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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
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
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
What is homosexuality?
What Jesus said about Gay
Rights
The purpose of homosexuality
What the Bible Says about
Homosexuality
Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men
Varieties
of Gay Spirituality
Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality
as Artistic Medium
"It's Always About You"
The myth of the
Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara
Joseph Campbell's description of
Avalokiteshvara
You're
Not A Wave
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
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
"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
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
The
D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance
The
Rainbow Flag
Toby's friend
and nicknamesake Toby Marotta.
About
Michael Talbot, gay mystic
About Guy Mannheimer
About Dennis Paddie
About Sterling Houston
About Michael Stevens
Second March on
Washington
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It was for a magical
reason that I joined the Servite Order in 1967: for I discovered that Peregrine was a Servite
name.
St. Peregrine was a 14th
Century Italian Servite friar who’d been canonized for his good works--and for his having been miraculously
healed overnight of a melanoma
lesion on his lower leg. Peregrine is the patron saint of cancer patients and, more recently, of people
with AIDS. He’s usually shown
pulling his tunic up to
expose the lesion. (Peregrine’s malady was probably actually phlebitis; as an act of
mortification and austerity Peregrine always stood, he never sat down. That’s a sure way
to get varicose veins and phlebitis.
The instant cure is no less remarkable though! What he called his
"penance" might have been a case of sciatica. He didn't sit down
because it hurt his lower back.)
I’d become attached
to the name when, as a fervent young man fresh
out of high school and about
to enter novitiate with my first Order, the
Marianists, the word
“peregrination” was the secret word on a local radio
station for which you could
win a prize by calling in when the D.J. used it.
I was proud of myself for
knowing the relatively obscure secret word, and
proud of myself for
recognizing that I was starting a true spiritual
peregrination.
Several years later,
I was told to leave that first religious order because
I was too modern and too
independent a thinker--I understand now that
that was a euphemism for my
burgeoning homosexuality. But still drawn
to monasticism, I soon
discovered in the Servites an Order that was seriously
making an effort to
modernize AND that had a St. Peregrine. On Peregrine’s
feast day, May 2, 1967, a
whole series of coincidences fell together
including, interestingly,
Joseph Campbell’s notion of embarking on a “hero’s
journey” and the Buddhist
bodhisattva spirituality that readers of my books
will recognize as ongoing
theme--and all coordinated by a
young Servite seminarian I had a crush on (Allan Pinka).
The synchronicity seemed to me a sign I should join the Servites. I
moved in with them in the St. Louis University Grad Student dorm (the
old Coronado Hotel) and lived as a Servite seminarian my last year of
college. Then transferred to Catholic Theological Union in Chicago
where the ’Vites were combining their theologate (priesthood training)
with that of the Franciscans and the Passionists.
And what a good
decision that was! I loved living in community. I
loved the brotherhood of
idealistic and innocent young men. And Servite
life proved a great way for
me to finally figure out my sexual orientation--
within the context of being
a spiritual pilgrim.
It also got me to San Francisco
in 1968 where the Servites had a house on Stanyan St. on the edge of
the Haight-Ashbury still heady
and hippie from the Summer of Love.
Indeed, I’d been a
hippie seminarian as a Servite. I got in trouble with
them for wearing my hair too
long and--again--for being too independent
a thinker. While in seminary
in Southern California, I inadvertently got to
be editor of the Servite
Provincial newsletter. I really was only supposed to
be the printer (because the
Provincial printing press was in the basement of
the seminary). But since I
had to do the typing and layout, I couldn’t resist
including my own column.
Peregrine was the
monastic name I chose as a Servite--in my second venture in Catholic
religious life. The name means
“pilgrim” or “wanderer.” It seemed like the perfect religious name. The
spiritual quest is
frequently metaphorized as a pilgrimage. Joseph Campbell likened the
effort of
every person to live a full,
rich, contributing, and worthwhile life to the “hero’s journey.” Being
a hero is saying yes to life,
achieving maturation and beauty of character, learning to cope with
challenges and
difficulties --
through discovery of one’s true spiritual being as invincible and
eternal and beyond ego.
For homosexually oriented
souls, being gay is the great challenge. Being gay calls for being a
wanderer, seeking an idealized
life beyond the difficulties, for we are cast out from the conventional
roles of householder and
paterfamilias, called to
discover our own special path. The journey is to wholeness and virtue,
to fullness of experience, and
to being a source of love and joy in a world so often bereft of love
and joy these days.
Being a pilgrim or
wanderer means accepting the insecurity of life, being open to change.
It’s the opposite of being a
householder obsessed with stability and safety--and self-reliance.
Being a wanderer puts you at
the mercy of the seasons and vissicitudes of human history. It means
sometimes relying on the kindness
of strangers and being a stranger yourself and a hero, on a quest,
doing good deeds and showing kindness
along the way.
Being a wanderer means placing your faith in something bigger than
yourself and your own powers.
Being a spiritual wanderer means responding to signs--“karmic
resonances"--to reveal the
path you should be following. It may mean believing in luck,
synchronicity--and magic.
I wrote an article
reminding the Servite Fathers that the Order was
originally founded as
mendicant at the time of the Franciscan reform of
monasticism, meaning the
Servites were supposed to practice an especially
rigorous form of poverty. I
wrote that I thought they ought to abandon their
automobiles and hitchhike
around Los Angeles--relying on the kindness
of strangers. You can see
the hippie in me in that advice! It wasn’t long
after that I was out of my
second religious Order and standing by the side
of California Highway 101,
hitchhiking to San Francisco: a true mendicant
seeking liberation.
The funny thing was
that here I’d taken the name Peregrine who’s
always shown with his staff
and begging bowl and his skirt hiked up showing
his leg--just like Claudette
Colbert in "It Happened One Night," teaching
Clark Gable how to hitchhike!
The peregrinations
have taken me on many a turn since then. The next step was going to be to discover gay
activism, to meet Joseph Campbell, to find that I could write books that got
published, and in quite a surprising way to “heal” a boyfriend of cancer (by
insisting he go to a doctor urgently and, the next day, undergo emergency
surgery—on May 2nd, St. Peregrine’s Day). My pilgrim steps then led me to be a
gay psychotherapist, then gay bookseller, novelist, and with Kip (now through 19 years), quasi-eremitical gay
B&B Guestmaster.
Spring 2003 White Crane
Journal #56
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