My Beautiful Life with Christ Yeshua, Part IV

I want to tell you a story.

It is a story I, when being completely honest with myself, am quite reluctant to tell. It places some people (who are never personally named) in what might be viewed as a negative light and that aspect makes me feel reticent, slightly uncomfortable, and also sad. Yet it also feels like a story I must tell now, during this season of Lent, when I have been spending the last several weeks since Ash Wednesday largely in a state of penance, repentance, self-denial, being in the desert with Yeshua, fasting, being brutally honest with myself, facing various demons, and ultimately preparing for ecstatic union with the everlasting Yeshua on Holy Saturday.

About a year and a half ago, at the age of fifty-four, I had what is turning out to be one of the most interesting and multifaceted experiences I can ever remember having in this life.

At that time, I was a member of a spiritual community in The San Francisco Bay Area of California. I was also in something of a temporary leadership role within this community. I loved this community very deeply and considered it to be my primary communal and spiritual home on planet earth. This leadership role I had came with certain privileges and powers which is usually the case with leadership roles, in general. The people in the community also had certain forms and expressions of privilege and power that were also afforded them as well. These however, were never talked about, or they were consciously or unconsciously disowned, or perhaps they were even outright denied by some or many. None of that however, made the privileges and real power the rank and file members of the community had, any less real.

At some point—a point that is not exactly clear to me—several months after I assumed the leadership role in this community, there began to be murmurings of complaints and dissatisfaction connected to some of the ways I managed some of my leadership responsibilities. There also was, as it turns out, a fair amount of unchecked projection and psychoanalysis of me engaged in by some, using what I imagined they believed were their natural deductive powers around trying to figure out why my performance as leader of the community had been less than sparkling. People chose projection and psychoanalysis instead of having a simple conversation with me. None of the complaints were directly checked out or discussed with me personally. No one sought me out to find out if there was possibly anything going on in my life that might have potentially contributed to the perceptions that fueled the complaints in some way, even though many members of the community knew that I, at the time, was homeless, had been for several months, and was living in my vehicle with my partner and our two dogs and they also presumably also knew of all the potential trauma and danger that can very naturally ensue during such a life experience and situation, especially in a large urban environment, which indeed we were in.  

I was not given an opportunity to address the concerns some people had put forth until many weeks had passed and many other processes and conversations had occurred between various other people directly and indirectly involved in the whole affair. So initially, nothing was said to me directly about any of this that was occurring within this community.  All of it, for weeks, which was completely about my performance as the leader of this community, was discussed within clandestine and semi-clandestine channels and thoroughfares within this community minus the very specific involvement of the person who was being spoken about—me.

Instead, all of the communication about all of this took place through gossip, other clandestine forms and avenues of communication, conjecture, also presumably through private phone calls and exchanged emails between people, and ultimately through a series of letters that were composed by the most ardently offended party’s.

Once again, these letters were meant to be kept clandestine, meaning I was not supposed to see them. However, through an innocent error by one of the members of this community who received the letters via email, the letters were mistakenly forwarded to me in a group email that was sent to me as well as to all the members of what is something of a coordinating or oversight committee of this particular spiritual community.

It however, became immediately very clear that I was not supposed to have seen nor received the email that contained the letters. This became evident when, during an open and quasi side conversation that was held in my presence, during a meeting between the members of that above mentioned oversight committee and myself about whether the letters should be placed on the agenda for the meeting we were all, at the time engaged in. This side conversation was meant to be one, I suppose, in which I was simply either not supposed to know what was being discussed in front of me or I perhaps presumably was not supposed to be intrigued enough to inquire about what was being discussed in front of me, since you must remember, I wasn't supposed to know about the letters. However, because I had erroneously been emailed the letters too, I calmly announced that I too in fact had also received the letters, had read every single word of them, and so indeed had knowledge about what was being discussed in my presence even though I had no opinion about whether or not a further discussion of the letters should be added to the meeting’s agenda. It was the very first time, during this series of events, that I received something directly about the complaints certain people had about my work and it was perceived as a mistake that I had received this information directly. I was not supposed to have gotten the information I had received. That is very telling, ironic, sad, and important to me.

The “deer caught in the headlights” looks on everyone’s faces in the room once I let it be known that I too had received the emailed letters immediately let me know that I was not supposed to have seen those letters. So, with this error, the cat was now out of the bag, as it were. We also ended up not discussing the content of the letters any further on that particular day, at least not in my presence.

The rest of the process that ensued henceforth, from my perspective, for the next several weeks, was essentially a series of poor choices, horrid missteps, more semi-clandestine meetings and discussions, inconsiderate and insensitive actions taken on the parts of many people involved, and my being (in my opinion) inappropriately kept in the dark about everything that was being said and done about it all—until several weeks later still, when I was ceremoniously (because it took place during a ceremony of sorts) relieved of my leadership role in this spiritual community without ever truly nor seriously being given an opportunity to address the complaints directly in any way whatsoever, until decisions and beds, as it were, had already been completely and very efficiently made.

Oh well, no one ever promised me a rose garden of a life.

I quite soon afterwards was very happy and very content with no longer being in a leadership role in this spiritual community. And I am also glad that many years earlier, and on more than one occasion, I had already become keenly aware of just how insensitive, thoughtless, and even cruel spiritual communities could be. So thankfully I did not have to add shock and total disillusionment to the vast number of emotions I experienced as a result of this whole (to me) horrible experience.

Breathe in, breathe out.
Breathe in and, breathe out some more.

Three months after experiencing all of this with this spiritual community I left both the city and the State this all occurred in, feeling a near complete revulsion rooted deep in my stomach towards this specific spiritual community I once viewed as my loving spiritual home, and feeling a deep compulsion to leave that specific city as well, which, for completely unrelated reasons, had also become clear was never going to truly be a “home” for me in the deepest sense of that word.

I went through a long and deep period of anger, rage, a poignant sense of reliving past trauma, and a concentrated process of healing intersected with a very intense process of The Dark Night of the Soul, afterwards. The sense of reliving trauma was the result of specific trauma I experienced in my childhood—trauma I believed I had all but completely healed from—that was deeply triggered by the whole experience.

Fairly soon after all of this with this spiritual community, I began to once again strongly question, reassess, and then reject some of the intellectual and experiential foundations I saw as being very present in that specific spiritual community itself. The community was very progressive and leftist leaning both politically and socially. It was comprised of many progressive social justice activists. It was comprised of many critical race theorists both academically trained and not, etc.I began to reject some of the foundational tenets of all of this.

At the very beginning of this process I was likely being somewhat motivated by a desire to distance myself from certain elements I found to be very present in that specific spiritual community. However, to the untrained eye, this is what it might have completely looked like what was going on for me—my going through a type of strong and negativity based emotional reactivity born from my experience of anger, betrayal, and resentment inside of me that was directly aimed at this spiritual community.

In truth however, that was only a partial truth. I have also been on a near lifelong collision course with leftist and progressive politics and political activism even while for most of that same life I have simultaneously and strongly aligned myself with such as well. So while it may have looked like the experience I had with this spiritual community birthed a rejection of values that were/are strongly expressed in that spiritual community--a rejection rooted in my own emotional and overwrought reactivity--the reality is that the experience I had with this spiritual community mostly served as perhaps the “straw that broke the camel’s back” in a several decades long deeply felt frustration and periodic distancing of myself from these same intellectual, social, and activist based communities and ways of understanding the universe. What however, is also likely true, is that my experience with this spiritual community is probably the strongest and likely deadliest blow that has or will ever be dealt to my relationship to leftist and progressive politics and political action. Through this experience with this spiritual community the courage to become extremely strong in my own truth about many things began to emerge and flower, beautifully.

On one level it was a very horrible time in my life. However, I always knew that “this too shall pass.” I always knew this without any doubt whatsoever. I simply didn’t know just how incredibly beautiful and life changing the next stages in the process would be. This in fact is the primary reason I am writing about this now and why I will probably continue to write about this whole episode for some time to come—because of the incredible healing and transformation that has come about as a result of experiencing something I initially held and experienced as being a very ugly and negative life experience that then slowly and then very rapidly began to morph into something of stunning beauty. I want people to know how deeply something experienced initially as negative can be transformed into something extremely positive and even how it can become a positive foundation for discovering one's true life's purpose. I want people to know about this possibility. Like so many people before me and like I also know there will be so many people after me—experiencing something like this that was experienced as so terribly awful became the very exact fertile ground for self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others, reconciliation (without reunion however), a powerful re-birthing experience, and the experience of Yeshua bursting through my brokenness and my weariness and a beautiful, love centered, mystical union between us taking place in the process.

You see, I believe the pain, the sense of betrayal, the sense of grief and loss, the experience of anger and rage that were all manifested within my experience of this episode with this spiritual community, all served as the preface to the opening of a cosmic door. I believe this experience became the opening of a door through which Christ Yeshua would eventually enter. I am filled with gratitude for it all, the entire experience, all of it. Thank you. Alleluia! Exhale...

To Be Continued...

The Loving Kindness Revolution

My Beautiful Life with Yeshua, Part III