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| By Jean Latz Griffin
The most powerful place from which to renew the face of the earth is
from the bottom of the heap.
For Ronald Chaplin, the realization that God loved him, gay and all,
came when he was a senior in college and about to end his life.
Chaplin had been more involved in church activities than most teenagers, to the point of being chosen to be an elder in his church in Belleville, Ontario, at 17. So it was especially painful for him to hear the church he loved teach that being gay was the result of turning one's back on God. Throughout high school, Chaplin says, he pushed his sexuality "as far back as it would go." When he became sexually active in college -- first with a woman, and then with a man -- he knew for sure he was gay. The near suicide at 22 came from his inability to reconcile his love of God with constant messages that some of his deepest feelings were sinful. "The most horrid stuff came out of the church," Chaplin said. When his first romantic relationship with a man ended, he became so depressed that he barely got out of bed for six weeks. He hit bottom. He prepared to die. And then, what he calls "a very visceral experience of God's grace" gave him a reason to keep going. Ready for the Presence of the Divine "When I was ready, when the vial of pills and the water were there, it was the first time I truly felt the presence of God," Chaplin said. "It wasn't that I saw a face or heard any words. But I had the very strong sense that God was saying, 'Be still, my child. I am with you always. Live and love the way I have created you.'" From that time on, he hid nothing. In his jobs, which included being an aide to a member of parliament and a lobbyist for Canadian Petroleum, he was out -- no imaginary girlfriends or lost weekends. When AIDS forced him to stop working four years ago, Chaplin's passion to help his community became his full-time job. He serves on two Anglican diocesan committees that minister to gays, lesbians and people with AIDS. When his home parish of St. John the Evangelist in Ottawa celebrated Pride Day for the first time two years ago, Chaplin was invited to preach the homily. "I talked about having no more dirty little secrets, about the need to live in the light," said Chaplin, 47. "We know what happens in the shadows. That is where things get twisted, and that is where the hurt and abuse happens. Getting that message through in the church, however, is quite a challenge. They want to push us back into the closet." Reconciling Sex and Spirit For gay men and lesbians, reconciling sex and spirit is seldom easy. The more adamant one's childhood religion is that attraction to members of the same sex is wrong, the more likely it is that emotional and psychological problems will occur. Starting in late childhood or in adolescence, the dissonance between what gay people have been taught is morally right and what they perceive themselves to be can cause them can hate themselves and to be angry with, hate and fear God. Many shut down the spiritual side of their lives in frustration. Self-hatred can lead to self-destructive behaviors. Clergy in particular feel the pain of living a lie when their churches refuse to let them be openly gay and remain ordained. But the way out of the morass, say spiritual teachers and therapists who are gay or work with gay people, is not to try to conform to the norms of non-gay society. For both spiritual maturity and psychological health, gays and lesbians do best when they accept and love their differentness, "embrace the exile," it may cause them, and build from there. And that is what has been happening for the past 30 years, as gays have developed their own spiritual communities by reshaping existing religions to reflect their own realities or creating new communies from scratch. New Spiritualities
These new spirtualities, whether a Catholic Dignity group, a
Wiccan circle or a Radical Faeries gathering, celebrate diversity rather
than conformity and are most often based on knowing God through personal
experience rather than from outside religious authority.
By replacing the negative messages of their childhood religion, lesbigay people reclaim the spiritual dimension of their lives and reintegrate it into a mature personality. Many find it easier to do this in a newreligion. Buddhism and women's spirituality have become adult religions of choice for many gays and lesbians for this reason. When spirituality does begin to flourish, therapists and spiritual leaders say gays may have a head start on straights because the "exile" forced on them as a minority can provide ample practice for breaking their attachments to this world--a necessary step in achieving union with God. Where Do We Find Meaning? "We all struggle for meaning, and as gays and lesbians, our meaning is not derived from social conformity," said Bruce Koff, a Chicago psychotherapist who is gay. "Because of that, I see a great fervor among gay men and lesbians for spirituality that celebrates diversity. As a therapist, my job is to encourage my clients to acknowledge that there is a spiritual component to their lives that they have to address, even if it is not found in the religion they were raised in." Author of The Church and the Homosexual John McNeill, 74, a ground-breaking gay therapist whose 1976 book, "The Church and the Homosexual," uses key scriptural passage to argue that the Bible does not condemn homosexuality, sums up the relationship between homophobic churches and the mental health of gays and lesbians neatly: "Bad theology produces bad psychology." McNeill was kicked out of the Jesuits and stripped of his right to practice his priesthood in 1987 for refusing a Vatican order to abandon his ministry to his fellow gays.
One of the cofounders of the Dignitychapter in New York City, McNeill
gives retreats and workshops aroundthe country, and has written "Taking a Chance
on God," and "Freedom, Glorious Freedom," which complete a trilogy of books
developing the theme of gay spirituality.
"As children, we take in our moral judgments from our parents, our church and our culture, and all three sources have been and still are homophobic," McNeill said. "If we can't love ourselves, we can't love others. And if we can't love others, we can't love God." Unhappiness: Being a Hypocrite and a Fake To develop a healthy psychology and mature spirituality, McNeill says, gays and lesbians must recognize, repudiate and replace the bad theology. He likens the psychological stages gay people go through in this process to those psychiatrist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross has described as the way people come to terms with death. "First is denial," McNeill said. "We try to pretend we are heterosexual. We date, get married. Next comes compromise. We try to be heterosexual at work and home, but have our homosexual weekends on Fire Island. We think we can live both lives. And the result is usually fundamental unhappiness, a feeling of being a hypocrite and a fake. Then we get to the stage of enormous anger, including anger at God. We feel that if God created us this way, then God is sadistic." But it is too frightening for people to believe an all-powerful God could be evil, McNeill said. So, much like children who take the blame for being abused by their parents, gays turn their anger against themselves or against each other. This can lead to cynicism and despair. It can lead to self-destructive behaviors, such as drug abuse or abusive sex, or to "vicious, cruel relationships with each other," McNeill said. Achieving Strength: a Connection with God To achieve psychological health and a mature spirituality, McNeill argues, gay people need to accept themselves as gay and come to terms with the fact that they may never be accepted or understood by non-gay society. And to use that exile status as a source of great strength and connection with God. McNeill points to John Fortunato's classic work, "Embracing the Exile," as the foundation of many of his own teachings on the role of alienation in gay spirituality. Fortunato explores many of the same themes in "AIDS, the Spiritual Dilemma." From the Bottom of the Heap "The most powerful place from which to renew the face of the earth is from the bottom of the heap," Fortunato wrote, after telling the story of a guilt-ridden fellow parishioner who on her deathbed told her family that it was the courage and caring of Fortunato and his lover that had helped her realize she was fit to be a Christian. "We are all in one way or another, in exile," Fortunato writes, because we are still on earth and not in union with God. But those who are isolated from most of society, whether they are gay, a racial minority or handicapped, can see this more clearly. They should drink "deeply from the cup (they) have been passed as an oppressed people, seeing it as an opportunity for profound spiritual deepening and for being empowered to do some very holy work in an especially potent way." McNeill says this use of a powerful exile status can help gay people to achieve a mature spirituality that comes from within. "If gay people complete the mourning process, they will have completed the process of detaching from the world that most people do not have to go through until they approach death," McNeill said. "Our spiritual life is meant to become less dependent on external voices and more attuned to what God says to us in our lives. For gay people, that means putting aside all the external spiritual voices that were translated by homophobes. We must hear the voice of God speaking deeply in our experiences and understand that God loves us in our gayness and in our gay relationships." A Gay United Methodist Minister Who Does Not Want his Name Used A 41-year-old gay United Methodist minister who does not want his name used is taking a sabbatical to create the time and space to work through the next stage in his spiritual journey. He is tired of hiding. A phone call to his parents on Mothers Day a few years ago outed him to his family long before he was ready. He has been called before his bishop to respond to anonymous rumors that he is gay, and remembers thinking at the time, "This is it." He confronted a fundamentalist minister who picketed a funeral he was about to perform for a man who had died of AIDS--but choked back acknowledgement that he too was gay. "There is so much negativity, and I suffocate in it," the minister said. "When I am ready to come out, I want it to be a positive, spiritual rite of passage. But that is so difficult when what you think of as gay is that terrible man who called my parents." The first step in his sabbatical was a class on homosexuality and spirituality. It was the first time the minister had heard of the possibility of gay-positive interpretations of scripture, and he said he had to "stop and catch his breath" as the class matter-of-factly discussed the possibility that Mary and Martha may have been in a lesbian relationship and debated whether the "disciple Jesus loved," may have been gay. "I believe it as much as I can, that gay, lesbian and bisexual people are not just something to be put up with," the minister said, "but people with unique spiritual gifts." Those gifts include developing relationships based on equality between partners rather than domination of men over women, a celebration of diversity as a gift of God, the ability to be in touch with both one's masculine and feminine sides, and the rediscovery of the feminine dimension of spirituality, according to McNeill. For the First Time
"You get three meals a day, a place to sleep, and can walk around in the exercise yard. But you are still in prison. The church has forced those of us who are gay and ordained to live a lie. The fear I live with all the time is that all it takes is one person to decide I'm their crusade, and it's all over." The anger many gay men, lesbians and bisexuals feel against organized religion is so strong that in a health district in rural Washington state not one person with AIDS would agree to participate in planning a World AIDS Day celebration if any part of it were held in a church. "They knew no one would come if it was in a church," said Rocci Hildum, a heterosexual case manager at the Chelan/Douglas County Health District in Wenatchee who is in charge of the annual event. "None of my clients go to church." Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches When gay men and lesbians do go to a place of worship, it is most likely one of the separate spiritual communities that have formed over the past 30 years.
The clergy who officiate at the services are either themselves gay or are gay-supportive. The congregations often meet in rented space. They develop inclusive liturgies in a small, homelike settings, with ceremonies crafted to reflect gay and lesbian realities. "These communities become the way gay people can have their spiritual component back on their own terms," Koff said. "It can be a reintegrating experience in which all the parts of one's life, especially being gay and being spiritual, can exist together." Or Chadash Koff is a member of Or Chadash, which has been holding Jewish services for gays and lesbians for 22 years. Most of that time, the group has met at a Unitarian Universalist Church on the north side of Chicago. On a recent Friday evening, Shabbat candles were lit by men as well as women, prayers were chanted by women as well as men, and a kosher pot luck supper was cooked, served and enjoyed by about two dozen people, from college students to gray beards. For 12 years, before the congregation hired a rabbi, Koff chanted a special prayer called Kol Nidre at High Holy Day services at Or Chadash, an experience he said was a crucial part of reintegrating his Jewish spirituality with being gay. "My lover and I would invite my family to our home, we would walk over to Or Chadash, and I would chant," Koff said. "It was a wonderful way of reestablishing myself as a son and brother." In many urban areas, mainstream congregations are trying to open their doors to gays and lesbians. But, while happy for the acceptance, some say they prefer their own communities. "This is really the only place to get the full gay or lesbian Jewish experience," said Norman Sandfield, 51, who has been a member of Or Chadash for 18 years and is a past president of the World Conference of Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Jews. "If you want to be comfortable kissing your boyfriend after the service, this is where you have to be." The diversity celebrated by gays and lesbians often extends beyond sexual orientation. At a recent Sunday service at the Good Shepherd Metropolitan Community Church in Chicago, Deacon Ninure Saunders, an African American lesbian in a mostly white, male congregation, wrote and read the key words of the communion part of the service. Ninure said she has tried Buddhism, Native American religion, Black Muslims and voodoo, and was ordained in a Pentecostal Church before joining Good Shepherd. "I wanted to go to church where my gayness wasn't an issue," Saunders said. "We have something unique here. It is the inclusivity. Ken is blind, but he reads scripture. We have the service signed every time, even if no one is here who is deaf. It is part of being open to everyone." A Mass Said for Catholic Dignity in a Presbyterian Church In Denver, when the Catholic Dignity chapter there celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1997, the mass was held in a Presbyterian church with a rainbow gay pride flag flying outside. Dignity chapters have been banned from Catholic church property since 1988 because the organization does not believe gays and lesbians must remain celibate. The music was sophisticated, with four-part harmony, a flute, piano and guitar. The communion bread was home-baked. Both alcoholic and nonalcoholic altar wine was offered. The congregation included crying babies, women holding hands, visiting Protestant ministers and men wearing rainbow stoles, shorts, black boots and earrings. At the consecration, when Catholics believe the bread and wine becomes the body and blood of Christ, the entire congregation surrounded the altar and joined in reciting some of the prayers usually said only by the priest. And during his sermon, McNeill spoke openly about his long-term relationship with his partner, Charles Chiarelli, who sat in the front row of the congregation, and used gay images to describe his view of humanity's relationship with God. "Your intimacy with your family and friends and lovers is a foretaste of union with God, just as my love for Charlie and his for me--we've been together for 32 years--is a foretaste of God's love," McNeill said. "God waits for our friendship. I like to think of Jesus in a gay bar, waiting for your approach. He is totally available. He doesn't have an attitude, and put us down if we don't fit a certain type. He loved us first and will always respond to our approach with a gift of love." Buddhism
Stephen Mo Hanan is a good example of someone who switched religions to
find peace and to integrate his sexual orientation with his
spirituality. Raised in a strong Jewish family, Mo Hanan always lights
Hanukkah candles and never misses a Seder meal at Passover. He says he
cherishes Jewish values of learning, social justice and reverence for
life, and is thankful for the "rich vein of soul that was mined by my
family's religious practices."
But, he says, "orthodox Judaism was a very uncongenial environment for a queer boy to grow up in." He discovered he was gay at 13, in the summer that followed his Bar Mitzvah, and repressed his sexual orientation for a decade. "You can't expect a person to grow up with a sense of shame and disgust for what they are, and then ask them to cleave to any kind of a Deity that is life-affirming," said Mo Hanan, an actor and director in New York City. "It becomes a great psychic war. Religion forced me to split off my sexuality from the rest of my being. Part of me was going towards God despite this shameful secret. It was an enormous psychological burden." Mo Hanan started exploring Buddhism in the early 1970s and was immediately attracted to its relative lack of dogma compared to Judaism or Christianity. "The advantage of such a path to a gay person is obvious," Mo Hanan said. "Be yourself. Who you are in the freedom of your soul is absolutely precious to God. Buddhism spells out the instructions to reach a state of inner peace very clearly. Buddhism doesn't teach that you have to subscribe to a belief system to be saved. Enlightenment is not attained, but reached as you make discoveries about your inherent nature, which arises from the ground of being." To Mo Hanan, that means that since all nature arises from this core ground of being, his sexual orientation also arises from it, and "is not in conflict with any other natural force, is not in a hostile universe, and is not in opposition to any spiritual reality." Mo Hanan doesn't belong to any Buddhist group, but meditates and practices mindfulness and humor throughout the day. He is also part of the Radical Faeries, a mostly gay male group founded in 1979 that gathers to create sacred space, sing, dance, feast and revive the traditions of gay shamanism. "Buddhism has helped me find peace within myself and reconcile my sexuality and spirituality," Mo Hanan said. "The psychic wounds are very deep, and there are always places to scrape, but they are nearly completely healed. Buddhism has given me a great sense of resolution." Unlike most Judeo-Christian traditions, Buddhism doesn't ostracize gay men and lesbians, says Jose Ignacio Cabezon, a professor of philosophy at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver and former Buddhist monk. But questions over the meaning of ancient texts that forbid oral and anal sex have concerned Buddhists enough that a San Francisco group met in 1997 with the Dalai Lama. Cabezon, who is gay, was part of that meeting and said he was encouraged that the Tibetan Buddhist leader encouraged discussion of whether the prohibitions, which include where, when and with whom one may have sex, as well as which body parts may be used, are relevant to modern life. One prohibition, for examples, forbids sex on rough ground or near temples. What the Dalai Lama Said "This opens the way for a new interpretation of scripture and the possibility that gay relationships can be not only permitted, but can be considered a source of growth," Cabezon said. "The Dalai Lama has come out publicly for full human rights for homosexual persons. But he made it clear that, unlike the Pope, he cannot give a pronouncement or decide what is right or wrong. The way this has to work is through consensus as we educate ourselves and talk with members of other Buddhist sects on what is appropriate." At the meeting, the Dalai Lama read from relevant scriptures, including one that says use of any organ other than the vagina for sexual intercourse is sexual misconduct, according to minutes published by the Maitri Dorje Gay and Lesbian Buddhist Society in New York City on its website. But he made a distinction between acts that are naturally unethical, such as killing, and acts which are not naturally unethical, such as those considered sexual misconduct. And he reiterated that "it is wrong for society to reject people on the basis of their sexual orientation." Cabezon asked the Dalai Lama how it was fair that Buddhist scriptures said it was all right for a man to have sex up to five times a night with his wife, but wrong for a man to have sex with another man even once in his lifetime. "He laughed and told me I had a point," said Cabezon, who was born in Cuba and raised a Christian in Boston, but became a Buddhist when he was 19 years old. He traveled to India and was a monk for ten years. He has a doctorate in Buddhist studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. ZEN
Rev. Pat Enkyo O'Hara, 55, raised Catholic, is now a Zen Buddhist
priest. She is a mentor to Maitri Dorje, and leads a mixed gay, lesbian
and straight meditation group at the Village Zendo in New York City.
Most of the members have Christian or Jewish roots and left their home
religion because they felt "marginalized and oppressed," O'Hara said.
"Many of us went looking in drugs or sex to connect with something more universal, and somehow found our way to the Buddhist tradition," O'Hara said. "The form imported here doesn't have any injunctions about your sexuality. What I see in our group is a wonderful thirst for the universal and the spiritual in an area where there is no stigma." O'Hara said when the group talks about the Buddhist precepts regarding sexual behavior, "there is a tremendous amount of guilt." "The precept is really saying, 'Don't be greedy and act in an irresponsible way.' But to someone who has grown up in a tradition that considers the body, and especially the homosexual body, an enemy, the precept brings up all kinds of fears," said O'Hara, who is a professor of interactive media in the film school of New York University. "We allow those thoughts to come up and be present. But adhering to the letter of an old text would be a fundamentalistic approach. You have to go with the spirit of the text." Wiccan Spirituality: Earth Based Religion Many lesbians have found a refuge from the ostracism and powerlessness they felt in their childhood religions in women's spirituality, earth-based religions, Goddess worship and witchcraft, also called Wiccan. "I felt eclipsed, unseen, invisible in Christianity," said Lisa Marshall Bashert, 39, a lesbian who was raised Catholic but now practices Dianic (women-only) witchcraft. "Mary and the female saints were the only aspect of God that I felt close to. But they weren't God, they were helpmates. I needed an image of the divine that included me." Besides the identification with a female deity, the Wiccan belief in self-empowerment attracts lesbians, said Bashert, an information manager at an adolescent health clinic who lives in Ypsilanti, Mich. "The craft is an immanent religion, with power within oneself, rather than a transcendent religion, with the power outside oneself," Bashert said. "Lesbians are very aware of the dynamics that deny women access to power." The Common Thread The common thread running through the spiritual communities that gay men and lesbians create for themselves is an acceptance and even celebration of diversity, along with a focus on listening to God speaking within, rather than religious authority speaking from without. "The power of any sort of spirituality that values the difference of being gay is tremenous," Koff said. "Also powerful are religious that are based in earth and nature, that embrace both male and female, and that see sex and sexuality as a spiritual experience between two people. Gays and lesbians who find those kinds of spiritual communities have very strong feelings about them because they give them a way to reclaim the disintegrated parts of their personality." "The experience of having to chose between authentic self and social acceptance inevitably places queer people on the edge," said Susana Carryer, 27, a masters degree student in theology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. "As queer people, we are brought to awareness of our isolation in a way that 'mainstream' dwellers are not," Carryer said. "What makes this parallel particularly strong for queer people is the centrality and intimacy involved in both sexuality and spirituality. They are the places where we are most vulnerable, but also where ecstacy is most accessible." Sonja Craven, 54, a Denver lesbian who is studying to be ordained in the Metropolitan Community Church, felt there was no place for her in religion for 15 years. "Finally, my hunger for God outdid my need for sexual relationships," Craven said. "I was ready to give it all up if that is what I had to do to have God." Prepared to lead a celibate life, Craven went to a MCC service. But she had the same kind of experience that Ron Chaplin had when he was close to suicide. "I looked at the pastor, who was gay, and he had such joy in his smile and radiated so much love, that It hit me. 'God loves this man.' And then I realized, 'This man loves God.' And for the first time, God and my sexuality came together, and I knew that God loved me as a lesbian. I turned my life over to Jesus, and he kept sending me women." Jean Latz Griffin is a free lance writer and former reporter for the Chicago Tribune who has written extensively about gay and lesbian issues. |
UFMCC Founder the Rev. Troy Perry 
© 1997-99 BEI