in my queer life, visions of my relationship to the Christian church and to Christ have brought a clarity that's left me with an unshakeable faith in their power and their truth. 

None of them is easy to write about. Each is bound up with complex circumstances of my life. What can they possibly mean for someone else hearing about them? I'll never know for sure. But I have to try. 

I

I was twenty-eight years old in 1983, when I outed myself in the Saturday religion section of the Toronto Star, in an interview about the experience of gay Lutherans. The reporter had selected for his writeup the most sensational sound bytes he could pull from our conversation.

Starting the next morning, news of it went through the coffee hour of St. Ansgar Lutheran Church like wildfire. Over the next weeks and months, the stalwarts of the congregation took to inviting me for individual chats. The conversation always centered around my grave errors, which Christian charity compelled them to point out. Usually, they ended by asking me to stop coming to church altogether. The Lutheran clergy of the city held an emergency meeting to assure that random homosexuals wouldn't start attending the services of their congregations. One retired pastor reached out to me for dialogue, and then put the make on me in his living room.

I plodded on for the better part of a year. Going to church on Sunday no longer gave me strength or joy to carry me through the week. Instead, it was the source of a metastasizing bitterness and resentment I needed the next four or five days to recover from. And then one night, I had a dream.

I'd escaped from a concentration camp. I'd made my way back home and was sitting at the dinner table with my mother and brothers. (In waking life, I'm an only child. But "Who are my mother and my brothers? asks Jesus in the first three Gospels.) As we sat together, my mother turned to me and said, "Go back outside." I replied that if I did, the Nazis would find me and kill me. My brother turned to me, drove a knife into my forearm, and said, "Do what your mother tells you."

And so I did, resolved to kill myself before I was recaptured. There was a car, and a lake, and I drove the car into the lake. Except that I immediately came up for air. Once, twice, and then a third time. 

Like a baptism that was at once a symbolic death and a birth into new life.

The dream told me everything I needed to know, at that point in my life, about spiritual survival. I woke up and never went back. It would be fifteen years before I participated in another Christian service. 

It was grace that rescued me from the clutches of the church.

II

In 2011, on top of a mountain above the Russian River, a Sacred Intimate midwifed the rage I'd carried, since the age of five, at being shamed for my male body by my narcissistic, fanatically religious aunt. I screamed myself hoarse shouting out over the valley. 

And then we were back in the room where the session had begun, diving deep into a visualization. Jesus was in the room with us. As he had been when I was five. And was blessing my body. Wanted my male energy. Desired it as a gift I could offer him. Jesus wanted me to top him. Beyond any power my aunt had ever had to come between us.

It was what I was made for, what I was created to do. It was a consummation of my relationship to the divine source of my life, a prayer prayed with my body. Blindfolded, I thrust into whatever it was that the S.I.  was offering me. His hand? A Fleshlight? In any case, for the moment, the flesh of the resurrected Christ. Utterly welcoming my humanity into himself. 

III

At a monastery up the Hudson from New York City, a young monk listened to the story behind the first of these visions, when I was feeling stuck and resistant in the middle of a weekend retreat. I was creeped out by the language of surrender that had been running through much of the program. I was trying to explain why. 

He and I were pretty much at an impasse in our conversation when, as we ran out of time, he said, maybe you have to go outside and face the Nazis.

"Get me the fuck out of here now. There are Buddhists I can go hang with just up the road." I thought. 

But then, just a few minutes later,  joined a circle with a dozen others on the retreat, sitting in silence around the altar in the chapel. My monkey mind jumping like crazy, panicked and swinging from tree to tree. 

Then I was alone, outside, waiting for the death squad. Except that Christ was there with me, hanging on the cross. And what I could do was shield his body from the bullets we were expecting together. Perhaps they'd still pierce his flesh, but only after they'd first gone through me. It's what I could do, the only thing I could do. Not a gesture of despair, like my attempt to drive the car into the lake, but of solidarity and love. Present to his suffering, as he was present to mine. 

And both of us together present to the world's. Present to the suffering of the folks at St. Ansgar's, stuck between what they'd believed in good faith all their lives and a new world making new demands of them. Present to my aunt, God love her, with her own life history of unmet needs and longings.

To protect him meant climbing up on the cross facing him. And then I realized that I was his Shakti, his consort in the iconography of a Tibetan mandala, united with him in passionate bliss. Penetrated by him in inseparable embrace. As years before I'd penetrated him. The circle completed. And the Nazis an irrelevant distraction. 

My beloved is mine, and I am his. He pastures his flock among the lilies.