My Beautiful Life with Christ Yeshua, Part II

After my experience at the Superdome during the 1987 visit of John Paul II to the USA, I was reaffirmed in my being able to have a very meaningful relationship with Yeshua (Jesus) that could exist quite substantially and quite exquisitely outside the strictures of organizational religious structures.

Earlier in that same year I had taken up a Buddhist practice, in the Vajrayana tradition—The Shambhala expression as envisioned by ChögyamTrungpa Rinpoche, to be more exact. And I also still saw myself as being a very strong and rather devout member of The Holy Roman Catholic Church as well. I saw nor experienced no conflict between my new Buddhist practice and my Christian/Catholic faith. I experienced them as two buckets dipping from the same deep, plentiful, and nourishing well.

In the ensuing years however, I saw two distinct movements occurring in my spiritual life.

On the one hand I underwent what felt like a natural and copacetic movement away from The Catholic Church. During this movement I never referred to nor saw myself as a lapsed nor a recovering catholic. This remains to be true even to this day. And still, this natural movement was taking place. And I really saw no need to alter nor interfere with its course. The other significant movement that was occurring was an explosive and very exciting investigation of a large number of other spiritual expressions and wisdom traditions.

This was in the very late 1980s and this explosive investigation period lasted until my move to California in late 1999. This investigation was during a time that coincided with what is popularly referred to as the heyday of “The New Age” era in American spiritual and cultural life. Because of this, it was exceptionally easy for me to find books, other types of supports and information, and a cornucopia of supportive communities for these investigations.

During this time I joined a Sufi group, a Cherokee prayer and moon circle, The Dances of Universal Peace, started attending both a Unity Church and a Unitarian Universalist Church on a somewhat regular basis, joined a peace organization that had strong ties to The American Friends Service Committee (The Quakers), started going to High Holiday services with a couple of Jewish friends, joined a mastermind group—all while steadily continuing with my Buddhist practice which by the early 1990s had now become a Zen practice rooted in the teachings of Venerable Thích Nhất Hạnh instead of a Vajrayana practice started by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. And all of this occurred while my never relinquishing my relationship with Yeshua, nor my identity as a Catholic/Christian man. I became a Reiki Master near the end of this period as well. I also attended my first Rainbow Family national gathering which for me had strong spiritual overtones. This was also the same period when I began to identify as a radical faerie.

Once I moved to California, there were some casualties and some survivors from that lengthy list. There were also some connections that appeared to be casualties though later reasserted themselves as very strong and vigorous survivors.

I moved to California ostensibly in order to co-found a lay Buddhist intentional community in the Grand Lake area of Oakland. This community was formed in 2000 and still exists today. I however, left it in 2007. Since this community had Buddhist practice as its overarching connective tissue, my own personal Buddhist practice was strengthened and buoyed tremendously by living in the community.

I tried very valiantly to continue my Sufi practice. However, it really just mostly collapsed under the weight of everything else I was focusing on now that I was living in The San Francisco Bay Area which included a full-time job at The University of California, San Francisco that required a great deal of my time and attention.

Attendance at Jewish High Holiday services vanished as well which I experienced as a great loss. The Jewish High Holiday services, among the great number of diverse spiritual services I have attended, remain for me the most spiritual and moving of them all, especially the Kol Nidre declaration that occurs as part of the Yom Kippur services. There is also the fact that many Jewish services have a very strong community element to them and there is often an incredible feast that occurs either before, during, or after the major holiday. Jews, like Hindus, have had many thousands of years to perfect religious services, and it shows. 

The other reluctant casualty was The Dances of Universal Peace. I kept telling myself I would find a circle somewhere in The Bay Area. There were plenty around. I simply never took the time to introduce myself to one. I had been introduced to The Dances of Universal Peace by a coworker in Kentucky, while I was still living there. I knew several of the people in the circle. So it was extremely easy for me to join the circle and feel comfortable. It was also a very new circle. So we all were learning the songs and the dances at essentially the same time. I probably simply didn’t look forward to being a new person in a very established circle nor being the probable sole person in the room trying to learn the songs and the dances. This was probably part of why I never seriously searched for one. The other part is that I really was very busy for most of the time I lived in California. I definitely gave in to the disease of “busyness” that is so prevalent in many cultures today and that is definitely very alive and well in The San Francisco Bay Area. In many ways it was a horrible, superficial, and depressing existence. I simply didn’t know it while I was immersed in it.

Eventually however, I found myself at The East Bay Church ofReligious Science and I instantly knew I had stumbled onto something very sublime and quite amazing as well. A significant amount of this sublime quality and amazing-ness was to be found in the founding pastor, Rev. Eloise Oliver. However, it didn’t stop there.

Here, in EBCRS was a New Thought church similar to Unity Church, which I had been introduced to more than a decade earlier. However, EBCRS had a very dynamic black female pastor. There was also a large black community that was vibrant, spiritually sound, and that was made up of many black people who could loosely be said to be members of the black intelligentsia. All of this was extremely attractive to me. There was also an extensive amount of diversity in this church that crossed many different definitions of diversity. I felt very uplifted every time I left the building after services, even if in her sermon, Rev E. had posed some very pointed and non-sugar coated questions in it. This was definitely not for everyone. Many people are not interested in looking at their shadow or doing really deep self-investigative work. People at EBCRS however, are well prepared for this. They do deep spiritual work. Being afraid of deep shadow and investigative work also does not describe me. My years in the seminary studying for the priesthood had made it necessary that I learn to be very comfortable with this. So I not only welcomed this from Rev E., I absolutely cherished her for it. I adored EBCRS and its community and I still do.

Still, for all the time and energy I put into EBCRS, I never officially joined the church. I never made that commitment. I knew there were lots of people there who were even more involved than I was who had also never officially joined the church. I never asked any of them why this was so. It however, was odd for me to feel so connected to a spiritual center and community and to not join it. I’m a joiner when it comes to things such as this. Until very recently I didn’t know why I never joined East Bay Church of Religious Science. Now I believe I know why. Still, if and when I ever visit Oakland, visiting The East Bay Church of Religious Science will be near the top of my list of "must do" things.

When I left Oakland in order to move to Bremerton, Washington, in February of 2015, I had a serious Zen practice that I had been nourishing and deepening for right at twenty-five years. That’s a long time. Whew! It doesn’t seem that long. I had to go back and count the years on my fingers just now because I didn’t think it had been that long. But it has been. Wow!

My Zen practice, when I moved, was clearly the most stable and outwardly appearing important spiritual practice in my life. One of the principal reasons I had moved to Washington State and the Seattle Area specifically was to connect with Genjo Marinello, Osho, a very well respected Rinzai Zen Dharma Heir and teacher who had been recommended to me by Kobutsu Malone Osho, when in 2014, I had discussed with Kobutsu Osho, the possibility of studying with him (Kobutsu). Ultimately Kobutsu, who lives in Maine, felt the distance between us (him in Maine and me in California) was just too great. He then recommended Genjo Osho to me. I contacted Genjo Osho immediately and we began a correspondence. During our correspondence I gained a great intuitive sense that Genjo Osho was someone I very much wanted to study with. There is a saying in these type of endeavor’s that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. I believe this thoroughly. Plus, it has also been my personal experience. Just in my Buddhist practice alone I have had one system (Shambhala) and three teachers. Each of them have shown up in my life at precisely the correct moment in my life.

My relationship with the Catholic Church was mostly a distant memory by this time, though I still did not view myself as a lapsed nor recovering catholic. There continued to be a handful of catholic saints who were important to me and I suppose it could be said I engaged in some sort of veneration although that word really doesn't capture my relationship with them at all. Among these were, Saint Martin dePorres, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint John of The Cross, Saint Theresa of Avila, and Saint Hildegard of Bingen. I also continued to learn and be endlessly inspired by The Desert Fathers. And my relationship with Yeshua remained intact and unchanged, all these years later. We continued to have a very mutually loving union although it was rarely expressed publicly.

And also as of 2015 it has been thirty-nine years since I had that initial, powerful, and very memorable spiritual awakening/kensho/samadhi experience in my life—an experience that had led me directly to the seminary to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood. And now it has been thirty-seven years since I had entered the seminary. Oh my! I just broke down and sobbed at the realization of the many years I have been on this journey, aware of all the twists and sometimes extremely violent turns I have had along the way, all the horrible challenges and struggles and somehow, somehow I have remained a very deeply committed man of faith. I just can’t believe it. All I can do is sob. All I can do is cry. And Praise God. And surrender to it all. And have deep, deep gratitude. And cry some more. And praise God more!

But the story doesn’t end there.

When my partner John and I and our two absolutely adorable Chihuahuas, Layla and Lulu moved to Bremerton, we were submerged deeply into poverty. We still are. That is another story in itself and for another time, perhaps.

Anyway, thankfully, Bremerton has many places that offer free meals to the homeless and poor people. Oakland is more than ten times larger, population wise, than Bremerton, and yet that city doesn’t have half the free hot meal options as Bremerton does—at least that don’t also come with constant over-the-top drama and servers who treat you like you are the scum of the earth. This was absolutely stunning to me and John when we first arrived in Bremerton. We thought we had magically been transported to Shangri-La. There are only two days in the week when one cannot get three very well prepared, hot meals in Bremerton. If you go just one town over, that number is reduced to one. Sunday is the only day of the week where one cannot get at least one hot meal in Bremerton served by gracious, friendly, and loving people.

One of the places that serves free meals in Bremerton is St.Paul’s Episcopal Church. They serve a Saturday meal at 2:30 pm every week. It is always very delicious, very well prepared, and served by various local area civic and religious organizations, including a local Girl Scout troop, Led by Marty Stennett, a delightful and spirit filled woman, who is also a member of St. Paul's, whom John and I have gotten to know better. And when the Girl Scouts serve the meal, they often bring Girl Scout cookies for desert! Can it get any better than that? No, I don’t think so.

We had been going to this Saturday afternoon meal at St Paul’s for several months when one Saturday, unbeknownst to us, the meal was being served my members of the St. Paul’s parish community itself. At some point during the meal, one of the servers, a tall, handsome gentleman, roughly in me and John’s age range, came by the table when John and I were talking about New Mexico (I lived in New Mexico for a short period of time in the late 1990s). This gentle man overheard us and his ears perked up because, it turns out, he too had lived in New Mexico for a time. So he sat down at the table with us and we all continued to talk together. He introduced himself as John Kingslight. Eventually he revealed to us that his wife was the rector of the parish—Mother Kathleen Kingslight—and then he invited us to come to a church service there sometime.

John and I used to really love and really enjoy going to East Bay Church of Religious Science in Oakland. And before that we really loved and enjoyed going to San Xavier Mission Church in Tucson, AZ (despite its very problematic history) during the nearly two years we lived in Tucson between 2010 and 2012. Since those two experiences, we had never really gone to a regular church and we hadn’t really gone to EBCRS for nearly the whole last year we were in Oakland.

So we talked about John Kingslight’s offer and decided we would go to service there the very next day (Sunday June 14, 2015). So we did.

The instant I walked into the church for the 10:15 service, that next day, I immediately became aware of an intensely loving presence that I felt completely pervaded the entire church. I was completely taken aback by this and didn’t know what to think of it. However, it was so powerful and so beautiful and loving I simply couldn’t intellectualize it. Let me tell you, that’s some mighty powerful energy if it keeps me from being able to go into analysis mode, OK! It was simply too beautiful and felt just too loving.

Once the service began this loving energy just continued to intensify. It kept intensifying exponentially throughout every segment of the service. I became overwhelmed, in a very good way. I thought I was going to pass out. I literally thought I was going to pass out. And I didn’t even care. I didn’t even care about falling and even hitting my head. This must be what is meant by a charismatic experience. I was filled with so much joy and love I absolutely didn’t care. I was in pure ecstasy. The only thing I cared about was being able to have the privilege of having and enjoying this experience. I was in a state of pure gratitude.

About a third of the way through the service I had to sit down (there is lots of sitting and rising in this Episcopal service, very similar to that in the Roman rite) in the pew and simply bawl over the overwhelming joy and love I was feeling. I just focused on the huge wooden cross above the altar to stabilize me. I don’t believe I have ever felt anything like this in my whole life. It was just so beautiful. It was just so incredibly loving. This service was in June. Mother Kathleen’s sermon was her “LGBTQI positive sermon.” It was so supportive and so uplifting to all LGBTQI people. This just added to the whole experience.

After mass, I made a beeline to Mother Kathleen while we were both still in the sanctuary. I told her about my experience during the service. And once again I started bawling when I told her of it. She instinctively hugged me and matter-of-factly said, “It was the Holy Spirit.” I absolutely knew she was right. I am having just a slightly less powerful feeling of overwhelming love right now just writing about this experience. Hallelujah!

John and I are now proud members of St. Paul’s Episcopal. I’m exploring ways to become more involved in church life there. I will be officially received into The Episcopal Church by the Bishop of The Diocese of Olympia, Greg Rickel, in Seattle, next April. For the first time in my entire life I feel like I am accepted by a Christian faith community and a Christian religious denomination, as a fully embraced part of The Body of Christ. Hallelujah! Amen! Hallelujah! Thank you Jesus! I was never lost. And yet I have been truly found!

And so the story continues.

Thank you Genjo, Osho.

Thank you Mother Kathleen.

Thank you Buddha.

Thank you Jesus.

Thank you for all the teachers and for all the teachings.

I know I am in very good hands and hearts.

Photo by Rags Kanyi Photography

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...