MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

The truth shall set you free

Senator Larry Craig's mug shot after the bathroom bust

Gay sex scandals have become way too common -- especially among conservative leaders who oppose gay rights while leading a secret gay life.

 
The news media are in a frenzy over Craig's arrest for allegedly soliciting gay sex in a public restroom. Craig announced yesterday that he regretted making a guilty plea to a lesser charge and keeping the incident secret from his family, friends and staff.

 
I’m trying to do my part by offering to send a free copy of my book Hide and Speak: A Coming Out Guide to any U.S. Senator, including scandal-plagued Larry Craig.

In my opinion, Jesus had the best coming-out advice of all: “The truth will set you free.” He elaborated in the gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Sometimes telling the truth is difficult, but living a lie is even harder. Senator Craig is just the latest example of an anti-gay leader caught in a web of lies about a secret gay life.

Former U.S. congressman Mike Foley and evangelical leader Rev. Ted Haggard officially opposed gay rights until recent gay sex scandals ended their public careers.  They all might have prevented their scandals by following my book’s powerful program of self-acceptance and appropriate disclosure.  The coming-out guide gives practical help with the coming-out process for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) people -- and anyone else with a story to tell. 

Each chapter of Hide and Speak includes real life examples and tested, highly effective exercises that I used in coming-out workshops nationwide.  The book tells positive ways to come out to oneself, create a circle of supporters and deal with family, job and school.  Readers learn how to live proud, free and balanced, no matter what happens.

If you know any Senators who would like a free copy of Hide and Speak, please send them my way!

A call to love in the Episcopal church

cross-posted at Joe Perez's Until

The Episcopal Call to Love, by the Rev. Rob Gieselmann is an online book worth a look. Rob (according to The Lead) has served at St. Luke's in Cleveland, Tennessee; St. Paul's near Chestertown, Maryland; and is now rector at Christ Church in Sausalito, California. Consider this moving passage from Chapter 1:

You might defend your actions by noting how harshly Jesus spoke to the religious leaders who imagined they owned the truth. But, let’s be clear: you aren’t Jesus. What gives you the right to claim truth? And worse, if you listen closely, you might hear in your own voice echoes of the same religious leaders Jesus excoriated.

It is time for each of us to stop sounding like we own the truth. And just so you will know, as I so arrogantly write these sentences, I fall to my knees (at this moment, I bow my knee, even as I write), and ask for forgiveness, and God’s grace, and for the truth of Christ to emerge despite my cold heart.

Some of you will say, when a human right is at stake, stake a claim. I’ve heard that argument, and I’ve heard the comparison to slavery and civil rights. First of all, not all homosexual behavior is about human right. Indeed, I’m still waiting for apologists to stop lumping all homosexuality into the same pail, as though all homosexual behavior activity is acceptable. At the least, we can and should agree that some homosexual activity is patently unacceptable, just like some heterosexual activity is patently unacceptable.

To be sure, a human right may be at stake, and if so, a claim is worth staking. However, I’m looking for those who will promote the cause like Abraham Lincoln promoted freedom to slaves. He agonized over the division of the Union. He prayed passionately before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, and he genuinely lamented the fracture of the Union and absolved the South at the end of it all.

To the homosexuals among us I would say, Isn’t patience in order? After all, how long did it take you to come to terms with your own sexuality? Can you reasonably expect heterosexuals to make the transition faster than you did?

Others of you will say sin is sin, and God says homosexual behavior is sin. I’ve heard that argument, and I’ve heard that God won’t bless the Church that condones egregious sin. Okay. Why is it, then, that we don’t talk about more popular forms of sin: cheating on taxes, adultery, fornication, or – watch out, here – keeping holy the Sabbath? [footnote 2] Even if you are right, and all homosexual behavior is sin (a discussion worth continuing for many reasons, but not here), the issue shouldn’t split the church, unless you’re ready for the Church to split over these other issues, as well. I’m looking for honesty among the more conservative among us, an admission that, for the most part, Scripture is being manipulated to hide prejudice—plain, good, old-fashioned prejudice (a/k/a homophobia). It is time to own it.

Some parts of this sound quite a bit like my own writing for the gay community in Rising Up, if you ask me. However, before I chime in with "amens" (and they're coming), there are a few problems worth stressing with this screed. I'll mention two.

Pleasure, Joy and Rumors of God

You, yesterday’s boy,
to whom confusion came:
Listen, lest you forget who you are.

It was not pleasure you fell into.  It was joy.
You were called to be bridegroom,
though the bride coming toward you is your shame.

What chose you is the great desire.
Now all flesh bares itself to you.

On pious images pale cheeks
blush with a strange fire.
Your senses uncoil like snakes
awakened by the beat of the tambourine.

Then suddenly you’re left all alone
with your body that can’t love you
and your will that can’t save you.

But now, like a whispering in dark streets,
rumors of God run through your dark blood.

--Ranier Maria Rilke, from Rilke's Book of Hours,
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

We Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people must be gentle with ourselves. 

Confusion settled on us in the way snow buries and obfuscates, and yet, as warmth returns to winter, if we listen, we will not forget who we are.

It is easy to reject when rejected, as so many LGBT people were rejected by our faith communities.  So easy to offer a bitter dismissal to those who defame and reject us.  So easy to run too far the other way in our thinking, as if the error of those spiritual authority figures invalidates our own spiritual existence. 

Running the other way, many of us fell, not really into pleasure, but into joy.  Any prospect of joy offered a promise of relief from the emotional and psychological pain weighing us down on our journey.  That such joy was largely sensory, and so, temporary, didn’t matter to us; we could feel happy for those few precious moments. 

Eventually, we experience the futility of sensual and projected joy.  We begin to question if there might be a more perfect happiness than this.  We may feel intense guilt and shame as we use the source template of our disapproving faith tradition to judge ourselves or our behavior unworthy: “Well, of course I’m not happy; I’m homosexual/bisexual/transgender/doing drugs/not going to church,” and so on.  Truly, regardless of gender, we were all intended to be ‘bridegroom’ to the Great Spirit of Love -- bonded with the great body of Truth and Transformation -- but now, the bride coming toward us is our shame. 

In fallenness (which does not imply ‘sinfulness’), in which “all flesh bares itself to you,” we become companions to desire, the body and its senses.  Our “senses uncoil like snakes.”  This sensual knowledge is not good or bad, unless it is put to constructive or destructive uses.  [In fact, such knowledge may become a great strength.  A persistant antipathy to the body and its senses possesses many individuals of spiritual direction, as if our divine function is one to the exclusion of another, instead of creating healthy balance.]

When we are suddenly left all alone -- as must happen in an existence based on sensory joy -- “with your body that can’t love you/and your will that can’t save you,” we finally face the fact of our own Spirit.  To many it is a given that we are body, mind and spirit, but just as many forget the spiritual until it reveals itself as the only choice for long-lasting happiness, independent of the senses. 

This awareness of our Spirit approaches “like a whispering in dark streets.” 

Listen and you can hear it now, the “rumors of God run through your dark blood.”

December 31, 2007: SAVE THE DATE

In response to a question from a reader of Soulfully Gay, do I still support the establishment of a gay-specific winter holiday? (In the book, I proposed a holiday called Yuletide. Subsequently, I refined the proposal to call the holiday Bridge of Light and suggested that the identity be shifted from "celebration of queer identity" to "a celebration of the full equality and dignity of all people").

I've been thinking hard about this one. My answer, only about three years in the making, is yes--I support the emergence of two distinctly new cultural traditions. They are distinct, but they are not necessarily incompatible or separate.

I maintain my proposal, advanced in Soulfully Gay, for the creation of a holiday for the LGBT/queer community called Bridge of Light, to be celebrated on January 1 of each year. December 31, the eve of Bridge of Light, should be the actual time of gatherings and festivities, as the point of such get togethers is to welcome in the New Year and to affirm the Bridge of Light with a distinctively LGBT/queer festival. I'm totally psyched for this, and support it 100%. I should add that I have been personally celebrating Bridge of Light continuously since 2004, and have encouraged my readers to do so as well each holiday season. I know some of them have taken me up on the suggestion, though it's hard to know precisely how many have done so.

I have also quietly begun to support a new proposal, effective January 1, 2008 (and not yet formally announced in any way), for the creation of an international, global, humanitarian holiday called Spirit Day. Spirit Day will be recognized on January 1 of each year, and will also be "rung in" on December 31. The point of Spirit Day is to honor Spirit in all its many forms and faces. So while in a sense the holiday is humanitarian, it's most fully humanitarian precisely because its focus is on that Spirit which connects and bonds human beings to one another and to every other living creature and everything in the cosmos.

I have proposed that Bridge of Light will be integrated into Spirit Day as a specific way of celebrating the Spirit Day. Bridge of Light will bring in the Spirit Day in a way distinctive to the LGBT/queer communities in which it is celebrated. It's a queer celebration of a human and universal wonder: Spirit.

I'll have more to say about both of these holidays in the fall and into the holiday season. For now, SAVE THE DATE. :-)

cross-posted at http://www.joe-perez.com/until

Gay Jesus art sparks violence… and hope

Sermon on the Mount by Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin

Art that shows Jesus as gay has sparked violence—most recently in Sweden last week.

The controversial images also appear in my new book Art That Dares: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ, and More.  It has color images by 11 artists from the US and Europe, including Swedish photographer Elisabeth Ohlson Wallin. 

A group of young people tried to set fire to a poster at the cultural center that was exhibiting her photos of a queer Christ.  Staff intervened and as many as 30 people joined the fight, according to news reports. 

The recent melee broke out over her Ecce Homo series, which recreates scenes from Christ’s life in a contemporary lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) context.  The conflict occurred in the Swedish city of Jonkoping, known as a center of evangelical Christianity.

The violence in Sweden is the latest example of why the queer Christ is needed.  Jesus taught love, but now Christian rhetoric is being used to justify hate and discrimination LGBT people.

People try to censor or destroy queer Christ images, so I compiled them into a book to ensure that they would be available.  An online gallery of gay Jesus images, including Ohlson Wallin’s work, was recently added to my website, JesusInLove.org.

Ohlson Wallin’s Ecce Homo series has caused violence before.  It toured Europe widely from 1998-2000, winning awards and breaking attendance records.  More than 250,000 people viewed it, but a man with an ax destroyed two of the photos and Ohlson Wallin needed police protection after receiving death threats.  The Pope cancelled a planned audience with the Swedish archbishop because Ecce Homo was shown at Uppsala’s National Cathedral.

Ohlson Wallin created Ecce Homo in the late 1990s after losing many friends to AIDS.  She got mad when some Christians said that the disease was God’s punishment for being gay.  Grief and anger became the motivation for her powerful, transformative images.  “I wanted to show that love is for everyone,” told me. 

I’m a lesbian Christian author who believes that Christ represents everybody, including sexual outcasts.  Two thousand years ago Jesus taught love and justice and was killed for it.  One of the charges that led to his crucifixion was blasphemy—the same charge that is being leveled against me and the artists in my book. 

My experiences as a minister and art historian have shown me that many people are longing for progressive spiritual images.  They seek alternatives to the current conservative monopoly on Christian imagery. 

Today queer people of faith are reclaiming our power and creating new images of the divine based on our own experiences.  I am grateful to the artists who are pioneers on this sacred path.

COMING OUT OF FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIANITY: An Autobiography Affirming Sensuality, Social Justice, and The Sacred, by Carolyn Baker

In early 2005, in anticipation of my sixtieth birthday, I began working on an autobiography. Certainly, I reasoned, now entering my sixth decade, I should be putting in ink my reflections on life as I officially become a senior citizen. Following the publication of three books and countless articles, it seemed that my “memoirs” was the very next step.

Little did I realize that in the fall of 2006, just a few weeks after the release of my third book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED, a bombshell breaking news story that would hit a pivotal nerve in my own personal history would compel me to integrate the almost-finished memoirs with commentary on the story, not merely from my intellect but from my personal life experience. That news item was the revelation that fundamentalist Christian icon, Pastor Ted Haggard of the New Life Church of Colorado Springs, Colorado, ostensibly rabidly homophobic, had been involved for three years in a sexual relationship with another man.

Memoirs just lying around, serving no purpose except navel-gazing, are easily ignored and postponed for “some other day.” But when one’s autobiography so eerily parallels breaking news on CNN, one should consider taking it out, dusting it off, and disclosing to the world that human beings do not have to live a lie in order to follow the calling of their hearts in pursuit of the sacred.

Still and Know

"Come up, O lions, and shake off the delusion you are sheep.  You are souls immortal, spirits free, blessed and eternal."  ~Vivekananda

One day, the devil and his friend were walking down the street.  Ahead of them, they saw a man bend down, pick something up off the ground and stuff it eagerly into his pocket.  "What was that?" asked the devil's friend. "Oh, that was a piece of the Truth," said the devil.  "Well, that's bad news for you, isn't it?" said the friend.  "Not at all," the devil said with a smirk. "I'm going to let him organize it."

On our spiritual journeys as Lesbian, Gay, Bi-affectionate and Transgender people, some of the most insidious illusions that arrest our progress are the trappings of organized religion.  For many of us that were expelled from the garden of our faith tradition because of our gender identity or sexual orientation, the struggle to return takes over our thinking about religion and spirituality.  But return to what?  Too often we are content to return to the rituals, the community or the drag of our faith tradition-overcoming those who thought they could hold us back or keep us out-but fail to engage our lives and souls in a transformational relationship with the Divine.  We claim the words, but not the power; we celebrate the customs, but avoid the practice; we bind ourselves to institutions, but drown out the Spirit; we sketch vast architectures, but remain blind to the Truth.

It's not that religious traditions are bad, quite the contrary.  Beautiful buildings, colorful fabrics, smoke, crackers, cadences and harmonies are all nice things to have, but if they do not facilitate the deepening of individuals' consciousnesses, if they do not simplify instead of complicate, transform instead of translate, if they do not, like language, point beyond themselves, if they do not lay bare our true selves, then they are all of them empty, valueless barriers to the evolutionary maturation of the human spirit toward God. 

The simple truth is - and you can stop reading after this is you want since the rest will just say this with more words - the simple truth is that salvation, enlightenment and inner peace can only be found by going inward, and never by rummaging through what's outside. 

"If your leaders tell you, 'the kingdom of God is in the sky,' then the birds will get there before you.  If they say that it is under the sea, the fish will enter and will precede you.  I say unto you that the kingdom of God is inside you and outside you and all around you. Whosoever knows oneself will find the kingdom.  And when you know yourselves, you will know that you are the children of the living God," says Jesus in The Gospel of Thomas. How do we come to know our true selves?  We become still, quiet and fully present.  We close our mouths, block off our senses, blunt our sharpness, untie our knots, soften our glares, and settle our dust. Only then can we know our primal identity.  Only then can we hear the still, small voice of Spirit.  Only then are we open to the action of Spirit.  Only then are we available for the great work of transformation.

There are many techniques that can support this transformation, from centering and contemplative prayer to yoga, Zen meditation and Vedanta.  The goals of a transformative spiritual practice are self-realization and partnership with the Divine. 

Of course, self-realization and partnering with the Divine mean exploring parts of ourselves and parts of God that we wish weren't there.  Only when we become fully conscious of the web of assumptions and beliefs that we have constructed about the world and about ourselves-a web in which we now are caught-are we forced to dismantle our illusions.  Then we learn to see what lies within us and what lies outside us as they really are; only then are we able to interact with the world as it is and not as we imagine it to be.  "Not-knowing is true knowledge. Presuming to know is a disease," cautions Lao-tzu in Tao Te Ching. "Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power."

Unfortunately, queer people are as skilled at avoiding this kind of conflict with our own minds' constructions as we are adept at confronting the discriminatory traditions and values of our society and many religions.  This conflict is so primal, so radical-to change not only the public translation of spiritual values but to transform our very understanding of reality-that part of us wants to escape it.  The loud, pushy voice of ego keeps our focus outside of ourselves-driving us to change things on the surface of the phenomenal world.  Any kind of fundamental questioning, any opportunity for deep, inner quiet, threatens to shatter the concepts of what the self is and how the universe operates upon which we base every thought and decision!  Many of us think, subconsciously or not, that we just don't want to know that much.

I've certainly seen this hesitance in myself; it took me years to pick up a Ken Wilber book because I knew I just couldn't handle having my worldview challenged that much.  The last time I confronted my Dad about the religious reasons for his disapproval of my marriage, he emotionally responded to my informed exegesis of scripture with, "I don't want to hear it.  I need to believe what I believe."  It's true of most of us. Our entire lives are constructed around certain assumptions about how things work and why.  We want our understanding of Spirit and our experience of the world to be static things that after you get them once, they never change.  Unfortunately, as time goes on and human beings learn more and more about the universe and human nature and how they operate, our personal understanding has to change or we become fossils of an outmoded worldview.  Our development becomes arrested: full stop.  Just because a way of being has become comfortable doesn't mean it's correct.

In fact, we usually become more and more uncomfortable as we become closer and closer to Spirit through meditation and prayer.  First, "We see that God is not a drug or an instantaneous bliss maker," explains Julia Mossbridge, gifted author of Unfolding: The Perpetual Science of Your Soul's Work. "We discover that our lives are not the sole item on God's agenda. Partnering with God is not about developing an ethereal, airy-fairy relationship with some force of Love.  It is about developing an intimate, everyday, every-moment-of-every-day friendship in which you are with God all the time: while doing volunteer work, making a speech, singing in a choir, dancing at your wedding, getting in a fist-fight, eating the third plate of nachos, cursing at pedestrians.  All the time."

"It is a call to follow Jesus out of all the structures, security blankets, and even spiritual practices that serve as props. They are all left behind insofar as they are part of the false self system…The false self is an illusion," says prominent Christian contemplative, Father Thomas Keating in Open Mind, Open Heart. In short, when we become fully, deeply present-as we begin to recognize our true selves and look God in the eye-we get the rug pulled out from under us. 

It's not a bad thing, although we have a low tolerance for discomfort.  Getting shaken up is just evidence of our rising up.  If our feet stayed firmly planted on the rug of our conventional understanding, our feet would never leave the ground. Groundlessness is inherent in the process.  Just as there must be silence for Spirit to be audible, there has to be space in our thoughts and beliefs for Truth to manifest.  Groundlessness wipes away our preconceptions. Pema Chodron explains in The Places That Scare You that as we become used to this insecurity, "To the extent that we stop struggling against uncertainty and ambiguity, to that extent we dissolve our fear."

There is no fear in love.  When groundlessness cultivates our fearlessness, we encounter our own genuinely loving nature, and we become available for open-minded, whole-hearted interaction with the universe.  As gay Christian mystic Jim Marion puts it in Putting on the Mind of Christ, "All we need to do to be 'saved' is to consciously realize who we have been all along.  We need to realize our own divinity, own it, take up the responsibility of it, and live it." 

If Transgender, Bisexual, Lesbian and Gay women, men and young people do not awaken to our full responsibility, to our fulfillment, our empowerment, then our natural function as human beings in society will continue to be frustrated, obstructed and disjoint.  The possibility for our final emancipation, legitimation and liberation will wither if LGBT people do not unmask and become more present to others, in service to others, and bring the gentle qualities of Spirit to the details of living. 

These universal qualities of Spirit-love, compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, contentment, responsibility and harmony-will help us transform straight communities into just and sustainable environments that nurture whole, mindful and evolving individuals.  Our awakening of spiritual and emotional intelligence will be the thunder that cracks their slumber.  Our care and service will rain down and wash away the dark stains of hate and prejudice.  Our radical realization will be the Shirt of Flame that burns bushels and allows our inner lights to shine. 

Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us 'til we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
Where are you making for? It takes
So many thousand years to wake,
But will you wake for pity's sake?
~Christopher Fry, A Sleep of Prisoners

Rejected slogan for the United Methodist Church advertising campaign

Cross-posted from my Until blog:

The United Methodist Church will soon begin a multi-million dollar "Open hearts. Open minds. Open doors." advertising campaign. Its target will be the younger generation of 22- to 44-year-olds, with a special focus on Internet web sites. Not surprisingly, another considered slogan -- "Methodism. Expelling your lesbian and gay friends from the ministry since 1760" -- was rejected. Truth in advertising doesn't always come first, not even when the advertiser is a church.

"Do Not Be Ashamed"

"You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before...

Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them...

Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
'I am not ashamed.'  A sure horizon
will come around you.  The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop."

~ Wendell Berry, "Do Not Be Ashamed"