a tender but ruthless seduction that will unravel our dreams, expose our tawdry ambitions, unwrap our fingers from the grasp we have on our lives, and teach us how to let go into the mystery of love. Despite all our misunderstandings, stubbornness, vanity and brokenness – yours and mine – God is seducing us into life beyond our imagining.
Surrendering to this seduction, however, can be frightening and bewildering and it is not wise to face it alone. One of the worst features of the spiritual oppression of sexual minorities has been the deep isolation so many of us have suffered, as we have struggled to deal with life and faith with all of their terror and beauty. At the heart of Jesus’ message is the promise that where two or three gather in his name, he would be there in the midst of them. Gay people, however, have been denied the chance to gather together – and certainly not in Christ’s name – because we have been forbidden to speak the truth of our deep selves in the community of God’s people. This is grave oppression.
I regard it as a miracle of grace that, despite everything, gay people have begun to find their voice and find one another. The final essay in this collection, the second ‘book-end’, is about the longing for community, for brotherhood, for companions on the road into the desert of the Divine. As he lay dying, St Francis said that when he set out on his spiritual journey, ‘No-one showed me what to do, but the Lord himself led me’, but then he added, ‘and the Lord gave me some brothers’. It was with the giving of those brothers that the Franciscan movement came into being. We need loving community as we seek to build a world where no-one will be a spiritual outcast, where everyone will be welcomed as sister and brother, where wise companions will support us as we surrender to the mystery of God.
Around the world there are attempts being made to form new spiritual communities, and these tentative, fragile experiments are bringing a new quality of hope into the lives of many gay people. I wrote the final essay in this book while staying with a very traditional community of Trappist monks, and just two weeks before encountering the Easton Mountain Retreat community in upstate New York, where gay men from a variety of spiritual traditions are forming a new kind of religious brotherhood. There is something symbolic in this movement from traditional religious forms, into solitude and search, then into evolving models of spiritual community. We need to come together, drawing both from traditional sources of wisdom and from our own particular insight and experience, and learn to support one another in ways that conventional religious institutions cannot even imagine. As we do this, we offer inspiration, challenge and witness to other spiritual seekers, from every religious tradition and every sexual orientation, that they can do the same. And so, not for the first time, gay people can become spiritual pioneers for the human family.
To do this, however, we must go deeply into our experience of life and of God, we must face and challenge both the beauty and brutality of our traditional religious institutions and teachings, we must reclaim, re-imagine and re-embody the revelation of Divine Love, the mystery ever ancient, ever new, that is manifesting in every moment, in every being, in every beat of every human heart. If this collection of essays offers some witness to this challenge, this vocation, this hope, then all the struggle and contemplation that lie behind these words will have been simply the play of grace.
*
A note on language
One of the most contentious issues facing anyone who writes about the experience of people belonging to ‘sexual minorities’ is the question of which words to use. Gay, queer, gay and lesbian, LGBT (lesbian, gay bisexual, transgender), lesbigay, homosexual, men-who-love-men and women-who-love-women – all of these terms and more have been tried – and each is contentious. Some people, for example, would see ‘gay’ as referring only to those who are fully out and proud, rather than to ‘homosexuals’ in general. Other people would question whether the word ‘queer’ can be used of, say, affluent, conservative men who love men, or whether it should be restricted to folks who are ‘alternative’, irrespective of who they might sleep with. Then, of course, there are the more academic concerns of the deconstructionists – which are valid and important but beyond the scope of this note. Suffice it to say that any use of language in the area of sexuality and gender must be conscious, clear and somewhat provisional. The best we can hope for, perhaps, is transparency about our particular use of particular words.
To speak personally, then, it was when I came across LGBTQIQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex questioning), a seven-letter attempt to cover all the bases, that I finally abandoned my efforts to keep up with the ongoing search for new terms to name and describe ‘sexual minorities’. I decided to return to using the shortest word of all: gay. I do not discount the important issues that lie behind each of these terms. I would suggest, however, that the issues are not happily solved by adding new letters, and that someone who aspires to be a writer, especially in public forums, needs to make choices.
For the most part, I have chosen to use the words ‘gay’ or ‘gay people’ to refer to those whose primary sexual and emotional attractions are to those of their own sex. I usually refer to ‘gay men’ when I am writing specifically about the experience of ‘men who love men’. I do value and occasionally use some of the other terms, however, and I hope that my writing will be relevant to a variety of people who, for a variety of reasons, may find themselves outside the sexual mainstream. Personally, I identify as a gay man, and it is from this perspective that I write.
Michael Bernard Kelly
On the Peninsula, alone with God
When I am asked these days, ‘What do you do?’ I am stumped. The monk Thomas Merton wrote: ‘What I do is live. How I pray is breathe.’ The southern Mornington Peninsula, with its clean winds and endless ocean, is a good place to learn to live and breathe.
In 1988, exhausted after years of teaching and ministry, I moved down here to rest and live alone for a year. I walked the beaches and sat by the fire, and slowly I fell in love with a contemplative way of being. Contemplatives, they say, are not people who have solved the mystery of God. They are those who can no longer keep the mystery at bay.
My life here is quiet and unremarkable, often enough boring and lonely. I have my times of prayer and meditation, but mostly I just ‘chop wood and carry water’, as Zen puts it. It’s all quite ordinary, but somehow the plainness and spaciousness of it keeps calling me home, often in spite of myself. Living simply, attentively, it becomes hard to sustain your illusions and ambitions, and impossible to miss the restless striving of your spirit. You start to live through the different ‘shapes’ your longing takes, and you enter the longing itself. In the still centre of your soul, you begin to taste deep silence.
The Spanish poet Machado wrote: ‘Is my soul asleep? No, my soul neither sleeps nor dreams, but watches, its clear eyes wide open… and listens at the shore of the Great Silence.’ I remember walking up the track from Bushrangers Bay on a windy afternoon five years ago. It was a time when the endless letting go asked of me seemed almost overwhelming. I looked across to the old hills sweeping down to the sea and was suddenly struck dumb by the sense that all our religions, sciences and philosophies are just toys and bones tossed on the edges of this Unknown Sea. We sit on the shore and play games with them to keep away our fear. We must face our fear, stop our games and turn our gaze to that sea. Living contemplatively means shaping your life so that you will be led continually to do just that.
For me this has meant learning the tough lessons of silence and solitude, but also coming to terms with chronic health problems. Together these have imposed a discipline and rhythm that have kept me slow-dancing on that empty shore as my old games have been inexorably exposed. For many contemplatives this all happens amid structured rituals, rules, robes and regulated practices, and sometimes I miss them in my dishevelled way of living. They have great value, but if you take them too seriously they can also insulate you against the rawness of life and the shock of the unknown. In time, they too
