Liberation comes not by believing in the right set of tenets or of dogmatic assertions, or even necessarily by behaving in the right way. It’s insight, it’s wisdom, it’s knowing the nature of reality. It is only truth that will make us free.
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Suffering and its unwholesome causes are not to be escaped but to be confronted—and eventually transformed into wisdom and compassion.
We train to be aware of what we are thinking and to breathe with it, relax it, and change it to a more balanced view, recognizing the good conditions that are still available to us. We can remind ourselves, “Smile. Choose to think of it in a positive way.”
TOBY JOHNSON an American novelist and writer in the field of Gay spirituality. Johnson is author of three autobiographical accounts of spiritual development: The Myth of the Great Secret: A Search for Meaning in the Face of Emptiness about his discovering a modern understanding of religion; In Search of God in the Sexual Underworld about his experiences — and interpretation of events as a religion scholar—in the study of teenage prostitution; and The Myth of the Great Secret: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell which added substantial anecdotal material about his mentor.
After leaving seminary in 1970, Johnson moved to San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area throughout the 1970s. While a student at the California Institute of Asian Studies (later renamed the California Institute of Integral Studies), from which he received a graduate degree in Comparative Religion and a doctorate in Counseling Psychology, Johnson was on staff at the Mann Ranch Seminars, a Jungian-oriented summer retreat program. There he befriended religion scholar Joseph Campbell and came to regard himself "an apostle of Campbell's vision to the gay community."
Johnson has authored three novels: Plague: A Novel About Healing, Secret Matter, and Getting Life in Perspective. Plague, produced was one of the first novels to treat AIDS through fiction. Secret Matter, a speculative, romantic comedy about truth-telling and Gay identity featuring a retelling of the Genesis myth with a Gay-positive outcome, won a Lambda Literary Award in 1990 and in 1999 was a nominee to the Gay Lesbian Science-Fiction Hall of Fame, the first year of the award.
He collaborated on the novel Two Spirits: A Story of Life With the Navajo and co-edited, an anthology of Gay-positive stories, Charmed Lives: Gay Spirit in Storytelling.
He is also author of Gay Spirituality: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness and Gay Perspective: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe, which explains how homosexuality can lead to a re-evaluation of people's role in the universe.
Johnson's central idea is that as outsiders with non-gender-polarized perspective homosexuals play an integral role in the evolution of consciousness — especially regarding the understanding of religion as myth and metaphor — and that for many homosexuals Gay identity is a transformative ecological, spiritual, and even mystical vocation.
From 1996 to 2003, Johnson was editor/publisher of White Crane, a periodical focusing on Gay wisdom, culture and spirituality. As of 2012, he worked as a literary editor He and his husband, Kip Dollar, live in Texas where they were recently married on March 16th, 2018. He is a friend to this writer, now, of many years and I want to personally wish him a very happy birthday.
"As you progress with your sadhana you may find it necessary to change
your occupation. Or you may find that it is only necessary to change the
way in which you perform your current occupation in order to bring it
into line with your new understanding of how it all is. The more
conscious that a being becomes, the more he can use any occupation as a
vehicle for spreading light.
The next true being of Buddha-nature that you meet may appear as a bus
driver, a doctor, a weaver, an insurance salesperson, a musician, a
chef, a teacher, or any of the thousands of roles that are required in a
complex society—the many parts of Christ’s body. You will know them
because the simple dance that may transpire between you—such as handing
them change as you board the bus—will strengthen in you the faith in the
divinity of humans. It’s as simple as that."
- Ram Dass -
Practice and enlightenment are mutually correlative; they evolve in conjunction with each other. You won’t have a sophisticated practice without a sophisticated image of enlightenment nor a profound image of enlightenment without profound practice.
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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.
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
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 The Steadying Power of Patience
With Dawn Scott |
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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.)
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.
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…
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