Faggot: A Middle School lesson in Spirituality.

 I'm in Tennessee at my parents' place on the lake in West Knoxville. It's just gorgeous. The only draw back is the constant swooshing of cars going by the house at 50mph on what was once a rural country road. Now it's in the heart of suburbia.  There are days when the traffic backs up from the signals in either direction; so far backed up that the cars sit in front of the house just waiting for traffic to move. Herons and cranes are flying and wading about, swallows are diving around, blue birds are watching their nest.  The geese are honking and the ducklings are quacking looking for momma.   While we are part of nature it’s weird how creatures and habitats coexist; humans belonging to nature and yet somehow not fitting in unless we are deliberate about. 

Suburbia is not my cup of tea, but mom and dad are doing well for themselves here.  It's a beautiful home with a beautiful view.  They deserve it.  They worked hard raising the two of us in this den of hate.  It was hard growing up here. I never felt that I fit in down here; not completely. 

Detect any political or social animosity from me?  Good job!

No, for real, I just had an EMDR appointment this afternoon.  Sometimes I minimize or compartmentalize the pain and trauma of my past. Everyone talks about trauma these days. The word is over used.  The DSM-5 defines trauma as exposure to actual or threatened death (check), serious injury (check) sexual violence (check) or experiencing repeated or extreme exposure to aversive details of traumatic events (check). I experienced bullying, harassment and teasing from 1-12 grades.  By the time I got to my senior year of high school I knew I was gay, my friends and family figured out I was gay, the student body who knew me believed I was gay.  The only problem is no one was ok with it, not even me.

I never had a sense that I was well-liked in middle school. I had a few friends.  I enjoyed creative writing, music, roaming in the woods, riding my bike.  I wanted to form a band and almost did.  But for some reason the boys never wanted to hang with me for long.  At school I was called a sissy or queer. I sucked at sports and was a wimp in gym.  I did have quite a bit of sugar in my tank. I vividly remember getting out of my mom's car in the morning one day, taking a deep breath and going into school.  Every day felt that way. Someone was always teasing me. Evidently I was an easy target.

Then there was that fateful day when my entire world was exposed. I was sitting in Mrs Steed's Tennessee history class. Mrs Steed had stepped out to go to the faculty lounge (teachers did that back then). She left someone in charge to write names on the board of anyone who misbehaved (snitching indoctrination 101). There was a boy in my class who I found absolutely gorgeous. I must have been staring at him hard that day.  All of the desks faced forward. I was about five desks back two or three rows in from the right.  Chris, or that's the name I remember, was in the row to my left two or three seats up.  One day, that day, he turned around and looked at me and said matter of factly, " you're a faggot."  The whole class laughed.  I looked around. Even my friends were laughing.  The only problem is I had no idea what that word meant. We didn't cuss in my household. "What's that!”  I asked.  The whole class laughed harder.  I guess the irony wasn't lost on these middle schoolers.  "Chris" answered me by defining what a faggot was. At that moment, I knew there was a word for the person I was, and I also knew exactly what people thought about people like me, and my friends were included.

It was about that time that I found Quakers through reading "The Witch of Blackbird Pond."  I identified with the Quakeress in the story; misunderstood, harassed by Puritans. I was misunderstood, so I thought, but not really. They understood me better than I understood myself. I was a faggot, apparently, after all.

I loved Jesus though, and the Jesus that was presented in Quakerism was so different from the one that the. Baptists presented.  Jesus was love. Jesus was always present as the Light within.  Jesus could save us from our sins in this life.  Quakers didn't preach up sin but focused on the solution: obedience to God.  So when I started attending the liberal Quaker meeting,  I was anti-gay and Christian.   The Friends at West Knoxville saw through anti-gay stuff, but had almost no tolerance for all the Jesus talk.  One day I was told in a business meeting to stop using all the Jesus talk. "Too much has been done in the name of Jesus for us to be comfortable with all that Jesus talk."  This came from several Friends.  

Mom pulled me from the Quaker meeting at that point.  She saw that as just another example of religion excluding people. 

At Guilford and at Earlham, I experienced this even more.  The Christian meetings, mostly with pastors, were supportive of my preaching in their meetings and engaged thoroughly in conversations about Jesus, but once they learned I was gay, it was all side-eyes and distance.  Similarly among unprogrammed so-called "universalist" meetings. (ABC universalism - Anything But Christ).  I was eldered constantly by Ministry & Counsel committees about my persistent use of Christian language. It really rankled a number of Friends.  Then add the paganism and ...

So from the age of 12 to the age of 53 I've never felt at home anywhere. The closest I felt at home is with Homewood Friends when I considered myself a neo-pagan nontheist.  That was totally fine at Homewood and among Baltimore Yearly Meeting Quakers.  

Then there was the other day when I spoke in meeting and felt that I wasn't faithful in preaching even though I got positive feedback.  I realized after sitting with things that I was given an explicitly Christ-centered message full of Bible.  Instead of using the words given, I tried to soften it theologically and while it was well-accepted, I knew I wasn't faithful.  "Not this again" I moaned upon realizing the truth of things.  Please, Light, not this again.

So from my EMDR session, watching a ball go back and forth, I realized something:  since that fateful year when I realized I could not be myself with my peers, from my teen years when I realized I couldn’t  be myself with other Christians or even liberal Quakers, to those tumultuous times in my early 20s when I was at seminary, completely wracked with a conflicting sense of self, a desire to serve God and no idea how to do that with integrity, up to today, I have not felt able to come full up because I haven't made peace with who I am. I've been seeking community and connection wherever I can, mostly among Quakers, and yet even then, there have been limits as to what Quakers would tolerate.

So my therapist encouraged me to continue working on my trauma, working on the pain, working on healing, coming to wholeness.  Integrity.  Clarity.  

I don't expect any Paul on the road to Damascus moments.  But I wouldn't mind one.

In the mean time, I will continue to dig deeper, with help, coming to accept Light and Shadow.

"You're a faggot."  Words that if I hear now, I'm like "duh."  I don't fit in everywhere, and I won't for this one reason.  But there are others.  The thing is I can spend the rest of my years trying not to be who I am, and trying to be who I am not. Or, I can take this lesson, and the counsel of my therapist, and connect with the person I am, Light and Shadow, accept that person, and find the places and spaces where I can connect with integrity.  The key is to be open, honest and tender to what I learn and is revealed to me.

There's a storm blowing outside.  The sky is dark and the rain is pouring.  Ominous sounds of thunder echo not so far away.  Even in the storm the swallows are perched on the railing, diving into the water for a drink, showering in the rain, doing their thing.  In the time it took me to compose this, the rain poured, then the thunder boomed, the sky grew dark,  the water was troubled and then got still again.   There's a lesson in this somewhere.

Learning to Listen to My Ancestors

 

So this should make some people crazy.  I venerate my ancestors. It sounds a lot more formal than it is.  Oh, I tried incantations when I first started. I called the four corners, welcomed spirits and entities that have guided me through my spiritual existence, and ancestors known and unknown to me.  I cast a wide net.   Yes, I am keenly aware that there are spirits that are malevolent or naughty. There are living people who are malevolent and naughty.  You have to learn to navigate them.   How? Well, trial and error, just like people.

I remember the first time I used a pendulum.  It was a monocle that a Quaker faith healer gave to me. He practiced a healing magic that was passed down to him through a family line of English Quakers.  He taught me a little, but I wasn't very serious about learning to keen my way forward and set my intentions. He gave me a gris-gris that I never used.   They hung on my walls in my home for years, with no purpose other than decoration.

So then one day I decided to set up my ancestor altar.  On it I put pictures of my deceased grandparents great great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, my late partner, bone dice, candles (and later a hurricane lantern) incense burner, my great grandfather's hunting rifle, Russell's glasses and hair, and a wooden idea human statue doll thing that Russell kept at work at Center Stage and for which he made a crown of thorns out of paper clips. He was creative that way.

Then I read online how to use a pendulum.  Imagine my surprise when the thing moved to my questions!  It answered yes or no to questions only I knew the answers to.  I tested it.  Always important to test things.  Then I started asking questions about my recovery, about spirituality, about being a Quaker, a Christian, a pagan, a Christopagan. I wanted advice, keenly aware that questions of should or ought should be avoided.  I firmly believed this was explainable by science; that the muscles in my fingers were moving the pendulum.  

Sometimes the pendulum worked with obvious answers. Sometimes it didn't work at all.  However, when I started asking lines of questions the answers to which I did not know, but only a friend knew, and I shared with him what I learned about him, his family and deceased great aunt and friend, we both were blown away.

I also got myself into some hot kimchi both at work and personally during this time.  I was worried for my job and reputation.  I wanted counsel from my ancestors.  Would there be ramifications? Would I be ok?  My big mouth.  My stupid past choices caught up to me.  Dumb. Dumb me.  My ancestors told me all would be ok each time.  All was ok.  Each time.

When I learned that my job might be on the chopping block due to low enrollment, I needed some reassuring that what would come would be ok.  And I got it. And it was.

Now the skeptic can say that this is my subconscious speaking. Could very well be.  I don't know how my subconscious knows things only my friend would know, or how my subconscious would know the truth of the future, but sure why not.

I can tell you, though, that I don't use the pendulum much anymore. I have gone to it when feeling the urge to get an answer right away, but it hasn't been working lately.  So, I just put it down and enter into silent waiting at the altar. It is there where it came to me that I can just sit in silence with my ancestors, that I'm not alone, and that if this is all hocus pocus and it's really my inner voice speaking, or even the Still Small Voice speaking, that I need to practice going there.

It does occur to me that these outward practices are similar to Christian rites and rituals; there is no power in and of themselves, but they can create a situation in which we experience the divine. Perhaps these aren't spirits of my ancestors speaking to me, perhaps it's the divine speaking to me.   I honestly don't know, but I have found that spending time with my ancestors has yielded spiritual growth.  At the very least, divination aside, and I have mostly put it aside, honoring them for all they have done for me, all that they did for my family, the hard work and troubles, the love and care, I honor them for it.

No harm in that.

On PTSD, Addiction and Recovery.

This is one of the more difficult posts, and I'm not entirely sure how much to put in here. I still teach public school and my kids and colleagues don't need to know my business anymore than what I've already put on paper.  I'm a person in recovery.  From what and how bad it got won't be put on my blog until I retire or quit working with kids.  This blog is about the consequences of my past.  Not the specifics of the hurts, habits and hangups. 

I know what it's like to be ruled by temptation and be attached to things and behaviors. I worry for my students who constantly smell of weed (though I'm not against weed for adults), for my students who struggle with food and weight, for my students who are experimenting with hard drugs, and for my students who put themselves in harm's way sexually, and my students who have been harmed sexually through no fault of their own.  I hear you. I see you. I love you.

For most of my adult life, I ran around acting the fool:  I don't mean just by who or what I put in my body or places or situations that were dangerous.  For many years, I crossed paths with some dangerous people, but most of my time I spent with people like me: party boys who were selective about who they'd party with.  But when things got darker, I changed out my crowd.  I would spend little time with people who actually liked me and more time around some hard people. People so hard that when guys I thought were rough came to hang out, or heard I was hanging with someone, they would pull me aside and say "do you know who is or was in your house or car?"  I didn't know, but I honestly didn't care.  Addiction would always downplay reality.  Temptation would overrule reason.  

The result was I had thousands of dollars stolen,  jewelry (including my and Russell's wedding bands) stolen, my entire wardrobe from France stolen, guns pulled out while hanging out, a gun put on me, a threat of being tasered by a supposed friend, my house ransacked, people at my door looking for other people, and cops in and out of my house. Through all of that I also had hands put on me (though that only happened three times:  the first time I almost lost my mind on the guy who hit me and had him hiding in a corner until friends came and got his ass; I was ready to go to jail.  The other time I got out of the house and the guy eventually left, and the other time was because I felt so disrespected that I saw white and I hit him first. Clocked him with my right fist. He got me back good, but it left everyone shocked. I can't "throw hands" but I have a good punch evidently.

Violence. Theft.  Transactional relationships.  Self-harm.

I was so lost. So, so lost.

Again that wasn't half of it.  And all the while people around me saw me withering away physically, seeing me as a poor thing who had his life out of control, a good teacher who could have been amazing but who was not reliable. It wasn't just at work, it was at Quaker meeting too.

I spoke with my trauma therapist today about it all.  The multiple times I wondered if I was going to die by my own choices.  Is this it? Am I going to do something that will results in my own death by my hands or by the hands of others?

The sweet, young man from Tennessee was becoming jaded, and hard-hearted.  I was hanging out with guys who were affiliated with one criminal organization or another.  I even met some of their families.  Side note: I was so nervous one time I fake called my brother to talk to him.  Talking in a way that I thought made me sound tough to those around me.  When we left the guy I was with was like "white boy, you tried too hard."  I.e.  there's code switching and then there's Whatever I Was Doing.    

I eventually lost my black and white thinking.  And the last thing I was was a snitch.  Yep. I had devolved into that sort of thinking. That not all illegal activity is bad; it's just another way of life.  Guns are sexy (except when pointed at me).  And these guys are my friends (a few were, most weren't).  I was even willing to break the law in order to support someone else in their bad decisions. Again, no specifics. Just to know my thinking went down the tubes.

There has been significant space between this life and today, but that doesn't keep flashbacks from my behavior, consequences of my behavior or the behavior of those around me.   When a guy was in my car and put a gun on me, I handled it the best way I could.  I told him " you picked the wrong one" and after some back and forth he asked if he got out and left if I'd call the cops on him.  "I'm no snitch" I said.  "I said I wouldn't and I won't."  He put his gun back and rode off on his bike.

I'm such a dumb ass.  One of my therapists offers me "what would you rather believe about yourself?"  I dunno you tell me.  Kind of a dumb ass to let someone in your car when you don't know them.  Kind of a dumb ass to be out and about when I should be at home.  Kind of a dumb ass to do the things I did, to say the things I said, to hang with the people I spent time with.  Dumb. Ass.

But that's what active addiction will do.  Eat yourself sick.  Drink yourself silly.  Drug yourself dumb. Sex yourself into a harmful situation.  It's all gambling even if not in the way we think about it.  Choosing to act out on addictive impulses brings situations that result in trauma. 

There are days when I have flashbacks to the past.  That gun in my side.  That taser pointed at me.  My stuff stolen. My house ransacked.  Those moments when I thought I wouldn't make it past that single situation or choice. I was constantly wondering if "this was the end."  Worse, sometimes I didn't care.  When I have flashbacks or vivid memories,  something weird happens beyond the adrenaline rush, beyond the gasp that has others around me gasping too and wondering wtf is wrong, looking around to see what I was gasping at.  Often I sigh as a way to calm myself down from the thoughts, the memories, the anxiety of remembering, of the trauma.  People around me ask if I'm ok.  I am, in the present, but my mind is int he past.

I already had complex PTSD from sexual harm and from bullying in school when I was a kid (I was the sissy, the faggot, the queer from first through twelfth grade).  I have vivid memories of interactions with people close to me and all the mess in seminary.  Those I already had on my list of traumatic experiences.  Not all of it led to PTSD but some of it contributed to it.

But starting in 2009 and for many years after, the trauma from acting out and the consequences of acting out left me sometimes jumping at the thought of my shadow.  What makes it worse is that the flashbacks are tainted with this false memory of pleasure, of fun, of camaraderie.  It's all a lie, really.  Few people I spent time with during those years liked me.  Not really.  Everyone was just using each other for their own ends.  And the self-loathing piled onto the hard self-judgment which was more easily remedied by acting out again.  And when memories come from times from acting out I would find new ways to act out.  It's been a game of wackamole! 

(I'm surprised I don't weigh 300 pounds and that I have the health that I do (although I have gained 40 pounds this year. Thanks food!).  But as people keep telling me, it may be time to deal with food, but they'll take me chubby over the way I used to be any day).

So there will be times when I'm just sitting there, day dreaming and I'll get a vivid memory of my past and the room around me will look so vivid. I can see colors and shapes more vividly than before. My adrenaline starts rushing.  Sometimes I'll start coughing so hard it makes me vomit.  This often happens in the morning when I wake up.  I don't know the rhyme or reason to it.  It's exacerbated if I gorged on food all night long.   My trauma therapist helped me to realize it's anxiety.  The one real panic attack that I've had started that way -- everything was so vivid I thought someone had put something in my drink (I was at the bar with my boyfriend).  We left out of there because I was dizzy and everything was like I was on E or something).  Turned out to be a full-blown panic attack.  I've not had one that severe since, but I've had them come on and start like that -- but breathing and talking myself down has usually worked.  So when I have these flashbacks, it triggers an anxiety response.

So that's the problem.  Therapy, 12-steps, Quaker meeting and supportive friends have been the solution.  I can't explain how EMDR works. It's controversial, but it has been helping me to see and think about things differently.  Being asked to leave seminary,  having Russell's parents file a lawsuit against me when he died, almost losing Russell, getting him back and then watching him die of sepsis through negligence, sexual harm, threats of violence, growing up gay, and my past addictive behaviors all haunt me. Somehow, by thinking on these things while watching a dot go across the screen, I've come to a different place on some of these things.  I can acknowledge the pain, and through watching this dot go back and forth, my brain just sees things differently.  

For example, I was unwell when they asked me to withdraw from seminary. While the process was harmful, these people had no idea what to do with me.  I needed to go home and get well (and it would take me years to do so).  I was in the wrong place. I needed to be healed of my childhood traumas and deal with all of the self hate before I could ever hope to live up to the calling that they admitted I had.  God was calling me to faithfulness, and they saw it, but I had some healing to do first.   Before I just saw it as an injustice and focused on the harmful way the school handled things. Yes, there was betrayal and there were lies told in the process, but that didn't hide the truth that I had spiritual gifts that were being drowned out by the spiritual and emotional illness that I had.  Somehow in one session, I came to a place of acceptance and understanding I did not have before.  That's also what the 12 steps can do.

In 12-step groups, a person doesn't sponsor another person until they have worked all 12 steps and are living a life of recovery.  The same is true for ministers and elders (at least in Quakerism).  While many are broken in some way, we all need to work a solution into a life of good choices and faithfulness to our higher power.  I have a ways to go still on the steps (I've only ever worked up to step 9 --- making amends) and I have a way to go to a life of consistent yielding to the Light.  

This isn't a story that has a happy ending beyond that I'm not wrapped up in that shit anymore.  It still haunts me but with my two therapists and my sponsor I met in PIR , I am gaining better perspective and learning new skills to cope.  While I've been in 12 step programs since April of 2012, while I've had multiple sponsors in multiple programs of recovery, while I've gone to retreats, hospitals and recovery centers, I'm working the steps again.  I'm in therapy twice a week every other week and once a week on the other weeks.  My life consists mostly of service in my religious society.  But I can tell you that while the Inward work is ongoing, while there are times when peace is shaken, there is a solution and a power that surpasses any understanding.   And each day I am awake,  each day I choose to use the coping skills I've been taught, to say no acting out and yes to being of service or doing something healthy for me, is one more day upon a bunch of days that I've put together.

People who don't know me can't imagine my past.  I have my health, I'm pretty even-keeled, my sense of humor is alive, and I make a difference where I work, worship and hopefully with my friends and family.  Whereas in the past people  believed me to have it mostly together, but in truth I was living a double life, now that is not the case.  What you see and experience is me, and I'm learning to come full up in to any situation.  

One day I'll be more specific online.  But this is all that anyone needs to know.  If you're struggling, or have a friend or family member who is struggling with addictions and attachments, with hurts, habits and hang-ups, I get it.  But there is a way out. One day at a time.

Love Appeared and Saved me from Despair.

 

Some of my hardest spiritual times were when I was in seminary at Earlham School of Religion in Richmond, IN.  I chose to go there at the age of 25.  I felt called to ministry, and it had been affirmed repeatedly.  I was also still living that double life, but I thought seminary would save me from it and I would be moulded into the minister I was supposed to be.

Wrong.

I should have known the moment I started taking Spiritual Preparation for Ministry. Bill Taber was my professor. The point of the course was to get us to go deeply spiritually.  The problem was when I looked deeply, I saw into the abyss, and was unprepared for the demons that were waiting there.

At the time I believed in real demons, but that's not the point. There were certainly psychological ones.  You see, I really had never dealt with how I was treated by kids at my school growing up. I was called it all: sissy, queer, faggot. We all laughed at antigay humorists.  I took note, though.  I was the biggest homophobe; I truly was afraid of it. I never really could make peace that I was gay. Oh, I would rub that I was gay into anyone's face that opposed it.  I would bring up anything gay and weave it into any conversation. I had fun partying, being campy, going to parades and clubs, being young and silly.  But was I proud? No. Not really. Churches were openly hostile to gay people. We knew the stories of cops entrapping men, men getting gay bashed, families disowning and kicking out their gay kid. It was normal.  My parents gave me no reason to believe they would do the same and yet I also got messages that life would be hard and people wouldn't like me if people knew I was gay.  Like it would ultimately be a choice. All my friends told and laughed at gay jokes.  So did I. (Hey some gay jokes are plain funny).  But I took note.  So there I was in seminary, with none of that resolved, all staring back at me from the abyss.

At Guilford  I celebrated Pride, helped found the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Association at Guilford which still exists today. For my senior project I founded the Gay and Lesbian Resource Center at Guilford, now known as the Bayard Rustin Center.  I revived the Baccalaureate ceremony at Guilford which still goes on today.  This year, an anonymous donor paid for faculty lunch after the baccalaureate ceremony in my honor and in the honor of a person who was important in the spiritual lives of many Guilfordians.  It feels good to have left a legacy. But the young man who left that legacy was struggling so hard with self-hate and the draw of gay pop culture (sex, drugs, dance music).

At Earlham I served on Ministry & Worship.  For my preaching class I preached at all-campus meeting for worship.  I preached on the resurrection.  I remember the night before trying so hard to prep a sermon, but feeling that a prepared sermon was not what God wanted.  I prayed all night.  I did organize the programmed worship:  I chose the hymns.  I chose my elders to sit behind me and hold me in prayer.  The room was packed that day.  John Punshon, my Quakerism professor, and Tom Mullen, my preaching teacher, were there. Everyone was there.  The choir sang whatever song I had chosen.  There were readings from scripture.  Then I rose to preach. I wish I could tell you what I said.  We ended with the song Amazing Grace with the praise god chorus at the end. Afterwards Tom said my sermon was incredible and he had never heard anyone preach on the resurrection like that.   Two Friends, one from Latin America who was lesbian and another who was Australian, told me that before they didn't believe, but now they did.  It was no less than a revival.

So it was clear I had the gift.

But I was also on the side living a life that would ultimately catch up with me.  I shared with my evangelical Quaker friends what was going on, perhaps in too much detail.   One Friend gave me a book on being a prayer warrior from the Moody Bible Institute.  I began to pray every night. Every day.

Weird things began to happen.  One was that the woman who gave me the book started feeling spiritually attacked. She shared with me that her old demons were creeping up; issues long resolved were coming back.  She knew we were under attack.  Then my roommate asked me if I was battling demons.  I immediately accused him of going through stuff in my room.  He absolutely denied it.  It was because he had been praying for me and all of the sudden HE was being attacked spiritually by his own demons.

Then there was the night I was praying, warding off my room and my dreams with the Holy Spirit, and all of the sudden the room became super vivid.  I tried psychedelics in undergrad. It was as if I had droppped a tab.  Everything was super vivid. And then I realized I was not alone. Something was in the room with me.

There was another time I was doing the same thing (warding my dreams), and I was laying in bed. All of the sudden I couldn't move. I could, however, roll. And so I rolled myself off the bed and then I could move again, but stiffly.  Actually that may have been the same night as the spiritual trip. I can't remember. It was back in 1996.

It finally came to a head one day when I was in my living room contemplating all this.  I began to feel despair.  I began to cry.  Then I started sobbing.  It was while I was crying, shoulders heaving, tears dripping down my face onto the carpet, that I saw a pair of feet beneath me.  I was shocked. I knew I was in the presence of something.   "Look at my face" the entity said.  I could not and I cried harder.  "Look at my face" the being repeated to me softly.  "I can't," I replied.  "Look at my face" it coaxed softly.  As I looked up, I saw a robed figure, I assumed male, and then looked into his face.  There was a man, with a face as bright as the sun. Pure light, no human features. The light radiated and filled my vision.  I felt nothing but love, pure love. I knew I was loved.  I assumed at the time it was Jesus.

I wish that would be the happy ending but it was not.   The seminary staff began to suspect that I was mentally ill and needed help. They found a psychiatrist for me who prescribed a medicine combination that made me crazier than a bat out of hell.  I had all sorts of physical side effects that made me sicker.  Later, when I would have the dean of psychiatry at Hopkins as a counselor and doctor, he balked at the regimen I was on.  Every doc and therapist has since.  Things got worse.  Eventually I withdrew from ESR and came home mentally and emotionally unrecognizable.  The process of me having to leave was nothing short of abusive, though through therapy I saw that I had to leave, even if the process was harmful. I needed to go home and get well. Hurt, angry and feeling ashamed and a failure, I moved back in with my family in Tennessee.   A few months later I would meet my future husband.  But it would take decades before I finally decided to make some serious changes.

Did the demons get quiet? No, but I ceased to recognize them as any more than psychological ones.  But they would show up any time I began to get spiritually and emotionally well and I would sabotage all progress.  Was that Jesus that appeared to me that day? I have no idea, though I believed it to be so.   But Love appeared to me that day and saved me from despair.

The Voice said "Speak!"

 When I was 14 years old, I visited the local Quaker meetings.  The first one I visited was First Friends Church in East Knoxville.  It just seemed like the Church of Christ to me.   Then I visited West Knoxville Friends Meeting.  My first visit there I prayed diligently for the first 10 minutes and then yawned and fidgeted uncomfortably for the rest of the hour.  Still, I had read that there was something in the silence, so I was determined to go back.  The topic of vocal ministry was on abortion that day.  I remember feeling my heart quicken and a voice, almost audible, said to me "speak!"   I had an idea of the subject but no idea on how to say it.  I was also the only teen in the room and new to the meeting. "Speak!"  I got into a back and forth with the Voice and then all of the sudden I was speaking.  When I finally caught up with the words in my head, the words were taken away from me and I was finished.  My heart was racing I was wet with sweat.

I knew there was a power greater than me.  I knew there was a God.

Whom am I trying to convince?

I spoke with one of my therapists Alesha about my blog posts. She has been encouraging me to journal through blogging (I sometimes journal in my journal books. I have a few depending on what state of mind I'm in and about what I'm writing). I shared the content of my blog posts about my spiritual identity beyond that of Quaker.  Sometimes it's hard being Quaker with so many different manifestations of it.  If you have read my previous posts you will see the gay Quaker who feels he has to defend himself against more Evangelical or Conservative Friends about being gay and more liberal Friends about being Jesus-centered.

I'm about to redo my step 4 in my recovery work.  This is where we list our angers, fears and resentments and look at our own part in them.  This is where another level of acceptance comes from.  This time I will be sure to put Quakers, all Quaker groups, down on my anger and resentment list.  To be fair, I feel like I'm being healed of this by the Spirit, but it will do good for me to look at my part in how I reacted or responded to these feelings.

I find myself talking in spirals with my therapist when it comes to faith.  She stopped me at one point and asked "who are you trying to to convince? You? Or someone else?"  The answer to that is both.  For me it's a question of integrity not only identity.  It's a question of not trying to water down a faith that has it's own traditions and ways to access the Power.  But then Alesha, offered this: "Do what works for you."

Honestly divination has worked for me.  I've listened to sermons where the pastors disparage the use of crystals, tarot cards and other divination tools. They're not wrong: the Bible is clearly against them, just like gay sex, men wearing women's clothing, having sex when a woman is on her cycle (you get the drift).  The Hebrew peoples and Paul had a lot to say about how people should and should not live, whereas my perception of the pagan religions is that they left a lot more room for personal practice and lifestyle. Christianity further subjugated women and stamped out same-sex expression.  The Biblical teachings are simply about not putting things between us and God; and I get that.  Even though divination "works" sometimes, (sometimes the spirits are silent), I also feel that divination, or prayer beads, or mantras, or formal prayers, are simply tools that Quakers traditionally have testified are unnecessary. We don't need these things to access God. God is within and our experience of them is direct.

And to be fair, I rarely do any divination. I make it sound like I do it on a regular basis. I do not. I mostly sit and talk to the pictures of dead friends and relatives (and my dog). I'll put food or black coffee (or a bud of cannabis -- for Russell) on the table as an offering.  I talk to my family about the very content of my blog posts.  

What am I trying to avoid by simply sitting in silence and going within?  My Aries ass always wants to do things whole hog or not at all.  But I don't have to sit in silence for an hour. I can do it for 5 minutes just to pause and build up. This I know. But there is something in the silence that troubles me or of which I'm afraid or am avoiding.  Is it the Spirit? Me? Do I sense there is something I don't want to hear or am afraid of yielding to?  I think it comes down to trusting the Divine and trusting myself that it will be ok.  It is always ok in Quaker meetings. Why not "alone" with God? (I know I'm never alone).

And why this constant bloviating about whether or not my faith in God is Christian and whether or not I consider myself one and what kind of Christian I am?  Why play around with words so much? Probably because Quakers are notorious for using "just the right words."

But then when I was talking it through with Alesha, this song came to mind. "Give over thine own willing, give over thine own running, give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the Seed, that God sews in thy heart.  And let that be in thee, and grow in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience, that the LORD knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead into the inheritance of life, which God's portion."   Give over thine own desiring to know or be anything. Wow. Quaker wisdom right there.  This theological back and forth that has occurred my entire life is really because 1)people like to put ourselves and others in neat little boxes that define them and 2)I've always felt a need to explain or prove myself.  I grew up with "How can you be gay and Christian?" from both gay people and other Christians. 

But that's not all; I fell in love with the Biblical narrative about Jesus and Jesus' love in a time where I didn't believe I was given unconditional love and acceptance by Christians or Quakers, my friends or my family.  This was my experience until I was in my early 20s.  Even later people would put up with one aspect of me (Christian or gay) but not the other aspect and both were important.  When I felt called to gospel ministry at a young age, that never died even through all the debauchery of my adult life.  My dual life only made it worse, though (see previous posts).  

Before I make this other people's fault, I take full responsibility for the choices I have made and how I have responded to various circumstances and decisions.  I made decisions. I tried to take an easier way out that made me feel good even when those same decisions made me feel good in the short term, they made everything harder eventually. However, it this double life started before I was an adult.

So if anything I'm simply processing on this blog. Am I looking for outside input? I welcome it. Ultimately, the decisions are mine.   So, we're back to Alesha's advice: do what works.  And in Barclay's Apology his first proposition is that we should approach faith in God as we approach art or science, that is experimentally.   Through experimenting and testing our experiences, we come to know God in a personal way, in a living way, and as a loving way.  That's the first proposition. All else hangs on this experience. And if I think to my life I've had many experiences of God in my life.  Honestly, no matter what I believed theologically about God, God has always been there.  There is a certain peace and joy that comes from that.  

I used to believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present God, but got hung up on that.  What kind of God like that would allow... then I came to understand that it's not about allowing.  Creation has its own rules of actions and reactions of causes and consequences.  When a plane crashes, that's God's creation doing what it does. Some human error or natural occurrence caused the plane to crash.  People often give God the glory when they are saved from death and they explain away that there is always a reason for the bad things.  I don't see it this way at all.  Humans chose to get in a metal tube that flies with explosive fuel taking the chance they won't crash. God didn't choose to fly. We did.  But God is there with us, within us. When the plane crashes, God is there if we make it out. When the plane crashes God is there when we die.  That's the joy: God is always there in our sorrows, pain, happiness and success. God is always there.  Whether or not God has the power to save us from a tragic accident, that doesn't matter to me. God is there regardless.  There are many times when I've been in danger and have gotten out of that danger (life threatening sometimes).  God was with me and with the others who were involved.  When I was neck deep in my hurts, habits and hang-ups God was with me when I chose to cope maladaptively and God is with me in my recovery.  God doesn't make me or prohibit me from stuffing my face all night long until I'm sick, but God is with me when I choose to eat even when I'm not hungry.  The still small voice is there to Guide me, if I were to listen.  

These things are true for me:

I experience Power in some Christian worship but I've also experienced God in other religious settings.

I find meaning in the Christian and Hebrew myth (stories).

I know God to be omni-present, the rest I have no idea.

The Name of Jesus represents love, compassion, healing, transformation, regeneration, charity, peace, subversiveness to oppression, and justice. I love Jesus.

The dead speak to us today, and I have experienced that vividly and soberly.

There are many paths, but they do not always offer to lead to the same place (some enlightenment, some salvation). That's ok.

I don't have to agree on everything or understand everything to know God and to share that experience with others.

I don't have to accept the supernatural aspects of the Christian story to see power in meaning and metaphor.

It doesn't matter if what I call myself; it matters that I'm faithful.

Labels restrict. They also define and identify.  Jesus-loving Quaker suffices.  

Paganism is not bad or diabolical.  There are evil Christians and there are good Pagans.  It's the Inward Life that matters.  People have both the seeds of the Light and the seed of Darkness in them.  

That belief based on experience gives a solid foundation; belief based on teachings can lead to doubt and atheism.

I'm not alone in my journey.

Articulating the Quaker Faith - Can our kids do it? Can we?

 

Around 2001 or 2002, my late partner Russell and I went to worship at Stony Run Friends where we were regular attenders.  I always like sitting high so I can see everyone so we sat on the upper row of the facing benches.  We came dressed casually as we always do.  As the room filled to capacity with finely dressed people whom I didn't recognize, it became apparent to me something was off.

We didn't know but it was Friends School of Baltimore's senior farewell meeting for worship. "This oughta be good" I thought.

And it was.  The messages out of meeting, mostly from the teens themselves, showed  me the value of a Friends education.  These young graduates were able to articulate the principles of Quakerism better than I've heard many Quaker adults. They shared how they learned to be friends with people who were quite different from them; one grad mentioned that if he had gone to another private school, he didn't know, as a football player, if he would have such a diverse group of friends.  The emphasis on community, seeing that of God in everyone, the importance of meetings for worship in one's weekly practice, were among the principles that these mostly non Quaker youth learned and internalized.

When I served on FGC's Advancement and Outreach committee years ago, we learned that when articulating our faith to others, whatever we say should be under 30 seconds.  Think elevator pitch.  Whatever you can say in an elevator ride is about the attention span of anyone listening. If they want to know more they can ask more questions.

Even this video takes six minutes. But I think it's a start. As an educator I  believe that it's important that students express their experiences.  They often need help organizing their thoughts and narrowing down what they want to say.  Their understanding of life, even at a young age, is important to own and and I believe they should feel validated.  Yet when I have asked what it means to be a Quaker for some young Friends, I often get shrugs, or some vague answers about environmentalism and peace, or the SPICES.

SPICES is a start but those are the outward testimonies of an inward reality.  You can find secular groups or even other religious groups who share some or all of our values.

How do I explain Quaker faith?  Here is my simple explanation of Quaker spirituality.  I don't usually present this in bullet form but conversationally.  I'm still working to get it to 30 seconds 😉

1. We can experience the Spirit directly.
2. We have a tradition that informs us but does not rule us.
3. We experience the Spirit together, but we don't define it for each other.
4. Traditionally Quakers see the Spirit through Jesus Christ, but not all do today.
5. The Spirit is always with us and teaches and Guides us.
6. We use silence to hear the Spirit and it's out of the silence we speak, pray, sing or act in our meetings.
7. We can find Spirit in nature as well as with other people.
8. We can be healed or  released us from hurts, habits, hang-ups, addictions and attachments. and transformed by the power of the Spirit.
9. The Spirit can lead us to ministry, service and activism.
10. We see that of God in all people.  All are welcome. and we are enriched by diversity.

Can you articulate your experience of being Quaker?
What canst thou say?
What can your kids say?