VIa White Crane Institute // TROY PERRY

 

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Reverend Troy Perry

1940 -

TROY PERRY, Metropolitan Community Church founder born; Happy Birthday Troy! The Reverend Elder Troy Deroy Perry is the founder of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, a Protestant denomination devoted to ministering to the spiritual needs of GLBTQ people.

A charismatic preacher and leader, Perry has built the religious organization into one of the fastest growing denominations in the world, with over 300 churches in some 18 countries. Perry obtained a GED and enrolled at a Bible college in Illinois, at the same time serving as pastor of a congregation of the Church of God. Perry was excommunicated from the Church of God after church officials learned that he had had a consensual sexual relationship with a man.

After reading Donald Webster Cory's The Homosexual in America (1951), Perry decided that he could no longer live as a "pseudo-heterosexual." He revealed his sexual orientation to a church official. Shortly thereafter he was dismissed by his bishop. Perry's wife left him, taking their sons with her. She eventually divorced Perry and remarried. She kept the boys from having any contact with Perry until 1985, when the younger son, James Michael Perry, sought out his father and was happily reunited with that side of his family. Perry soon began to discover the Gay community in Los Angeles and to become acquainted with other Gay men, whom he viewed "as part of [his] extended family."

When Perry was drafted into the United States Army in 1965, he acknowledged that he was Gay, but the Army inducted him anyway. He was stationed in Germany, where he worked as a cryptographer, a job requiring a high-level security clearance. Eventually, Perry felt called to start a new church. He spoke to members of the Gay community and took out an advertisement in a newspaper announcing a worship service.

Twelve people attended the first meeting of the Metropolitan Community Church, which was held in Perry's living room. Perry preached a sermon entitled "Be True to You," enunciating three important tenets of his faith: 1) salvation--which comes through Jesus Christ and is unconditional; 2) community--which the church should provide, especially to those without caring family and friends; and 3) Christian social action--a commitment to fight oppression at all levels. These principles have guided the Church as it has matured from an evangelical, Pentecostal organization into a more liturgical and ecumenical denomination that welcomes heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and that empowers women and minority groups.

Via Daily Dharma: Distilling Wisdom

 

Through the magic of reflecting on the teachings, their force—sometimes clear, sometimes obscure—will cause ferment in our minds from which we can gradually distill the wisdom of reflection.

—Lama Jampa Thaye, “How Do We Learn the Dharma?”

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Jackson Browne & Leslie Mendelson "A Human Touch" from 5B - OFFICIAL MUS...

Via Daily Dharma: Every Day Is a Bonus

This truth [of impermanence] changes our perspective and makes us much happier. It helps us appreciate the life we have right now—moment by moment. It helps us understand that every day is a bonus.

—Trungram Gyalwa Rinpoche, “Every Day Is a Bonus”

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Boudha Stupa Boudhanath • Nepal | JOEJOURNEYS

Via Ram Dass - Love Serve Remember Foundation // Words of Wisdom - July 25, 2021 💌

 

 

You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into. - Ram Dass

Via Daily Dharma: Unfolding in Freedom

 

Just as love must be allowed to unfold and cannot be forced, our broader experience of life and death can truly unfold only in the freedom of mutual encounter between us and the world.

—Mark Unno, “The Original Buddhist Rebel”

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Tibetan Buddhist Library at Sakya Monastery in Tibet

Via Tricycle -- Embracing the Buddha

 

Embracing the Buddha
By Mindy Newman and Kaia Fischer

An ancient tale from The Hundred Deeds Sutra offers a powerful lesson in turning our aspirations into reality.

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Via Daily Dharma: What Is Correct Concentration?

 

Only the mind that is void of grasping at and clinging to “I” and “mine” can have the true and perfect stability of correct concentration.

—Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, “A Single Handful”

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Via Tricycle // Dawn Scott

 

The Steadying Power of Patience With Dawn Scott

When life gets stressful, practicing patience can help stabilize the mind and strengthen the heart.

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Via Daily Dharma: The Circle of Practice

Each moment of practice encompasses enlightenment, and each moment of enlightenment encompasses practice. In other words, practice and enlightenment—process and goal—are inseparable. The circle of practice is complete even at the beginning.

—Kazuaki Tanahashi, “Fundamentals of Dogen’s Thoughts”

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Via Lama Surya Das

 

tSponsSoredoWhen a water drop merges with the ocean, it is indivisible from the ocean. And the one space on the outside and inside of a broken vase cannot be differentiated, but extends into a single, all-pervasive space. Likewise, in the identification within yourself of the pure awareness, the nature of your mind, there is nothing to be altered and nothing else with which to engage.

 

#SeraKhandro #LamaSuryaDas #Dzogchen #Awareness #Awakening

Via Daily Dharma: Mountains Are Simply Mountains

 

In our essence of mind, mountains are simply mountains, flowers are flowers, and the sound of the wind is the sound of the wind. We hear, we see, and we leave each thing as we hear or see it, adding nothing at all to it.

—Shodo Harada Roshi, “Finding Our Essence of Mind”

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Via White Crane Institute // This Day in Gay History

Poet Hart Crane

1899 -

HART CRANE – American poet, born (d: 1932). Crane’s father, Clarence, was a successful Ohio businessman who had made his fortune in the candy business by inventing the Life Saver (an odd foreshadowing of the poet’s death, ironically). Crane was Gay and associated his sexuality with his vocation as a poet. Raised in the Christian Science tradition of his mother, he never ceased to view himself as a outsider in relation to society. However, as poems such as "Repose of Rivers" make clear, he felt that this sense of alienation was necessary for him to attain the visionary insight that formed the basis for his poetic work. It is one of the classic Gay Archetypes.

Throughout the early 1920s, small but well-respected literary magazines published some of Crane’s lyrics, gaining him, among the avant-garde, a respect that White Buildings (1926), his first volume, ratified and strengthened. White Buildings contains many of Crane’s best lyrics, including "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," and a powerful sequence of erotic poems called "Voyages," written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant marine.

Faustus and Helen was part of a larger artistic struggle to meet the modern world with something more than despair. Crane identified T.S. Eliot with that kind of despair, and while he acknowledged the greatness of The Waste Land, he also said it was "so damned dead," an impasse, and a refusal to see "certain spiritual events and possibilities." Crane’s self-appointed work would be to bring those spiritual events and possibilities to poetic life, and so create "a mystical synthesis of America." He meant an epic poem.

This ambition would finally issue in The Bridge (1930), where the Brooklyn Bridge is both the poem’s central symbol and its poetic starting point.

Just before noon on April 27, 1932, on a steamship passage back to New York from Mexico — right after he was reportedly beaten for making sexual advances to a male crew member — he committed suicide by jumping into the Gulf of Mexico. Although he had been drinking heavily and left no suicide note, witnesses believed Crane's intentions to be suicidal, as several reported that he exclaimed "Goodbye, everybody!" before throwing himself overboard. His body was never recovered.

A marker on his father's tombstone in Garrettsville includes the inscription, "Harold Hart Crane 1899-1932 LOST AT SEA" ("Voyager," John Unterecker, 1969). Crane's suicide inspired several works of art by noted artist Jasper Johns, including "Periscope" and "Diver." Hart Crane: Complete Poems & Selected Letters (Langdon Hammer, ed.)

 

Today's Gay Wisdom

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Repose Of Rivers
By Hart Crane

The willows carried a slow sound,
A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.
I could never remember
That seething, steady leveling of the marshes
Till age had brought me to the sea.

Flags, weeds. And remembrance of steep alcoves
Where cypresses shared the noon’s
Tyranny; they drew me into hades almost.
And mammoth turtles climbing sulphur dreams
Yielded, while sun-silt rippled them
Asunder ...

How much I would have bartered! the black gorge
And all the singular nestings in the hills
Where beavers learn stitch and tooth.
The pond I entered once and quickly fled—
I remember now its singing willow rim.

And finally, in that memory all things nurse;
After the city that I finally passed
With scalding unguents spread and smoking darts
The monsoon cut across the delta
At gulf gates ...  There, beyond the dykes

I heard wind flaking sapphire, like this summer,
And willows could not hold more steady sound.

 

Via Daily Dharma: Fold Into Now

When we immerse ourselves in a moment and meet it in its suchness or wholeness—whether through prayer or meditation, or through more “profane” activities like doing the laundry or having a cup of tea—all of time gets folded into a single point: now.

—Vanessa Zuisei Goddard, “The Places We Go to Be Here”

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Via White Crane Institute // ORPHEUS

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Orpheus by Franz von Stuck (1891)

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ORPHEUS: traditional date of birth. Orpheus was the son of Calliope and either Oeagrus or Apollo. He was the greatest musician and poet of Greek myth, whose songs could charm wild beasts and coax even rocks and trees into movement. He was one of the Argonauts, and when the Argo had to pass the island of the Sirens, it was Orpheus' distractions that prevented the crew from being lured to destruction. This much of the legend of Orpheus is fairly certain. It's the final days of Orpheus, however, that are the subject of varying stories.

One such version justified Orpheus' inclusion here. The celebrated Thracian musician became a follower of Dionysius and, it is believed, soothed the Argonauts with means other than mere melodies, thus introducing homophile love into Greece. As a result, Orpheus was soundly hated by Aphrodite who considered him a competitor and rival. Orpheus met his end at the hands of the women of Thrace who, because the handsome hunk refused to pay them any attention, tore him to pieces.

And…speaking of charming Thracians…