MyOutSpirit.com Gay Spirituality Blog

Hysteria and Paranoia

By the time readers are done reading this particular blog I may lose a few friends, maybe a few church members and a few colleagues will finally have proof that “I have just finally gone over the cliff.”

Those who are promoting the hysteria and paranoia around the building of a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City are in the truest sense of the word “idiots.” I am using this word in the modern sense of its understanding: “describing an extreme folly or stupidity, and its symptoms (foolish or stupid utterance or deed)."

Yes, for a pastor this is VERY strong language, however this controversy is an embarrassment to me as a follower of Christ, an embarrassment as a reasonable educated person and an embarrassment as an American.

First and foremost the term “the Ground Zero Mosque” is misleading and a lie. This proposed building is a full four city blocks from where the World Trade Center stood. In most cities such as Chicago and New York where the geography is grid like, there are about 8 blocks to a mile. 4 blocks would be almost a half a mile from where the World Trade Center stood. This is hardly “ground zero.”

According to Gary Leupp who is a Professor of History, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion, at Tufts University this whole ridiculous controversy got its start from a person by the name of Pamela Geller. Pamela Geller maintains a blog called Atlas Shrugs. She has written a book about Barack Obama in which she alleges his real father was Malcolm X. She leads an apparently tiny wacko group called Stop the Islamization of America. 

From Within or Without?

by Chris Stedman, NonProphet Status

As I reflected on in my last post, I recently spent a week in the woods with a cohort concerned with interfaith approaches to ecological efforts organized by the Chaplaincy at Yale University, Hebrew College and Andover-Newton Theological School. The speakers were remarkable and included Forum on Religion and Ecology co-director Mary Evelyn Tucker and Policy Advisor for the New York Mayor’s Office and author of Green Deen Ibrahim Abdul-Matin. All who presented were engaging and interactive, but one exchange in particular really stuck with me.

During an afternoon session we were privileged with the presence of the brilliant Rabbi Arthur Green, a prolific author and Professor of Jewish Thought at Brandeis University and dean of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College. As a part of his conversational session, Rabbi Green detailed his story of being raised in a culturally Jewish but religiously Atheistic home — I’ll do my best to accurately represent it here. Around the age of 10, Rabbi Green experienced an internal transformation and converted to religious Judaism. He became captivated by the so-called “religious questions” of life. Then, after several years, he began to realize that he didn’t buy into a theology of God and abandoned his faith. But a few years later he returned to the religion, wanting to continue wrestling with the questions that drew him to religious vocation in the first place. He has been working as a Jewish leader ever since. But it was the questions that religion seeks to answer that brought him back, not a belief in a personified God.

As I sat there listening, I experienced a sensation that can only be described as a close cousin to religious experience. In Rabbi Green — a Jewish man much older than myself who was ordained as a Rabbi in 1967 and studied under renowned civil rights activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel — I saw a mirror. This man’s story eerily echoed my own. He was, in a way, telling my own story to me. Hearing him speak, chills ran up my spine and my eyes nearly welled. I tried to gauge my surging and strong emotional reaction but was at a loss. Why was this happening to me? So we had similar experiences. “So what.”

Though I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say, I knew I had to say something. I raised my hand and, voice a bit shaky, gave him a brief synopsis of my religious history — my conversion at the age of 11 to Evangelical Christianity and the moral and communal impulses that predicated that identification move; how I left the tradition after some years of wrestling with problematic theologies that ultimately left me unable to reconcile the doctrinal postulations of religion with my own lived reality; and an eventual commitment to align with religious communities in their social justice efforts without a historical tradition of my own. I identified the significant parallels in my story and mine, and then posed a question: did he think one who is interested in the “questions of religion” and in relating to and utilizing its language, such as he and I both, had to work from within? I explained that I too had found traditional notions of a personified diety to be fundamentally limited and particular structural elements of religion too restrictive. But like Rabbi Green, I continued that I also wanted to address the questions of religion within my work — on my own, in organizing moral secular communities, and in coalition with others equally concerned (aka the religious) — but from outside of traditional religious paradigms. So I wanted to know: why had he decided that, for him, that could only be done from within a tradition? Do you need to be religious to engage the “religious questions?”

Rabbi Green responded that he wanted to be ancestrally rooted in a way that allowed him to employ the richness of religious rhetoric and story; to immerse himself in the “echo chamber” of a tradition that would allow him to evoke and speak from thousands of years of moral history — and then demonstrated this by contrasting a goosebump-inducing articulation of the story of Cain and Abel to a standard “secular” story of betrayal. After he did I could see why it would be easier to illuminate such mores within the historicity of a particular tradition, but I hypothesized that his ability to return to religion might have had something to do with the fact that he was raised around Jewish traditions and language. For him, it was second nature. But I grew up in a secular context and so there was nothing for me to “return to” after I left religion. Bouncing back into Christianity as a non-theist, or adopting another brand of non-theistic religiosity — which admittedly I tried with stints as a Buddhist and God-as-metaphor Christian — just seems co-optive and dishonest for me.

I guess I’m just interested in broadening the echo chamber to incorporate all people, all traditions, and all stories — and I think Rabbi Green is too, or else he wouldn’t do the work he does in the way he does. But I also believe that we are in a place culturally that we were not when Rabbi Green was coming into adulthood. Today individuals without a belief in God can openly engage the questions posited by religion, both taking the conclusions religion has amassed seriously and adopting secularism as a base. This is perhaps why I never became a Unitarian Universalist, which seems like it should be a natural fit in its permittance of non-theism but still feels personally inauthentic to me.

We secularists can adopt religious forms like community, service, story and ritual, but apply them to a secular model that is separate but engaged. This engagement means that we can and should perform these endeavors in communion with religious people, stories and ideals — and in doing so we can more effectively lift up the important moral issues of our time, such as the ecological imperative we tackled at Common Grounds. I believe that today we are well situated to engage from without, establishing our own moral frameworks and language that run parallel to those of the traditionally religious. Perhaps in doing so, this dichotomy of within and without will dissolve altogether. But until that day comes, I’ll be trying to think of a “secular story” that can come close to Rabbi Green’s telling of Cain and Abel. Anyone up for the challenge?

Gay and Jewish in Brooklyn

{Amanda Julius, The Brooklyn Ink}

Benjy Unger remembers sitting cross-legged on his therapist’s floor, waiting to be tapped on the head. Dressed in traditional Orthodox Jewish regalia, “the whole garb,” the 25 year-old was playing duck, duck, goose.

The children’s game is one of several tactics used by Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality, or JONAH, to turn gay Jews straight. The idea is to return men to a childlike state, in order to rewire their sexuality. The organization, based in Jersey City, attracts men like Unger, who is from Borough Park, with the goal of treating homosexuality as a kind of disease, in order that they might have a heterosexual marriage.  In the Orthodox communities of Brooklyn, many gay Jews feel pressured to change, and they provide a substantial chunk of business for these types of programs. JONAH is one of many, though it claims to be the only organization specifically tailored to this gay Jewish audience. 

According to the American Psychological Association, there is no evidence that reparative therapy, as this type of conversion technique is known, is successful. Last fall, Dr. Judith Glassgold chaired an investigation on its behalf into reparative therapy and concluded that, “there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation.” Yet JONAH remains an attractive option for many young Jewish men in Brooklyn. The organization declined to comment.

“If you are Orthodox you have a choice: you are either Orthodox or gay. You have to choose, you can’t be both” Unger said. “You grow up hearing it’s a sickness, and one day you realize, ‘Oh my God, I have this’,” he explained.

Though there are those who accept his sexuality, his community as a whole holds a negative perception of homosexuality. At one extreme, the lack of acceptance of homosexuality within ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities is clear in the statements made by Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a Flatbush rabbi and a spokesman for the Rabbinical Alliance of America. In a Youtube video he blames the earthquake in Haiti on homosexuality.

Unger was raised in a highly Orthodox family, and attended conservative yeshivas as he was growing up. He was eventually expelled from a Brooklyn yeshiva when his sexuality became known. Even his friends were unsure how to react. “People went crazy when I said I was gay. I was getting calls about it, nobody believed me,” he said. “It’s a really misunderstood issue in Brooklyn.”

He came out to his family last year and, while they were supportive, they paid for him to attend therapy sessions at JONAH. The therapy, he says, was his own idea. Twice a week for the next year, Unger traveled to Jersey City, paying a weekly total of $160 for one private and one group session with around 10 to 12 other men. “After a year, we’re talking thousands of dollars,” he said. And, he says, he did not reap any benefits, instead finding the experience damaging. “I’m in therapy because of it now,” Unger said. “I’m actually in reparative therapy for my reparative therapy.”

“When I heard of JONAH, I thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’ They have many members because we are desperate to change, because we have no option. But it can be very destructive,” he continued.

Unger’s friends were predominantly supportive throughout this period, he says, though he remains the only gay person they know. “There’s so little education about this in the Orthodox community that some people actually did not believe it was physically possible to be Orthodox and gay. It’s impossible to be accepted into the community and be gay. Impossible. It doesn’t exist.” According to Unger, JONAH has one member who has been attending therapy for 15 years.

Much of his therapy at JONAH focused on the idea of masculinity, Unger said. He was told the reason he was gay was that he was too close to his mother, and that his relationship with his father was not strong enough. As a result he distanced himself from his mother, a course of action he regrets.

JONAH claims many success stories and its website is filled with testimonials from men for whom their therapy has apparently worked, but Unger believes this success is defined predominantly through abstinence, rather than a holistic change. The organization has created its own lingo for discussing what in religious Judaism is frequently considered unspeakable: homosexuality is “same sex attraction,” or SSA. The website offers the knowledge of how to “journey out of homosexuality.” Gay men are repackaged as those who “are involved in homosexuality” or “embrace the false identities of homosexuality.”

Shloimy, whose requested his last name be removed from this story, 22, attended JONAH for 8 months before leaving the organization in January.  Originally from the West Coast, where he was raised Orthodox, the family relocated to Crown Heights a year ago. He came out to most of his family—several of his siblings still do not know he is gay, but he is planning to come out to them at the upcoming Passover festival—when he was 20. “They basically pushed me back in the closet,” he said. “The closet was named JONAH.”

Continue reading in The Brooklyn Ink at http://thebrooklynink.com/2010/03/31/9921-gay-and-jewish-in-brooklyn/

  

 

New LGBT Siddur

Congregation Beth Simchat Torah Releases “With All Your Heart”

Progressive Jewish congregation publishes groundbreaking
new siddur for the LGBT community and its allies

 
(New York, NY)Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) is proud to publish 
Siddur B’chol L’vav’cha, (With All Your Heart), a new edition of the community’s 
long-standing Friday night prayer book. Created for individuals coming from a 
broad spectrum of Jewish practice and tradition, this siddur introduces numerous 
liturgical innovations that expand definitions of Jewish family and community to 
explicitly embrace lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) families. 
 
“B’chol L’vav’cha publicly affirms the pride GLBT Jews possess today, and provides 
a message of tolerance, inclusion, and inspiration that will facilitate meaningful 
moments of communal and personal devotion and joy for all Jews,” said Rabbi David 
Ellenson, President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “It roots 
itself firmly in the soil of Jewish liturgical tradition and draws creatively upon 
a whole variety of Jewish sources while providing a host of innovative and imaginative 
poems and prayers.”
 
With All Your Heart is a meaningful and important addition to a congregation’s 
liturgical collection, and is an important resource for LGBT-friendly synagogues. 
 
Highlights of this new, inclusive prayer book include:
 
•	Readings by American, Israeli, and Yiddish poets and by gay and feminist 
writers, including Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Walt Whitman, Yehuda Amichai, and 
Rachel the Poet;
•	A broad AIDS section with writings by William Finn, Stephen Sondheim, 
Tony Kushner, Thom Gunn, and others;
•	Prayers for coming out, for celebrating transgender experience, and a 
memorial prayer for Transgender Remembrance Shabbat;
•	Readings by transgender and intersex members of CBST;
•	An extensive LGBT Pride section, including an LGBT Pride Al Hanisim prayer;
•	Prayers and readings on disability, the environment, and social justice;
•	American folk anthems, such as God Bless America (written by a Jewish immigrant), 
America the Beautiful (by a lesbian), and Lift Every Voice and Sing (considered the 
African American national anthem);
•	Prayers for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day;
•	Songs, readings, and blessings in Yiddish, Ladino, Russian, and French 
reflecting the diversity of the Jewish world;
•	The inclusion of feminine God language in Hebrew for many prayers;
•	Concubines Bilhah and Zilpah included among matriarchs Rachel, Leah, and 
Sarah, recognizing all of our mothers, not just the “legally married ones”;
•	Removing heterosexual references to God’s love for Israel in L’chah Dodi 
by changing kimsos hatan al kalah to kimsos lev b’ahavah.	
 
“This siddur represents and embraces all of us in our beautiful and God-given diversity,”
said the book’s editor in chief, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi of New York City's
Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) since 1992. “It represents a key facet of CBST’s
mission of creating a kehilla kedosha, a sacred community, built on a love of the Jewish
people, a passion for social justice, prayer, and study. Our hope is that this prayer 
book finds its way to synagogues and into homes across the nation.”
 
Siddur B’chol L’vav’cha, (With All Your Heart) was edited and compiled by lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and straight Jews and is intended for Jews of every sexual 
orientation and gender identity. The prayer book is available for order in hardcover, 
as well as in a deluxe, personalized edition. A companion CD, With All Your Heart: 
A Musical Celebration of Shabbat at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah, is also available 
for purchase. Those interested in placing orders may visit the CBST website, 
(http://cbst.org/NewSiddur.shtml). 
 
About Congregation Beth Simchat Torah
Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) is a synagogue serving people of all sexual 
orientations and gender identities in the New York metropolitan area. Founded in 1973, 
and under the leadership of Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum since 1992, CBST has become the 
largest LGBT synagogue in the world and arguably one of the most influential. CBST is 
an important voice in Judaism; in the worldwide discourse on the nature of religious 
community; and in the movement to secure basic civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual,
 and transgender people in the United States and throughout the world. For more 
information about the synagogue, please visit www.cbst.org. 

Conversations with angels and toasters

By Joe Perez

In the Jewish Renewal online magazine Zeek, Jay Michaelson discusses the theme of "Religion and Insanity." Actually, his concern isn't with insanity but mysticism. It's more to dispell the notion that doubt and cynicism are the peak of sophistication (a belief Michaelson says it a fixture in the contemporary literary culture). Michaelson finds doubt and cynicism mere defense mechanisms, revelations of our shame, fear, and ignorance. He writes:

So then, with whom do I have more in common -- the Evangelicals who trust their inspiration, or the literate atheists with whom I like to go to dinner? Really, I and people like me are split down the middle: I am aligned with the atheists on matters of science and cosmology, but aligned with the religionists on questions of spirit and subjectivity. Maybe that's why I feel myself increasingly distanced from my angel-channeling friend -- because he's not split down the middle, but has instead gone over to the other side. Or rather, to a side, as opposed to my have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too perch, astride the fence of doubt. With my meditation practice, I can feel grounded anywhere -- but perhaps that sense of groundedness prolongs my indecision. Whereas, if I trust my experience, then I, too, must admit that I am on the side of the Tarot cards, the evangelicals, and the New Agers -- without all their myth, but necessarily open to the possibility that the myth contains deep and useful symbolism for the unconscious mind.

And why, exactly, do I not believe the myth? Because it is more accurate to interpret my devekut as a mindstate, and condescendingly look down on the 90% of the people in the world who mistake their mindstate for a real, live deity? Their inspiration for divrei elohim chayim, the words of the living God? Is that really wisdom?

This post continues on Joe Perez's Until blog.

Conservative Jews allow for same-sex unions and gay ordinations

By Huw Richardson

Judaism's Conservative Movement has opted to hold two positions at the same time: while still holding to a ban on same-sex activity, the movement will allow any Rabbi who wishes may bless same-sex unions, and seminaries may ordain gay men and lesbians. Such contradictory decisions, by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, teshuvas in Hebrew or interpretations in English, are allowed because Jewish tradition looks for valid understandings, rather than "the one right one".

The Conservative Movement is one of several denominations within Judaism, it is the third largest grouping. Generally it is not as strict about some of the laws and traditions as are Orthodox Jews, but it is not as liberal as the Reform Movement and the Reconstructionist Movement.

Conservative Judaism to allow gay rabbis

A news article by Michael Conlon discusses how the Conservative Jewish movement is approaching a decision to allow gay rabbis and same-sex unions. At the same time, conservative Jews may reaffirm their religion's traditional condemnation of "homosexual behavior."

WorldPride in Jerusalem Seeks Clergy Support

Dear Colleague,

As some of you might know, a major international glbt event
is scheduled for Jerusalem this August.  WorldPride 2005 is
an international interfaith gathering of gay and lesbian
people hosted by Jerusalem Open House, Jerusalem's GLBT
Center.  An international campaign, initiated by
evangelical Christians, to oppose WorldPride has been
launched.  This right wing religious campaign has now
enlisted all the Shas members of Kenneset, the Sephardic
Chief Rabbi, the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi, the deputy mufti
of Jerusalem, the Latin patriarch and the Armenian
patriarch to pressure the Israeli authorities to cancel
this event.

"They plan to fill the hotels and restaurants and party
like Sodomites, while the world press takes pictures. It is
a disgrace to the eternal holiness of Jerusalem and to its
people." Texas evangelist Mike Evans

"We fear that Israel is now making a disastrous mistake by
allowing this gathering to take place in this land where
G-d has blessed you in such a special way. We petition you
to deny the request for this event to take place in this
land where G-d has blessed you in such a special way."  ...
"It is painful for us to comprehend why you would permit
such a meeting ... It has been the historic position of
each of these faiths [Judaism, Christianity, Islam] that
homosexuality is an abomination to the one true G-d." Leo
Giovinetti, pastor of the Mission Valley Christian
Fellowship in San Diego, California

"This parade constitutes a 10-day homosexual pornographic
festival... "They?re trying to rape the Holy Land."  Rabbi
Yehuda Levin, the director of the Rabbinical Alliance of
America.

In these times of intolerance and suspicion, please join
with us in supporting WorldPride 2005.  I am immensely
proud of the efforts of those who are trying to show the
world a Jerusalem which is open and loving rather than the
Jerusalem so often projected of violence and bigotry.  We
are gathering a list of international clergy to present to
the media and to the Israeli government.  As an expression
of support for WorldPride, sign a clergy letter in support
of WorldPride and pass it to your colleagues.

Please reply to
http://www.cbst.org/worldPridePetition.shtml if you are
comfortable being publicly listed as supporting WorldPride.

Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum
North American Chair of WorldPride

P.S. Click here if you haven't seen it and would like to read The New
York Times article.

"Wrestling with God," by Joe Perez

SOULFULLY GAY

By Joe Perez

“Wrestling feels a lot like making love. It also feels a lot like making war,” wrote rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph.D. in a noteworthy poem. In recent decades, the Jewish tradition of which Waskow is a part has given a variety of new expressions to the struggle that has moved people for centuries: wrestling with God and with each other.

In the Bible, Jacob and his brother Esau began to wrestle with each other even before they were born. Their combat in the womb was so fierce that their mother, Rebekah, screamed to God, and at God, in agony.

As an adult, Jacob had an experience of profound transformation. He struggled mightily with a mysterious foe. The details are sketchy, but we learn that he spent a full night fighting with “a man” who then told him he has wrestled “with God and with men” and won. He is renamed Israel, the God-wrestler.

In the book Godwrestling, Waskow says he wrote his poem about wrestling as a young man grappling with sibling rivalry. And as an adult (who I believe is heterosexual), he began to see new dimensions to the wrestling match described in the Bible.

He says that a friend of his heard his poem and called it “the first gay Jewish poem – or at least the first that says God is gay.” The implication is that Jacob discovered a profound truth that night in an unexpected grip or toss, pinned to the muscular body of another man: there is both love and war in the pressing of flesh.

Waskow acknowledges the homoerotic reading but says that he was intending to say that within each person are all the polarities that have been conveniently assigned to men or to women, Same and Other.

To wrestle with God is to unify opposites in the same way that God unifies. We all contain love and anger, gentleness and toughness, and fear and guilt, the rabbi suggests. God is the force of reconciliation in the world. It’s not really that God is gay; rather, it’s that God is both gay and non-gay, and the force that moves us beyond seeing the world through duality.

Waskow is part of a non-denominational religious reform movement called Jewish Renewal. It is grounded in Judaism’s prophetic and mystical traditions and incorporates insights from a variety of 20th-century influences, especially those with a progressive political vision.

Many in this religious reform movement are also involved in social change movements such as gay rights and feminism. And yet, they believe that such movements have tended to downplay or even deny the spiritual dimension of life.

The reformers do not simply accept Jewish traditions uncritically, but they do not reject them either. They wrestle with them.

When gays fight with the Bible, we often get pinned under some mighty heavy burdens. For example, Leviticus 18 says, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman, it is to’evah [abomination].” And Leviticus 20 commands the death penalty for men who lie with men (as well as for a wide variety of persons, including those who curse their father or mother).

The Jewish Renewal perspective advocates creating the greatest possible amount of inclusion for gays and lesbians among different Jewish denominations, grounded upon divergent rationales. Orthodox Jews have a conservative, literalistic way of reading the Bible. However, even Orthodox communities can take significant steps toward welcoming gays based on their own principles.

Steve Greenberg, writing in Tikkun magazine (tikkun.org), notes that Orthodox Jewish rabbis have articulated two main arguments for changing traditional beliefs around homosexuality based on the principles of o’ness and tinok shenishbah.

The first argument basically says that homosexuality is an involuntary condition that creates psychological duress for which sexually active gays shouldn’t be harshly condemned. The second argument says that homosexuals have been seduced by Western permissive values and should therefore be treated with leniency.

Greenberg says these strategies may be able to slowly nudge Orthodox communities into offering greater hospitality for gay members. He also notes that gay people “cannot reasonably be required to internalize the claims that we are either mentally ill or victims of a debased social milieu.” Most gays must wrestle more deeply with the Bible than the Orthodox traditions are ready to allow.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, Ph.D. offers a radically inclusive vision for gays in Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation. For Lerner, God is not a big daddy or grand puppet master in the sky. For him, God is the force of healing and transformation in history.

Lerner does not assume, as the Orthodox do, that every word of Leviticus is the word of God. What demented, wrathful sort of God would not only condemn homosexuals, but demand that they be stoned to death? What sort of God would sanction treating women and children as chattle or tolerate slavery?

Lerner’s vision of Jewish Renewal holds that some of what is recorded in the Bible as the voice of God is actually the voice of human cruelty mistakenly attributed to God. Ultimately, people today are obligated to wrestle with the texts and separate the voice of healing and transformation from the voice of pain and distortion.

As rabbi Waskow says about God-wrestling, reading the Bible must be a synthesis of love making and war making. We must not merely try to understand what the book “really says” about homosexuality, but actively engage in a challenging process pointing all people toward God, the force that unifies all polarities.

When gays approach the Bible or other sacred books, we should do so the way wrestlers grapple with their foes. Becoming like the God that reconciles all opposites, we must turn a legacy of fear and hatred into the freedom of love.

---

Joe Perez is a Seattle-based writer who pens “Soulfully Gay,” a bi-weekly column that explores spirituality and religion from a gay man’s perspective. Contact him by e-mail at [email protected], and read more at joe-perez.com.

Jay Michaelson asks: "Am I Religious?"

In a fascinating essay for Zeek, Jay Michaelson explores the meaning of spirituality and religion in his life. Jay is the director of Nehirim, a spiritual initiative for GLBT Jews in New York. The essay's quite a mouthful, but it's worth every bite. Here's a small taste:

One group I admire, Q-Spirit, has developed ritual that they lead at gay circuit parties around the world. Their aim is not to make these parties spiritual; it is to invite the participants to see that what they are doing is already spiritual. Many gay dance clubs are re-enactments of ancient ecstatic rituals: the trance-inducing music and dance, the ingestion of somatic substances, the two-spirit people as shamans. All that’s missing is the heart, the spiritual intention.

I have two main concerns about the word “spiritual.” The first is that it, like “religious,” has been tainted by its associations – in this case, with cheesy, feel-good New Age stuff, and with an ultimately unethical lifestyle of spiritual hedonism. The second problem is deeper. For many people, being “spiritual” is about having a certain feeling. But the thing is, there is nothing to get, and no particular feeling to have. Being in love with God is like being in love with a person; sometimes its ecstasy, sometimes it’s laundry (paraphrasing Jack Kornfield here). And sometimes it’s intense pain and sadness. The question is not, how do I get away from the ugly or boring bits and into a cool “spiritual” vibe. But rather, how can I accept everything as what God is like right now. This acceptance does not mean “I accept everything as the will of God” or “God has a plan” or “There is no reason to change anything.” It means, just this – whatever is going on for you at this moment, reading, sitting, wondering, worrying: this is it.

Read the whole piece: "Am I 'Religious'?" at Zeek.