My Beautiful Life with Christ Yeshua (Part I)

When I was growing up, through a very natural process, I found that I very deeply loved two men in my life. One was my maternal grandfather. The other was Jesus.

My love for Jesus was not something that was particularly overt. I didn't go around, for example, as a little boy saying things like, “When I grow up me and Jesus are going to be married.” I knew little girls who said things like that. And it would have been totally legitimate for me to have said that too, if that was how I understood my love for Jesus. I would be exceedingly proud to admit I had those kinds of feelings of love for Jesus as a young boy, if that were the case. However, it wasn't like that for me. It wasn't that kind of love. Yet it was still a very real love that meant the world to me.

I became considerably more emotionally conscious of my love for Jesus when I was preparing for confirmation into the Roman Catholic Church. I knew of and was aware of Jesus before this, of course. It's just that in preparing for confirmation, Jesus became much more real for me, I suppose. During the confirmation classes we all had to take, Jesus became more of a human being for me. The stories about Jesus and his relationship with the apostle's made him much more real for me. I had always been aware of the God part of Jesus and while that part was OK, it was the human part of Jesus that I was introduced to more fully when I was preparing to get confirmed. It was that part that really jumped out and touched me. When I was preparing to get confirmed everything about the Christian faith became a little more real too.

After I was confirmed I felt a distinct warmth, a fire of sorts, develop inside my chest that also radiated throughout the rest of my body. I believed and knew this was because after my confirmation, I had taken Jesus into my heart.

Interestingly, I never, ever wanted to be an altar boy despite my deep and growing love for Jesus and an already strong sense of service that had, at that young age, been instilled in me by my community organizer and university professor grandfather.

There are two reasons why I didn't want to be an altar boy. The first reason was that I didn't feel I was worthy to be an altar boy. This sense of not being worthy was not driven by feelings in me of inferiority in all the various ways I could have definitely felt I was inferior even at that age, given the experiences I already had under my belt. No. It also wasn't driven by any conscious deficits in my self-esteem either. The best I can describe it is as a sort of childlike humility. I simply believed and felt that I needed to grow more in my love for Jesus and develop this relationship more deeply before I could put that relationship on public display in some way or another.

The other reason why I did not want to be an altar boy is that I did not want to share my love for Jesus with the other altar boys. I wanted it all to myself. I'm sure there was some selfishness that was an aspect of this. However, when I am able to really place myself, as best as I can, back into the consciousness I had at that time, again, it seems to have largely been motivated by this sense that I needed to deepen my relationship with Jesus more before I could put that relationship on public display. This, BTW, was also how I approached whatever romantic crushes I might have had at the time too. It was also how I even approached my friendships at the time as well. All these relationships had to be a little more certain, more developed before I wanted to place them on display. I believe a lack of confidence played into this in some important ways. And this lack of confidence itself was likely influenced by the fact that my biological father had exited my life and our family when I was very young. I never saw this man again while he was still walking the earth in a physical body and for many years, until I was a young adult, I did not find out why this was the case.

And then, when I was sixteen, something so immensely powerful happened to me that it would forever change and solidify my relationship with Jesus. It would also mark the first really definitive spiritual experience in my life. This experience is the one I now point to as being the one that in many ways initially changed my life forever.

At age sixteen I had the first powerful and memorable spiritual awakening/kensho/samadhi experience of my life that I am consciously aware of. This ended up being only the first of several such experiences I would end up having throughout my life. Each experience contained several of the standard elements many people in certain spiritual circles have now become very familiar with. These included an unexplainable experience that seemingly comes completely out of nowhere (now here), a total feeling of oneness with everything in the large and expanding cosmos, the complete disappearance of a sense of separation of any kind, including the disappearance of a sense of there being a separate “self.” There was also the sense of a oneness with everything and everyone, and a complete sense of inner and outer peace, loss of time, etc.

There was also an element of this event that involved Jesus and an intense connection to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that has never left me.

This experience had come about, on the physical level, as the result of simply looking out my bedroom window, in mid-winter, and noticing lightly falling snow reflecting off of a streetlight that was directly across the street from my bedroom window. One moment I was merely looking at the falling snow, appreciating and being mesmerized by the slightly iridescent flakes of snow falling and being illuminated by the light. The next moment I was having an overwhelming feeling that the entire universe was a place of unbounded love and that I was an integral part of that unbounded love.

At first I didn't think anything special had happened to me at all. And because this happened right around the time I was seriously beginning to accept myself as being gay—something I believed I could not share with many people—I also just naturally figured this experience was also something I wouldn't be able to share with anyone either. So I didn't share it with anyone for many years.

Over a short period of time and also rather quickly however, I became aware that something significant in some ways at least, had in fact happened to me. The main reason I knew this was because I suddenly became very obsessed with what was then my idea of God, as my sixteen year old self defined the idea and could understand it. I became obsessed with understanding what the concept of God really meant, what it was all about. A thirst for spiritual knowledge grew extremely strongly within me. Each day it seemed to grow exponentially more than the day before. I became a budding philosopher at this point as well. I began to pay attention to a great deal of phenomena in the world around me and strained to understand it and assign some meaning to it.

There was a Hare Krishna center and temple in Lexington, the city I grew up in, at this time. I went there multiple times after having what I then understood to be my weird, unexplainable, yet beautiful spiritual experience. I was very excited about what I saw and found there. I befriended a young man in his twenties there who was a Hare Krishna devotee. We spoke about spiritual ideas and concepts I had never heard nor spoken to anyone else about ever before. He gave me several of those hard cover colorful books written by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement. I collected several more of them some years later as well. I cherished those books because they were a tangible doorway for me entering into the consciousness of a totally different religion and one I found completely fascinating.

I became a serious and intense reader of books about all the world's wisdom traditions. Studying world religions and wisdom traditions became an extremely important aspect of my life when I was sixteen. It has continued just as strongly through all these decades as it was when it first entered my life. I am positive I bought my first Zen book during this time. I believe that book was Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. Since that book didn’t have all the pretty color photographs that the Hare Krishna books had, it got relatively little attention from me at the time. Sometime later it made a much bigger splash, shall we say.

Soon, since I was a practicing Roman Catholic, I concluded the entire incident that happened in my bedroom that snowy wintry night was to be completely understood through the prism of a calling to the Roman Catholic priesthood. However, this in no way interrupted my interest in world religions and wisdom traditions.

So at age sixteen I decided I was to become a catholic priest and was to completely and unflinchingly focus my energies on this. It was a firm, non-negotiable conviction. It was the first really firm decision I made completely on my own with absolutely no input from anyone else. And so I spent the next several years of my life pursuing this objective. Ultimately that pursuit didn't work out the way I thought it would.

At first, my plans of becoming a catholic priest failing to materialize completely and absolutely bewildered me. I entered a serious and prolonged period of a Dark Night of the Soul as a result. I was certain this was what I had come into this body to do yet now that was gone. Poof. It was as if my entire reason for being, for existing, was now gone as well. It was a dark, lonely, and very confusing time.

Eventually, from the purely human part of me, I saw this experience as my being faithful to the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church not being faithful to me. Even though my departure from priestly studies had nothing to do with my being gay, I was aware that this was always going to be an issue for me and for this church as well. I knew it was ultimately going to be an issue for me to be an official representative of a church that officially did not value me as a true and complete part of the body of Christ.

During my several years studying for the catholic priesthood I had met nuns, brothers, priests, and even bishops who were gay. I spoke with many of these people about how they dealt with having to hide this extremely important part of who they were from the church cabal of various officials and such, and both their superiors (in many cases) and the people they served (in many cases). Their answers were never satisfying to me. However, I genuinely and deeply loved Jesus and my vocation to the priesthood and my church (to an ever decreasing degree) enough that I always simply placed this outrageously glaring problem on the back burner.

At first, when I left study for the priesthood, I remained an extremely involved and relatively devout member of the church. When Pope John Paul II made his 1987 visit to the US, the diocese I was living in at the time decided to send ten individuals to New Orleans for the event and for a semi-private audience with him—all expenses paid. I was selected as one of these ten people from the diocese. It was an enormous honor.

I never told anyone that by that time I had already developed an intense dislike for John Paul II. This dislike for this man remained throughout his papacy. Still, this trip was an amazing one. It was soon enough after the time I had left formal study for the priesthood that when I got to New Orleans I immediately began to run into seminarians, priests, nuns, and even a few monastics I had known during my study. It was amazing to see them. Plus, the event itself sort of took on a life of its own.

There was a major event at the Superdome filled, and I do mean filled, with ecstatic and deeply devout Catholics. Even though I did not fit into that description at all at that point, I was swept up into the energy of it all just as strongly. I too found myself vigorously waving the yellow and white flag (the colors of the papacy) I had bought and screaming at the absolute top of my lungs, “Viva il Papa! Viva il Papa! (Long live the pope in Italian) just like everyone else.

It was crazy really, in some ways. I had never been a papist by any stretch of the imagination even though I had really liked John Paul I, JP II’s predecessor. I had so many mixed emotions about the whole thing. I distinctly remember one moment while being enthralled and being totally engaged in all of this while also being somewhat disgusted by it all, ceasing my flag waving, quieting down my shouting and thinking to myself , What the hell is wrong with you girl! Have you completely lost your mind! 

In those few seconds, when I was able to remove myself, just a little bit, from it all, everything seemed to go silent and also go into slow motion. I stood there looking at the throng of people all around me, observing their sheer excitement, drinking in the whole essence of everything going on there in the Superdome, most of which somehow made me feel isolated and alone and a little bit sick to my stomach even. And at that moment, in the middle of all the apparent overwrought emotion, superficiality, both obnoxious and perhaps even genuine piety, I also strongly felt the unmistakable presence of God. It was gentle. It was loving. It was pure. And I also felt the loving presence of Yeshua, in a manifestation within the context of housing the sacred heart of Jesus. And a voice spoke to me during this time—a voice I did not recognize. It repeated the words I knew from a song written by one of the Saint Louis Jesuits that I had sung many times in the seminary although the lyrics now came to me in a voice I had never heard before. The song was, “Be not Afraid.” Plus, the words were not being sung now, as I was used to hearing them. Instead, they were coming to me in something like spoken words of poetry. The words were:  

You shall cross the barren desert but you shall not die of thirst. You shall wander far in safety though you do not know the way. You shall speak your words to foreign men and they will understand. You shall see the face of God and live.

Be not afraid. I go before you always. Come, follow me, and I will give you rest.

If you pass through raging waters in the sea you shall not drown. If you walk amid the burning flames you shall not be harmed. If you stand before the power of hell and death is at your side, know that I am with you through it all.

And I felt completely at peace. And I resumed waving my yellow and white flag. And I resumed shouting, Viva il Papa! Viva il Papa!

 Black Jesus art by Frank Hazen

To Be Continued...