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Also on this website:
Toby
Johnson's books:
TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the
Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of
Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE:
Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe
SECRET
MATTER: updated, revised & expanded edtion from Lethe Press
with Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE
PLAGUE:
A NOVEL ABOUT HEALING.
CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into
Gold: Reclaiming Our Queer Spirituality Through Story
About ordering
Books on Gay Spirituality:
Articles
and Excerpts:
Read
Toby's review of Samuel Avery's The
Dimensional Structure of
Consciousness
Funny
Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San
Francisco"
The
Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate
A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality
Why gay people should NOT Marry
Wedding Cake Liberation
Gay Marriage in Texas
What's ironic
Shame on the American People
The "highest form of love"
The
cause of homosexuality
The origins of homophobia
Q&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness
What is homosexuality?
What
is Gay Spirituality?
My three messages
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
Queering religion
The purpose of homosexuality
Interview on the Nature of
Homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Waves
of Gay Liberation Activity
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
Easton Mountain Retreat Center
Andrew Harvey &
Spiritual Activism
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
What is Enlightenment?
What is reincarnation?
Emptiness & Religious Ideas
Experiencing experiencing experiencing
Going into the Light
Meditations for a Funeral
Meditation Practice
The way to get to heaven
Advice to Travelers to India
& Nepal
Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva
John Boswell was Immanuel Kant
Curious
Bodies
What
Toby Johnson Believes
The Joseph Campbell Connection
Campbell & The Pre/Trans Fallacy
The Nature of Religion
Being
Gay is a Blessing
Freedom
of Religion
The
Gay Agenda
Gay
Saintliness
Gay Spiritual Functions
The subtle workings of the spirit in gay men's lives.
The Sinfulness of
Homosexuality
Proposal
for a study of gay nondualism
Priestly Sexuality
Marian Doctrines: Immaculate Conception & Assumption
"The Evolution of Gay Identity"
"St. John of the
Cross &
the
Dark Night of the Soul."
Avalokiteshvara at the Baths.
Eckhart's Eye
Let Me Tell You a Secret
Religious Articulations of the
Secret
The Collective Unconscious
Driving as Spiritual Practice
Meditation
Historicity
as Myth
Pilgrimage
No Stealing
Next
Step in Evolution
The New Myth
Teenage
Prostitution and the Nature of Evil
Allah
Hu: "God is present here"
Adam
and Steve
The Life is in the Blood
Gay
retirement and the "freelance monastery"
Seeing with Different Eyes
What
are you looking for in a gay science fiction novel?
The
mystical
experience at the Servites' Castle in Riverside
The
Great Dance according to C.S.Lewis
The Techniques Of The World Saviors
Part 1: Brer Rabbit and the
Tar-Baby
Part 2: The
Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara
Part 3: Jesus
and the Resurrection
Part 4: A
Course in Miracles
The
Secret of the Clear Light
Understanding the Clear Light
Mobius
Strip
Finding Your
Tiger Face
How Gay
Souls Get Reincarnated
About Alien Abduction
In honor of Sir Arthur C Clarke
Karellen was a homosexual
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
More
about Gay Mental Health
Psych
Tech Training
The
Rainbow Flag
Ideas for gay mythic stories
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
Harry Hay, Founder of the gay movement
About Hay and The New Myth
About Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first man to really "come out"
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Arthur Evans
About Christopher Larkin
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Our friend Tom Nash
Second March on
Washington
Book
Reviews
The Gay Disciple by John Henson
Art That Dares by Kittredge Cherry
Coming Out, Coming Home by Kennth A. Burr
Extinguishing the Light by B. Alan Bougeois
Over Coffee: A conversation For Gay Partnership & Conservative Faith by D.a. Thompson
Dark Knowledge by Kenneth Low
Janet Planet by Eleanor Lerman
The Kairos by Paul E. Hartman
Wrestling with Jesus by D.K.Maylor
Kali Rising by Rudolph Ballentine |
Being gay is a blessing,
a higher incarnation, a better way to be. These are notions many of us,
especially men involved in the gay spirituality movement, may believe
deeply, but seldom say out loud. Perhaps because we are especially
sensitive to the problems that follow when one group claims superiority
over another, we do not claim superiority over normal heterosexuals.
But at certain moments--perhaps in meditation or prayer, perhaps in
sexual arousal, perhaps at a gay bar or a political fundraiser or
social event--we realize just how wonderful our lives are and how
blessed we are to be gay.
This discovery is an important part of spiritual maturation. As we
understand how blessed we are, we begin to put out those good vibes. We
can forgive the world. We can accept things as they are with all the
pain and loss that goes with being human. And when we do that we change
the world.
Gay orientation is participation in one of the great
thoughts of the planet. We resonate with the lives of all the
homosexuals who have lived before us. And we transform their lives by
the way we live ours. We affect all the people around us. The world is
a different place since gay liberation. No matter how hard anti-gay
forces try to prevent it, gay identity has appeared and is changing the
world. That is why, as individual gay people, we have a moral
responsibility to participate positively in this worldwide change we
are creating.
When you discover that your being gay is the longest
straw you ever drew in your life, then you can put out all good
intentions. You can love your life--even while you suffer.
The specifics of our lives may be horrific, like AIDS. But
that is the point. To love what is unlovable is to transform it. This
is how we participate in the evolution of consciousness.
Being a higher incarnation isn't better. The long straw
of gay identity implies sensitivity and vulnerability to other people,
and, even, responsibility and expectation of heroic virtue. Being a
higher incarnation, in the metaphor of Mahayana Buddhism, may mean
being a bodhisattva.
Transformation Of Religion
Religion teaches acceptance and
resignation to Divine Will, but all too often it also teaches
resistance to the way things are, i.e., to the so-called human
condition. Roman Catholicism teaches that the urges of the flesh and
the things that give pleasure to the body are sinful and punishable by
being burned alive everlastingly. Buddhism teaches that love of life
and enjoyment of the senses causes continuing rebirth into life after
life of suffering. Protestantism teaches that human beings are all
miserable sinners only worthy in God's eyes because we are cloaked in
the grace of Jesus's sacrificial death. These are not declarations of
the wisdom of choosing things the way they are and participating in the
beauty and growth of the world.
Religion inadvertently ends up being about unhappiness not happiness,
figuring out who is to blame, not understanding and feeling compassion
for other people's struggle. That is not the wisdom to glean from the
mythological vision that has come down to us. And it is not a wisdom to
be perpetuated.
With the transformation of our understanding of religion we can see
that the sex-negative, body-negative, life-denying, punitive notions in
religion need to be let go of to fall into the past--like the
persecution of witches or approval of slavery.
Like the rose that would bend to the pruning knife, mainstream
American Christianity should welcome the challenge gay people pose.
Here is its chance to transform its attitude and beliefs about the
mythologies of the past and to reorient itself back to the teachings of
Jesus about love and compassion. It's time to give up Jesus as medieval
God and to embrace Jesus--and Avalokiteshvara--as symbols of how humans
can relate to one another, all as loving neighbors, all as different
manifestations of the same Self of Earth.
The message of the myths is that we can make up our own religion.
Indeed, we have to. We may do that, of course, by joining a Church or
by becoming a student of a Master and accepting everything we're told.
But we do it, not because it is the One True Church or because the
Master is right. We do it because we choose to follow this path because
we like how it makes us feel. We may also do it by studying various
religions and selecting the metaphors that seem life-affirming and
meaningful to us. We make up our own religion in order to feel good
about our life.
God doesn't care what religion we are. God just keeps shining. We're
the ones who have to choose how we think about God--or whether we even
do.
This essay is excerpted from GAY
SPIRITUALITY.
It continues with the next excerpt titled Freedom
of Religion
Christian de la
Huerta, author of Coming Out Spiritually: The Next Step,
identifies ten spiritual functions
of gay and lesbian people.
Toby Johnson, PhD is
author of
eight books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his
teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and
religious problems, three gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual
issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's
spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality. In
addition to the novels featured
elsewhere in this web site, Johnson is author of IN SEARCH OF GOD IN
THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD and THE MYTH OF
THE GREAT SECRET (Revised edition): AN APPRECIATION OF JOSEPH
CAMPBELL.
Johnson's Lammy Award winning book GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness was published in 2000.
His Lammy-nominated book GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was published by Alyson in 2003. |
