Paranirvana

Shadowbox, David Townsend, 2019. Wood, collage, and acrylic.

Teetering on the Brink of Fandom

Last week, on a friend's recommendation, I binged every then-available episode of The Wheel of Time on Prime Video. (Another is released every Friday.) And am tempted to dive right in again from the beginning. I've never fallen completely down the rabbit hole of fandom--though I came close with Star Trek Voyager, after the divine Seven of Nine first stepped onto the set in silver spandex and heels and nearly turned me into a lesbian.

But now--I'm at serious risk. What's next? Cosplay?

The debt to the world of Tolkien's Middle Earth is obvious. The threat of a Dark Power arising once again in a distant stronghold. A band of reluctant travellers only gradually realizing the full extent of what's expected of them. Hideously savage minions wreaking havoc on innocent villagers, led by overwhelmingly powerful wraiths on horseback. Throw in Star Wars for the sort-of-Taoist interplay of the light and dark sides of the One Power, and the ever-present possibiltiy of crossing over. And a sort-of-Hindu belief system grounded on faith in reincarnation and a cycle of world creation and destruction.

But unlike the relentlessly homosocial world of Middle Earth--homosocial, but almost entirely asexual--the powerful female order of the sort-of-Celtic Aes Sedai, channelers of the One Power, call the shots in this world, and it's men who, when they try to tap into the One Power, inevitably go mad and fuck it all up.

As you gradually piece together the rich, complex, and visually gorgeous world of The Wheel, you realize that Lan--the hot guy who travels with Moiraine, the blue-cloaked Aes Sedai who shows up in a remote town in the first episode--is her Warder, the man bonded to his Aes Sedai more closely than husband and wife, more closely than brother and sister, more closely than parent and child. And later, that all the Aes Sedai (except the Reds, but that's another story) have Warders, who hang out at night together around the fire, bantering affectionately with each other.  One of them sits leaning up against another's chest, until they both respond to the beckoning glance of the Aes Sedai to whom they're both bonded and saunter off after her to the knowing glances of the rest of the group. Later on, a Warder whose Aes Sedai has been killed by a powerful adversary is invited to join that cluster of three.  "I've never been with a man," he confides to Lan as he considers the possibility. "With two men," Lan replies, smiling. 

Among themselves, the Aes Sedai are just as sexually fluid and diverse. Moiraine, it turns out, has a passionate but clandestine relationship with the woman who holds sovereign power over the whole order. When she's not soaking in a tub with Lan.

I love that the world of The Wheel makes room for the beauty of men--of men at home in their skins, at home in their bond with each other, confident of their strength, aware of their limitations, capable of experiencing their own vulnerability and therefore capable of healing from their psychic wounds, capable also of accepting their attraction to one another--in the context of women's unquestioned strength, authority, and power. As pathetically nerdy as it may be, I want to hang out around that fire every night of my life.

Found Objects

 

Shadowbox, David Townsend, 2017. Antique hardware drawer, collaged photography, beachcombings, and acrylic.

Bodhisattva of Fire and Light

 

Shadowbox, David Townsend, 2012

Wood, collaged paper, photographs, ribbon, cotton thread, and beachcombings

Every Child

 "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

--Pablo Picasso.

Shadowbox "Postcard from My Father" by David Townsend, 2018.

Wood, acrylic, photography, collage.

Litany

"How do you make something sacred? You say 'This is sacred' and you treat it that way."

 --Stuart Wilde

Exposed Tip of the Heart

Ladder to Heaven

Column of Infinite Light

Key to the Inner Temple

Spiritual Antenna

Taproot into the Earth

Wish-Fulfilling Jewel

Shadowbox "Ephemeral Bloom" by David Townsend, 2019

Wood, collage, and acrylic

The Feast of All Saints

We're approaching the point when the veil is thinnest between the worlds--Samhain, a.k.a. All Hallow's Eve, a.k.a. Hallowe'en; then All Saints's Day, and All Soul's Day, the Day of the Dead, Dia de  Muertos, on November 2. When we can accept the invitation to look and listen for the ongoing presence in our lives of those who've passed over. When we can choose to reflect on the inevitability of our own eventual passing over, a reflection which, if we do it well, can open us to living our one wild and precious life more fully in the here and now. 

A friend and I talked about all this a long while ago, when with the sometimes surprising directness I value in our conversations, she asked, "So, who are your saints?"

My grandmother, I told her without much hesitation. A woman whose mythical reputation lives on among her descendants, nearly fifty years after her death. A woman who carried a willow sapling over her shoulder the day she and her family moved to a new house a century ago, because it was the most important thing she could imagine taking with her. A woman who nursed fallen fledglings to maturity, and was given to standing on the doorstep laughing up into a livid sky filled with lightning and the crash of thunder in the midst of Indiana's prodigious thunderstorms, before she went back to cooking for a family of nine, plus any human strays who happened to show up.

And then, without much more hesitation, Matthew Shepard.

The ashes of the twenty-one-year-old gay man who was abducted, brutally beaten, and left to die tied to a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming in 1998, were laid to rest in Washington's National Cathedral three years ago on September 26 in a ceremony that was lifestreamed on YouTube. Gene Robinson, the now-retired Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, who as an out gay man had to wear a bullet-proof vest to his consecration in 2003, gave the homily. (It starts at 1:13 of the very long recording of the full service.)

To watch the online recording of that ceremony is to be reminded that we don't so much live our lives, which then end, as that Life lives us--flowing around us, into us, through us, out of us to others, and back again. 

"If you close your eyes and open your hearts, Matt is right here," Robinson told the congregants.

"I'm here partly to celebrate [Matthew's parents] Judy and Dennis Shepard," he later went on. "They could have so easily gone home and grieved privately. But by the grace of God they decided they were going to turn this horrendous event into something good....They could have just grieved privately, but they shared Matthew with us. And today, they are sharing Matthew with us one last time."

The remembrance of the Day of the Dead, like the remembrance of Christian Holy Communion--anamnesis in Greek--is the living experience that Life lives us, not the other way around. "It's to recall a past event so dramatically that you bring it into the present moment, and it becomes your event, not just stuff in the past," Robinson continued. "That's the kind of remembering I pray for today--transforming remembering."

The illusion that we're separate, that we can save our own lives, leads to our losing them sooner or later, continuously by slow degrees and inevitably at the end. The realization that our life is so much bigger than what goes on inside this skin is what has the power to save us: the understanding, as Thich Nhat Hanh observed, that we have to die countless times every day in order to let the present moment come into existence; the understanding, as therapist Hedi Scheiffer puts it, that we have to cross the bridge to the world of the other in order to find new life in the encounter.

Do you have practices by which you open yourself to this truth? What are they? And who comes to you as a result--from across great distances, from out of the past, across even the barrier of death?

My grandmother's life flows into mine, blessing me and sustaining me, as surely as it did when I stood by her side at the age of four. Matthew's life flows into mine, though we never met, and though he died fifteen hundred miles away. Hate crime legislation signed into law in 2007 bears his name. The suffering with which his life as an individual ended has turned into an outpouring of love and affirmation touching tens of thousands.The living and the dead live on together.

Words Still True

 In 1992, in the gay spirituality journal White Crane 15, J. Michael Clark wrote:

"One important theme in Gay liberation is the realization that we cannot wait for others to sanction our efforts in theology or spirituality. We must instead find our own prophetic voice and assume our own authority to speak in theology and spirituality. Ultimately, neither Gay men and Lesbians, nor Native Americans, nor the poor, nor any other oppressed people can afford to wait for an external conferral of authority to speak. Moreover, the shared nature of oppression means that as we create our own liberation, so also are we obliged to seek the liberation of other people, and of the Earth itself, from objectification, disvaluation and exploitation."

It's good to remember that long before "intersectionality" became a popular term, long before our current and evolving terminology for queer identities proliferated, the concept was there, the consciousness was there, the commitment was there.

Joy in the Forest

 

Photo by Gerry Fortuna

God Bless Charles Rennie Macintosh

With thanks to the lovely and talented Mountaine Jonas for snapping the photos and sending them along... 

Yom Kippur 5782

Walk, don't run....

The bush doesn't suddenly catch fire,

it's been burning the whole time.

Moses is simply moving

slowly enough to see it. And when

he does,

he takes off his sandals.

        --Bob Rell

Being Seen

In the introductory statement to his book of male nude photographs, Being Seen, my generous and brilliantly gifted friend Andrew Graham writes, 

"What about our deeper selves--our naked selves--that which makes us weep with abandon, laugh out loud, or that which gives us reason to rise each morning? What are our passions? What is it that makes us vulnerable? Can we share these parts of us? 

"Obviously for most to be literally naked before the lens is to be very vulnerable. I believe there is a truth inherent and unavoidable when we shed our clothes. It is my goal to capture and share that truth."

Andrew's lens lovingly captures the beauty of the men he photographs, both those who would turn heads on Fire Island, and those who probably wouldn't. Not "seeing past" the physical, but seeing into the physical, seeing "the soul beneath the skin" (to borrow the title of David Nimmons' book about gay men forging more loving, connected communities).

Whenever I visit Andrew, it's a joy to look at his recent work. When I saw him this last week, I didn't expect him to ask me to model for him--a request he made with his characteristic concern for the comfort and agency of those he's with. 

My body shame operates oddly. I enjoy walking around a locker room nude--until I look in the mirror and go, "Oh, fuck." In the depths of Covid's first waves, I took to joking that I was down to one angle I was happy seeing myself naked, and that my goal was to make it back to two by the end of a summer of daily visits to the Y.

I asked Andrew to forgo sharing the work with me during the shoot, as he prefers to do with his models. I knew that self-consciousness would take over as soon as I saw the images. When we finished, nearly 300 exposures later, my predicted distress set in. I talk the talk of all of us having the right to take joy in our bodies, to love them as they are, to inhabit them as subjects rather than evaluate them as objects of scrutiny. And then that all goes out the window when I see that three months of fixed weights have done nothing, nothing at all, to reverse the sag in my 66-year-old chest or the extra pounds around my middle. 

I found myself cringing as much at the hypocrisy of my discomfort as at the soft contours of my belly. And yet could go on feeling good about the experience of the shoot, because of Andrew--because of the respect and affection of his gaze, because of the alchemy that comes from being witnessed rather than just looked at. My vulnerability held within the safe container of his regard. Encouraged by him to see myself through soft eyes. My being, seen.

Later that day, he showed me what had become of a few of the images he'd begun to edit. And I was astonished. Being seen, being truly seen, can be more than a safe experience. It can be a healing. 

Images from Andrew Graham Photography

The Trouble with Archetypes

Magician. Warrior. King. Lover. 

Enneagram 6. Myers Briggs INFJ. Virgo with the Moon in Drag Queen.

Sometimes we'd really, really love to find the Captain Midnight Decoding Ring. 

When we're casting around trying to make sense of our lives, trying to find a center that will hold, it's comforting to think that in some universal archetype, finally, lies the deep truth of who I am. The deep truth of who I've always been, of a destiny that's mine to fulfill. The truth of who other people are as well. Cut through the vagaries of my history, the random stuff that's happened to me, and underneath I'll strike the archetypal bedrock that makes sense of it all. 

Except it doesn't.

We want there to be something solid down at the bottom. We're drawn to the possiibility of some universal truth. But we won't find the truth of our lives in some eternal verity that's waiting to be uncovered. The truth of our lives is in the random history of how we came to be who we are. Peel away a layer of the onion, and you'll find the onion inside. Except that there's another layer to peel away after that. And another layer after that. 

It's not always easy to look with clear eyes at our own histories, with their joys, their traumas, their wounds, their experiences of grace, and their sheer accidents. Sometimes it's hard work to see ourselves as the entirely particular beings that we are. So we start projecting our experience onto some transcendent realm, instead of facing the specific, precious randomness of who we've become and are still becoming. We start making outrageously overgeneralized statements about the universal nature of men's experience, or gay experience. We imagine we're including everyone, when what we're doing is marginalizing those whose experience doesn't conform to our own formulation.

Men don't, as men, have some core essential nature that makes us protectors or warriors, kings or magicians or lovers. Gay men aren't, by some innate gift of being gay, nurturers or tricksters or shamans. We may have some or all of these qualities, but none of them sets us apart as men, or as queer men. None of them is a secret handshake that admits us to the Boys' Club or the Queer Boys' Club. None of them makes us esssentially different from women or straight people or gender-fluid folks or anybody else. And all the other components of our identity--our religion, our class, our race, our cultural background, and on and on, just as importantly make us different from one another.

What we have is the particularity of our experience. We need to dive deeper into it, not impose on it the template of some imagined realm of essential identity. Use whatever images, whatever boxes, whatever labels, you need to make sense of your story. But they're only tools to use for as long as they're useful.

Random Objects

The Sacred isn’t just something we discover out there, or within. It’s also something we invent with our bodies. And something that invents us.

That’s my summary, in twenty-four words, of Brent Plate’s A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). It’s that rarest of all phenomena, a book by an academic who can write clearly and accessibly for an intelligent non-specialist, without sacrificing subtlety or suggestiveness. It’s the kind of book that will unsettle anyone who thinks his own spiritual path offers an exclusive or unique access to the Divine. And it’s an antidote to mystified shamanic woo-woo.

Plate starts by making a fundamental point about our experience in human bodies--we’re not complete. We feel partial, because we are partial. We’re not each a whole, but a half. We long for completion, and we try to find it by a whole slew of means: drugs, companionship, sex, the perfect relationship, our i-Phone, the touch of a dog.

We also look for it by reaching out further, when these stopgap measures fail to satisfy, toward the Mystery. We create religion. But we get sidetracked into believing that religion is about disembodied teaching, or that the spirit is separate from our flesh, even antithetical to our flesh. Religion, Plate insists, is about tying body together with the longings we experience for relation to what is beyond us. (The word "religion" itself derives from a Latin verb that means "to tie back together.") And we do that through the means of the senses.

Plate’s five objects are stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread. In each case, it’s the physical practice of what we do with these objects that comes first, not an abstract understanding of the meaning of our action. We act, then we think about the meaning of our action. First comes practice, then comes belief. 

We set stones on top of one another to mark a place out as noteworthy, or even sacred. Later, we create an explanation for what made us do it. 

We make a memorial quilt panel for someone we’ve loved. Only later do  we experience what our grief might mean in the larger world, when we see our handiwork incorporated into a project that honors tens of thousands of those lost to HIV-AIDS. 

We lay a bouquet of flowers in a public space to honor someone who’s died. But the meaning of what we’ve done depends on the offerings that others have already made there, and on the offerings that will follow. 

We witness our love for someone by buying a cheap lock and shackling it to the grate on the Pont des Arts in Paris. All this is not only about discovering or expressing what’s within us. It’s just as much about inventing it, making it real through the senses and through the body. 

All this turns our understanding of the relationship between ritual and the soul inside out. We want the rituals we participate in to be immediately and easily meaningful. Many of us want their purpose and significance spelled out for us ahead of time, and we’re uncomfortable with doing something before we understand why we’re doing it. 

It’s not a bad idea to resist this impulse for clarity. “Listen to your art,” says Marina Abramovic. “It knows more than you do.” The same can be said, sometimes, of ritual. Long ago, Pascal said, “Kneel down, move your lips, and you will believe.” Walk into the river and submerge yourself. Afterwards, you may understand that you longed to be cleansed. 

Ring a bell at the door of a temple, and afterwards you may get it that you needed to announce your entrance into the Presence of what’s honored there. Bow to someone who smudges you with sage, and later you may understand that the smoke has prepared you to take what happens afterwards more seriously. Hold your wrist out and let someone tie a red thread around it, and days later it may go on bearing witness that the ritual it was part of is still working its way through your consciousness. Your urge to sit quietly at the back of a church with your eyes closed for five minutes every afternoon doesn’t require your belief in a creed.

First we do. Then we understand.

But the reverse of this trust in the integrity of the ritual before you completely understand it is also true. Plate’s approach also invites us to build ritual from the roots of our experience up, when we need to, instead of waiting helplessly for some expert to hand it down to us ready-made. Your favorite park bench may work better for you than the back pew of a cathedral. 

A ritual doesn’t depend for its authenticity on an esoteric meaning fully possessed only by some master of the tradition. Being recited in a language no one in the room knows except for the officiant doesn’t make a chant more effective. Exotic materials aren’t necessarily preferable to what’s around us from day to day. Something as ordinary as water or wine or bread or a candle becomes extraordinary because of how it’s used, and the care with which it’s treated, and because of how its use encourages us to sink further down into its deep multiple meanings for our life. 

“...one point of a history of religion is that all these sacred rituals were, over time and space, made up. All traditions adapt and change, fitting new environments,” as Plate puts it (p. 133).

We build a spiritual practice for ourselves out of the materials we have on hand. There’s nothing to wait for, no expertise you need that you don’t already have, no clear understanding that has to come first. Pick up the tools. They’ll teach you what you need to know.

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Sex is a Finger Pointing at the Moon

The deeper you dive into the Left-Handed Path of desire, the more you run up against this inevitable truth: your monkey mind thinks it's about fulfilment, but it's not.

A well-known koan runs, Zen is the finger pointing at the moon. And the non-answer to the riddle is, "Don't look at the finger. Look at the Moon, stupid."

Don't get hung up on Zen teaching. Don't get hung up on perfecting your meditation practice. Don't get hung up even on the quest for enlightenment.

If we take desire a teacher, the stakes are high. We're pretty nearly hard-wired to imagine that the perfect fulfilment of the fantasy, the perfect connection with the perfect partner, the perfect orgasm, is what will bring us completion.

In other words, we're almost inevitably inclined to "chase the dragon," hoping for the perfect high.

If only the masseur's touch were a little firmer. Or a little lighter. If only the guy I just started dating were five years younger. Or older.  If only he were more my type.

If only my abs were a little tighter. If only I could still keep it up like I did when I was twenty-five. 

If only I'd come out six years earlier. Or twenty years earlier. Or fifty years earlier. 

If only the surgery hadn't put an end to my ability to ejaculate. Or to my partner's sex drive.

If only I weren't actually living my life as it is, here and now, in this present moment.

When we keep staring at the finger, we miss the Moon. We miss the lightning flash of unexpected experience. We miss the magic of what we never bargained on, of what's more than we could have asked or imagined.

Your fantasies, your memories, your expectations, they're all a finger. You need them to point the way. But look at the Moon.

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

If you keep an altar and are willing to share it here, send me a photo and I'll post it.

Icarus: A Reverie

We sit on the slope above the field where we go on warm, windy spring afternoons. We watch one bright purple kite fly higher than the rest. As it dives, the practiced hand of the young man holding the string lets it play out till it catches the updraft again and shoots higher. His son shouts in delight. 

I turn to my daddy and we lock eyes. "You really want it, don't you?" he smiles. I just nod slowly, and we head back home.

Thirty minutes later, I'm leaning against the diamond-shaped plywood frame with its thin mattress. He's putting the restraints on my ankles, stretching one of my arms out to the side to tie it down, then the other. He unfastens the base  of the diamond from the shackle that secures it to floor and hauls up on the pulley. I'm swinging in the air now. He puts one hand on my chest, gazes into my eyes, and rocks me for a few seconds from side to side.

The soft cord goes in a slipknot around my cock and balls. He wraps the other end around his forearm. His fingertips graze the underside of my erection, and I shudder. He flicks the tip of his tongue over my frenulum, and I moan.

This will go on for hours. By the time he lets me down again, I wil barely remember my own name. I'll have only a few words left, but they'll be all I need.

"Please, daddy."

"Thank you."

"Higher, daddy. Make me go higher."

"I need this so bad."

"Please let me be your fucktoy."

He tugs gently on the cord around my junk, and I sway tilted, suspended three feet off the floor.

He oils his hand and strokes the length of me, twisting so his palm rotates, gloriously and excruciatingly, over my glans. The middle finger of his other hand presses against my perineum and begins to burrow gentlly towards my pulsing hole.

He, too, will only need a few words.

"Take another deep breath for me."

"Take it in. I know you're close, but you can hold on."

"We're going to go a little higher now."

"That's my sweet boy."

"I know how full you are, but it's not time yet."

If I begin to hyperventilate: "It's OK, I've got you."

Everything will disappear but the feel of his hands and mouth. His eyes. His voice. The sight of his own erection, unreachable though just inches from my hand. The pleasure spreading from my bound, oiled cock through my whole body. Before it's over, I will forget that I am anything other than my daddy's fucktoy. I will not want to be anything, ever again, but my Daddy's fucktoy. 

At last, when I've pleaded for an eternity, he will make me cum. He will bend down to taste it and then share it with me in a kiss. He will adjust the pulleys so that I'm floating horizontal, slather the rest of my semen onto his own perfect phallus, and ejaculate into my grateful open mouth.

Until then, I will look down from the sky to see Daddy expertly playing the connection between us, tethering me safely to earth as I strain towards heaven.

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.

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!

Through a Glass, Darkly

 "Remember, the only language available to religion is metaphor.  God is always like something else we have experienced visibly and directly."

--from Fr. Richard Rohr's daily meditation for May 30 (Trinity Sunday)

Center for Action and Contemplation

L'dor v'Dor

It's the Jewish liturgical phrase for the endless sequence of connection, from generation to generation. 

And wired into it is the privilege given to biological reproduction as the means by which we inherit a sense of belonging in the world.

This side of the Holocaust--with whole lineages wiped out, and others that survived by the most tenuous thread--that phrase is also full of trauma, grief, longing, the desire for reparation. 

And for queer children of survivors, I know--sometimes a nearly intolerable burden, as it was for my beloved, gifted friend, the late Oscar Wolfman. 

Oscar Wolfman, "Five Sons"

I don't have to be Jewish myself to get the nostalgia, the longing for connection to a family of origin who couldn't teach me what I needed to know about making my way in the world as a man who loves men. Growing up German Lutheran in the Midwest, at the tail end of a dysfunctional generation who loved to think they were the Waltons, I got a full helping of the desire to be seen and mentored, and precious little of its fulfillment. 

Of course, it's where my daddy fantasies got their start. 

I've decided I'm done with pathologizing those fantasies. I'm ready to move on and accept them as my personal expression of a broad and easily recognizable human need. More radically: I'm ready to say that the erotic connections we form across generations (within the parameters of the law, which is to say 18+) are a precious form of mentoring. Rooted deep in our individual psyches, yes.  And at the same time, a means of weaving the queer social fabric we need to thrive and find our place in the world. A means of creating acceptance and belonging for one another. 

I'm a man of a certain age, and getting more certain by the month. At some point, you look in the mirror and can no longer deny you're now the older and wiser man you always wanted to meet. I may still be a son longing for his father figure, but it's time to step into being the father figure ready to respond to the younger man who needs me. Giving what I've always needed is the best way I have to experience it myself. 

Not to pretend I can recover lost youth, but to send the young into a country I'll only see from the top of a nearby mountain.

"Your children are not your children," wrote Kahlil Gibran. "They are the sons and the daughters of Life's longing for Itself."

Why I Love Shortbus

I can count on one hand the movies that I don’t just love but credit with changing the way I look at my life: 

Word Is Out, the 1977 documentary that assured me there were any number of ways to be gay in the world, most of them interesting, many of them desirable; 

Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which helped me find the courage to walk away from spiritual abuse at the hands of a dogmatic, life-denying religious hierarchy; 

Babette’s Feast, which goes on reminding me that the only way to find the deepest joy is to give joy lavishly away;

And Shortbus : John Cameron Mitchell’s sexy, sad, funny, compassionate vision of a queer utopia, set in and around a Brooklyn salon/sex club hosted by the outrageous and divine Mx. Justin Vivian Bond (then still pre-Mx. and pre-Vivian). 

When the movie came out in 2006, I was raw from a long, obsessive breakup with plenty of confusion, grief, anger, and blame to go around. Mitchell’s film showed me people trying hard, fucking up, struggling against shame, longing to connect, fleeing from connection, hurting those they loved, forgiving themselves and each other. I found myself in more or less every scene. 

Years later, talking about the movie with a group of other gay men--some of us newcomers to the film, some fanatic ongoing fans. At the end of the evening, one man observed that if we'd screened the end of the film as one of the clips to prompt discussion, he would likely have cried through it, as he had before. I expect I would have too.

In candlelight during a blackout, Mx. Bond sings "In the End," more or less summing up the vision of the film. Songwriter Scott Matthew's lyrics are anything but upbeat: "We all bear the scars," they begin. "We all feign a life." But it's the tenderness and affection that Bond brings to the song, and that Mitchell and his cinematographer bring to the shooting and editing of the scene, that convey what matters here: that the participants in this "salon for the gifted and challenged" have touched what Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön would call "the genuine sadness at the heart of things": bodhichitta. 

This is the realization that our lives are infinitely precious because they're infinitely vulnerable. The end of the song erupts, with the incursion of a marching band--I'm not making this up--into a riot of musical and erotic carousal. In the end, the characters celebrate their humanity not despite, but in and through their flaws. They find community, but only because they accept the aloneness that we can't overcome.

Some less than appreciative responses to the film, including Bruce Diones' snyde notice for The New Yorker, objected to the utopianism of the final scene. But the inbreaking of what isn't expected and can't be foreseen, until we let go of our attachment to the illusion of perfection, is the whole point. "I never saw that one coming," Bond observes through a bullhorn in the last line of the film. "You never know what's gonna happen in this neighborhood."