Wednesday, March 18, 2009

We Are All One Piece: The Three-Faceted Diamond

When we experienced our own oppression in our places of faith--churches, synagogues and mosques--where we could not be who we really were sexually and, therefore, spiritually, we left those institution in droves.  Some chose, and still choose, to stay and fight for the recognition of their wholeness as full human being in all their Queerness from within their painful religious structures.  These are courageous Queers of faith, those who stay in the spiritual and emotional bondage of unenlightened religion knowing that only their spiritual and physical presence will make institutionalized religion change.  There are certainly, however, Christian denominations that celebrate Queerness as God's gift to Creation.  The United Church of Christ is one of these, as are The Quakers.  Within Christianity and Judaism, there are pockets of liberation and justice ministry centered on total inclusivity particularly as it relates to Queers, churches and synagogues that don't just lovingly accepts us, but celebrate the gift that we are intrinsically as Queers.  They celebrate the consequent gifts that we bring to the ongoing spiritual lives of their communities.  They celebrate us with great celebration.  One of these is within the United Methodist denomination, a Protestant Christian denomination that is rabidly homophobic but which, much to their hierarchy's chagrin, has some communities of sanity and liberation--Broadway United Methodist Church in Chicago of which community I was a member for a number of years in my Christian incarnation, as well as all those churches in the Reconciling Ministries Network of that denomination. 

I am not a Methodist, I never could possibly be, but that community was so prophetic in its ministry and outreach that I had to sit in those pews and listen to their former pastor, the Rev. Gregory Dell.  He was selflessly committed to complete justice and nothing less for Queers. There are also pockets of liberation within the Presbyterian and Lutheran Churches as well as the Episcopal church, but they are, still, only pockets.  There is also The Metropolitan Community Church, which was founded by the Rev. Dr. Troy Perry specifically to provide a safe Christian worship space for Queers.  Within Judaism, we are celebrated in both the Reform and Reconstructionist traditions.  Within the Hindu tradition , much of the mythology of the gods and goddesses, particularly Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu, is particularly Queer.  Buddhism speaks of world justice and liberation for all of Creation and says nothing negative spiritually about Queers. Within the Muslim world there is no safety whatsoever.

It is unfortunate that for those of us who are equally courageous and did not stay in our original places of worship, who went into a spiritual desert leaving our own personal Egypts, we left our innate Queer spirituality behind in our lands of bondage.  Like the Children of Israel, we fled our own spiritual places of outright hatred and pain where we couldn't hear the Voice for which we searched and yearned.  We knew this was our birthright, and to our great loss, we left our innate Queer spiritualities behind in the pews.  We equated religion with spirituality even though often there is little if any connection, although sometimes there is.  And, because were never taught from were we come, what our spiritual legacy is, because we are consistently and consciously denied our powerful spiritual history in this world, we wandered spiritually alone in our deserts, the gift of Queer spirit left behind, something that not only connects us one to the other, but also connect us to all of life in all its forms.  Queer Spirit has a reverence for all of Creation, with which we are in relation and with which we are at peace.

Queer Spirit is nothing if it is not relational.  Queer Spirit is how we care for each other, how we treat people, most especially other Queers.  During the holocaust of the 1980's and 90's when we were all dying, Queer Spirit was powerfully alive in how we cared for each other.  What we learned back then was that wemust love ourselves first before we take it out into the larger world to be care-givers, teachers, peacemakers, prophets, and a people of non-violence, a compassionate peoples, a volunteering peoples, an altruistic peoples, a peoples of loving kindness and understanding, a peoples of both a soft voice and a loud-voice-screaming when oppression is near.  When universal peace is threatened or forgotten or, worse, purposefully denied or destroyed, our voice can be a roar.  

Remember that Jesus our great Queer brother and one of the teachers of the Way said, "There are only two commandments---love God and love your neighbor as yourself."  That means that loving God comes first, then yourself which is necessary in order to feel that love returned, and then to do the next which is to love neighbor, not the other around.  Jesus was very clear about that!!  For Queers, this is vital if we are to live outside of the shame and darkness of the closet. Loving ourselves in all our Queerness is Jesus' commandment to us.  No matter what our relationship to the Christian tradition, the esoteric words of Jesus are words of justice and right relationship, words to which we can look for understanding of our own stories.  They are words of humanity, not necessarily words of a church.

In a statement on the fifth anniversary of the Lhassa Uprising, His Holiness the Dalai Lama said, 

"I believe in justice and truth, without which there would be no basis for human hope."

Justice, truth, and hope are the essence of Queer Spirit.  These three keep us in right relationship with each other and with our own selves.  The Buddha said. 

"See yourselves in others,
Then whom can your hurt?
What harm can you do?

These are the words of justice and peace. These are the words of Queer Spirit.  

The great spiritual teacher Ramakrishna teaches us the same thing regarding the adoration of the Mother, the One whom we as Queers embody on Earth.  The first thing he teaches is to adore the Mother in all things, to let Her magnificence and love pour through you and flow out of you. The second is to adore each being as Her child, to honor the innate goodness in each individual, but not just people, honoring the innate goodness of the individual things She created in this world as well. The third is to adore the self as the Mother's own child, because it is She who birthed us as Queers in her non-dualistic image.  As Queers, we go back to a pre-Edenic time when there were no polarities, no dualities, as there are none in the Mother who contains all things and is all things and yet transcends all things, just like the Father.  We go back to a time before the creation myths split us and the world into two separate parts, a time before counted time, the time of the Mother of Us All.

As Queers, embodying both the divine masculine and divine feminine in all their fullness and yet transcending both, we are the Mother Incarnate in the world, and it is through this fact, this lived truth, that we as Queers have been called to heal the world, by bringing back into world consciousness the divine feminine, thus destroying the horrific work of the dark masculine in the world, by doing the work we have been given to do in a most humble way.  That is, to bring back the presence of the Mother through our embodiment as sexual beings who most easily embody both the divine masculine and divine feminine, a presence and consciousness necessary if the world is to survive.  If we are to create the Kingdom of God/dess on Earth, this embodiment is absolutely requisite.  Jesus was very clear about this in his teachings as well.  He knew the importance of the divine masculine and divine feminine and the need to embody both, which is exactly what we do as Queers.  This combination embodiment is our very being. In the Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic gospel that is not in the canon of Scripture but is extra-canonic, when asked by his disciples how to enter the kingdom of God, Jesus said:

"When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and
the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male
and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be
female..then you will enter the kingdom".

These are the Queer words of Jesus, words that tell us that who we are as sexual beings, Queer Sexual Beings.  These are also the teachings of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching and in the Sutras of Buddhism.  When we enter into consciousness of exactly who we are, we can create a world of peace, justice, and prosperity for all of Creation, not just for people, but our entire environment in which we live---all of Creation.  If we are to survive as a created world, as a planet, we must bring our message of Queer Spirit to the world at large.

Strength of Spirit cannot stand on its own in one individual.  It must be made manifest in community, in relationship.  It must be made manifest in understanding and compassion.  It must be made manifest in sexual expression that honors the Queer Spirit in each of us, a sexual expression that honors both body and spirit as the one thing they really are, rather than as separate dualistic entities that we, in our ignorance fostered by traditional Jewish and Christian theologies, somehow need to re-make connected.  In truth, the two have always been connected!!  They are part of our fullness of incarnation, of embodiment of the Mother and the Father, that fullness of who we really are in the larger scheme of things, our place in the Universe, in the larger Cosmos.

We are like magnificent three-faceted diamonds of body, mind, and spirit--all one piece--not three separate things that somehow we must learn to connect, as the New Ageists would have us believe, but, rather, we are one piece that cannot be separated.  Through that one three-faceted piece, the diamond light of Queer Spirit breaks into forth prismatic rainbows of color, the Rainbow that we are, illuminating the world with the sexuality and eroticism of Queer Body, the fecundity of Queer Mind, and the inextinguishable power of Queer Spirit--a sexual, erotic, fecund, inextinguishable Queer spirit.

1 comment:

  1. roger this would be great on tribe.....lol.......marc

    ReplyDelete