IN SPIRIT

“Spirit” comes from the Latin word for breath and my spirituality is like the air. It is all around me and in me each time I breathe. In the midst of the Covid-19 crisis, breathing and spirituality have been on my mind a lot lately, so I wanted to write about my own spirituality for the first time, knowing full well that putting such matters into words is a tricky business.

If the tone of this piece sounds irreverent, please know that I take spiritual matters very seriously. I just never want to appear sanctimonious. I also have no interest in proselytizing, so what follows is not an attempt to convince anybody of anything. How one chooses to believe, or not believe, is their own business and I respect that.

My personal journey has taken me from Christianity to atheism to a 12-Step-based model . While my spiritual life has certainly been influenced by all of these things, my experience is uniquely my own.

When I got sober in 1979, I had to reckon with a new relationship with something called a “higher power”. It wasn’t vertically higher like the God of my childhood, it was higher because it was bigger than me and nearer to me, like the air.

When a friend decided to return to the rooms of recovery after a few years away, he told me: “I’ve found that life is much better and easier with a higher power than without one.” When I look back at the ten years of my life that was fueled by my own internal combustion engine (age eighteen to twenty-eight), I have to admit that the simplicity of his experience matches mine.

At Easter time, I often think back to the church-based lessons of my childhood. Although my religious training was as conservative as any in the mid-twentieth century, it did not include eternal damnation. I also feel very fortunate that neither my troubled parents nor my church ever tried to ram sexual guilt down my throat.

DOWNWARD-FACING GOD

My spirituality was grounded in the teachings of the Anglican Church, specifically St. Michael’s and St. George’s in St. Louis. It was the Episcopal church-of-choice for the upper-class families in the West County in the 1950s. My parents weren’t social climbers, they just figured that since their kids were already going to private schools, they might as well get their religious education with their privileged classmates. It was elitist, but it was still our community.

We didn’t attend church as a family. Embroiled in bad marriage, Mom had given up on religion by the time I was a young boy. She was often depressed and spent most of her energy just getting through the day. As her husband drank in local bars each night, she often stayed up drinking scotch and listening to Frank Sinatra records. She stewed in her anger and abandonment until Dad came home around 2:00 AM, then they had another big fight.

During these times, she fastened a cross-shaped pin that she had earned for perfect Sunday School attendance to the sofa pillow next to her head. When I saw her conked out on the living room couch the next morning with the pin next to her face, it was the closest I ever saw her come to communing with God.

Dad too had abandoned religion after witnessing the worst of human cruelty and suffering on the battlefields of World War II. But even though he was an agnostic, he dutifully dropped my older sister Barbie and me at the back steps of “St. Mike’s” in our Sunday best.

We waved from the steps as his car faded into the distance. As soon as the coast was clear, Barbie grabbed my hand.

“Come on, we’re going to Velvet Freeze!”

Terrified of getting caught, I pulled and whined as she dragged me down the steps. Her boldness soon won out as I fell into a quick-step, twenty-five minute march to the ice cream parlor. Along the way, we tore open our little offering-envelopes to buy hot fudge sundaes. After gorging ourselves, my big sister spit on a paper napkin and wiped any chocolate smears off my face before setting off on a fast trot back to St. Mike’s. When Dad came to pick us up, he found us perched on the church steps like the naughty-but-nice children in a Norman Rockwell painting.

When we couldn’t make it to Velvet Freeze, Barbie and I attended a small kiddie chapel. After just a few childish prayers, we filed into separate playrooms. Although I much preferred our “sundae school” to Sunday school, I didn’t mind working on biblical scenes in Christian coloring books.

I especially liked the illustrations of Christ on the cross at Easter. I delighted in raking a red crayon back and forth across Jesus’ naked torso depicting fountains of blood spewing from his wounds. A “woke” Sunday school teacher today might see this as a cry for help, but in those days she just taped my bloodbath on the wall next to the cardboard, pastel bunnies.

Above our drawings on the wall, a color print of Jesus, the hippie-beautiful, kind-eyed white man, made a big impression on me. When I was seven, I once saw Mom emerge from the bathroom wrapped in a towel after a shower, her wet brunette curls cascading down to her shoulders.

“Mommy, you look just like Jesus,” I said in my little boy voice.

She swept me up in her arms and covered my face with kisses. For the next few months, she told this story to anyone who would listen and everyone had a good laugh at the cuteness of my remark.

Otherwise, we didn’t hear much about Jesus in our house because Mom considered anyone who regularly referred to Christ as Jesus to be “drips.”

It was her name for people that she considered to be unintelligent and boring. In Mom’s book, being a bore was worse than committing a felony. If she was cornered by a gas-bag who consumed the air space with unending monologues, she listened politely. After he was out of earshot, her eyes always rolled heavenward as she proclaimed:

“Oh brrrother … was he ever wet!”

I always tried to be clever in the company of adults so that I would never become one of the Wet Ones. Although the hand sanitizing wipes by the same name are in short supply nowadays, the world never seems to run out of suffocating bores.

If we heard anything like “Jesus” at home, it was when Dad was exasperated (which was often) and he hollered “Jeez” or “Crimeny,” euphemisms that he had learned from his Christian Scientist mother who brooked no taking-the-name-of-the-Lord-in-vain.

However, we heard “Go to hell” a lot when Dad was yelling at Mom (which was also often).

The first time I heard the word “hell” at St. Mike’s was when I was thirteen. I was sitting in confirmation class learning the Apostle’s Creed when I read that after Jesus was crucified and buried, he “descended into hell.”

Our teacher explained that the next line, “on the third day he rose again from the dead,” was the “good news” of The Gospels. The Creed continued:

“… he ascended into heaven,

He is seated on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty;

From there he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

In other words, Jesus became Christ. The teacher said that “the quick” meant “the living” and that Jesus somehow had to go to hell to assume his co-pilot seat next to God. However, like a considerate houseguest, he had the good sense to only stay for three days.

Although the Anglican Church was considered quasi-Catholic, it didn’t hold the same tenets. There was no mandatory confession, no adoration of Mary and the Saints and (thanks to Henry VIII) marriage was not a sacrament.

In confirmation class, the picture of movie-star Jesus on the playroom wall was replaced with the ever-present depiction of Christ on the cross. I had been drawn to this image in coloring books, but the sight of a near-naked, writhing male body held a different appeal in early adolescence. Not quite sexual yet, but definitely intriguing.

Although I heard talk of heaven in my confirmation studies, I never got the idea that I should deny earthly pleasures to get there. In class I learned that Anglicans were free to misbehave all week, secure in the knowledge that we could obtain forgiveness on Sunday morning. If we felt truly remorseful about our behavior, there was no withholding of communion until one had confessed, just a private conversation with God in the pews before going up to the altar for Christ’s body and blood. Such silent repentance was our get-out-of-jail card that could be redeemed each week.

Once confirmed, I started attending services in the big chapel where I never heard the word “hell” lobbed from the pulpit like a grenade. I don’t know about other Anglican churches, but such fire-and-brimstone carryings-on would have been considered tacky at St. Mike’s. Like the Nicene Jesus, we didn’t loiter in hell. It was just a word intoned once on Sundays when the congregation recited the Creed.

As for pageantry, the Roman Catholic mass had nothing on us. I was immediately drawn to the ritual of the high Anglican Church. The organ music, the choir, the clerical robes, the smell and the bells all held great attraction for an unfledged gay kid like me.

I gaped at the boy leading the parade down the aisle holding a golden cross atop a long pole. It looked like a starring role; even the priest trailed behind. So when I was fourteen, I decided to serve as an acolyte.

I soon regretted my decision when I showed up for my first gig in the sacristy a half-hour before services. The acolyte who had carried the cross was waiting for me and brusquely told me to take off my jacket. He then pulled a wire hanger from a closet that was lined with identical white robes. Ever compliant, I put my head through the top hole and wriggled into the one-size-fits-all cassock. Upon closer inspection, I was disappointed to see that the robe was fashioned from old bedsheets. The older boy then took a length of white clothesline from a hook on the wall and yanked it around my waist. When I saw myself in the mirror, I looked like a prison-escapee in a jerry-rigged outfit from someone’s backyard.

The closest I ever came to hell were summers in St. Louis and my debut as an acolyte fell on a particularly hot, humid morning spent kneeling on a stone step beside the altar. As I teetered on my aching knees, I closed my eyes, bowed my head and pretended to pray, while a young priest (who later became a U. S. Senator) performed the rite of Holy Communion in a bright green chasuble .

I was directing all of my attention to not keeling over, so I wasn’t paying much attention to my duties until the priest stage-whispered “get the wine, get the wine!” out of the side of his mouth. I hauled myself up, limped into the sacristy and shuffled back with two small pitchers of water and sickly-sweet, red liquid.

One morning as I sweltered on the step in my percale cassock, a loud thunk on the opposite side of the altar snapped me out of my trance. I peeked around the priest’s robe and saw that my fellow acolyte had passed out from heat stroke. His head had hit the stone floor and his knees were folded underneath him like a Cirque de Soleil contortionist.

As if on cue, a couple of men popped out of the front pews, hoisted him up by his limbs and carried him fireman-style to an adjacent side room. As he lay stretched out on a couch sipping grape juice until his parents arrived, the services continued as if nothing had happened. The devout congregants knelt at the railing, kept their eyes fixed upward at the cross and stuck out their tongues for dry wafers with a wine-water chaser.

During my time as an acolyte, religion began to look like so much show-biz to me and I soon felt like a bit-player stuck in a never-ending musical like Cats. Any sense of a religious mystery had vanished after my stint behind-the-scenes, but I stuck it out until the end of the year before retreating back to the anonymity, and the relative comfort, of the padded knee boards of the pews.

By age fifteen, my home life had hardened me into a sarcastic cynic and I let go of my childish belief in a celestial Santa Claus. I stopped praying after gazing upward too many times, tearfully begging God to fix my home life while nothing changed. My approach to prayer then was like putting in an order at a spiritual drive-up window to an unseen presence who would deliver me a Happy-Meal-Life, made just the way I wanted it, somewhere down lane. When that didn’t happen, I took another step away from God.

I see now that looking up in prayer was a juvenile attempt to lift myself out of my psychic pain. Once I backed off praying in private, if I thought of God at all, I still imagined Him looking down, His gaze piercing through the pomp and the flesh, his eyes fixed on the suffering of the human heart. Although He didn’t seem to do much about it, it gave me some comfort just to know that He was watching. I too was always looking down in church, either hunched over a gory coloring book or perched on a stone step, ever aware of the ache of humanity, like the downward-facing God of my imagination.

Once I turned seventeen and got a VW bug, I never pointed it towards St. Mike’s. I preferred to sleep in on Sunday mornings after listening to my parents’ brawls outside of the bedroom door until the wee hours of the night.

FROM GODLESS TO HIGHER POWER

When I picked up booze and drugs at the University of Virginia in 1969, I was delighted to discover that they took the edge off, or totally numbed, the pain of living. Any residual notions of God soon flew out my dorm room window once I’d mastered the knack for escaping the human condition with substances. When Jesus Freaks approached me on campus, I enjoyed watching them wince when I announced that I was a “goddamn atheist.” When they said “we’ll pray for you,” I just gave them the finger and walked away.

It was easy to convince myself at college that alcohol and drugs wouldn’t put me on the same trajectory as my parents. Despite my genetic predisposition for alcoholism, I told myself that I didn’t drink like them. In fact, I didn’t. I drank like me for ten years and it was enough to crash-land me into my own brand of addiction.

When I entered recovery, I had to come to an understanding of a loving “Higher Power.” When it was explained to me that it could be anything so long as it wasn’t my ego-Ralph, my former concept of a downward-looking God seemed too out of reach. Over the first few months, I enjoyed listening to the diverse spiritual musings of the people in the church basements. Somewhere in the first six months I cobbled together my own idea of a HP that cared about me.

While I still can’t define it, I know that I found my HP (or it found me) on the grimy, linoleum floors in the church basement, not on the sparkling, marble floors of the chapel above. Both have their place in the crazy-quilt of human spirituality, but my new HP was no longer above me; it was within and around me no matter where I was.

Carl Jung kept these words on a plaque over his front door, and later had them etched on his gravestone:

“Bidden Or Unbidden, God Is Present.”

Today HP is just present in my life. I don’t feel the need to worship it because it is as close, familiar and unintrusive as my own shadow. It bears silent witness and provides guidance through other people and intuition (what some call “the still, small voice within”). My 12-Step HP challenges me to be more compassionate and helpful (however imperfectly) to anybody going through a difficult day, especially when that person is me.

Over-explaining a higher power that works for me runs the risk of turning it into a hollow husk. I don’t need to personify it as a deity and assigning it a gender just feels silly, so I’ll simply say that I depend upon an unknowable, yet ever-present, force. Like the air, it prefers to remain anonymous. A No-Name God, like the frozen steaks.

My spirituality began to wobble during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, so I went to psychics hoping to make some sense out of all the random sickness and dying around me. The idea of a reality where dead friends and lovers could speak to me was comforting at first but, try as I might, I just couldn’t experience any supernatural phenomena first-hand. After a while, the certainty of life-after-death began to smack of the whole God-above thing.

When the psychics talked about friends and family being at peace “in spirit,” I just couldn’t see why anyone should wait for death to experience this serenity. Though early in my recovery, I had already witnessed many people in the rooms reaching this state here on earth. I even felt it myself from time to time.

Withholding peace and joy until an afterlife felt like a spiritual layaway plan that I just couldn’t embrace. Since I never believed in hell, it seemed disingenuous, and a little too convenient, to suddenly buy the Pearly Gates package. In my 12-Step spiritual life, there is no heaven or hell, just what the program calls “the bondage of self” and the freedom of forgiveness.

Without repudiating the help and metaphysical beliefs of these well-meaning psychics, I realized that I was alive now in body, mind and spirit, and it was good. Sometimes it was hard, but my spirituality didn’t need the sure knowledge of anything to believe that my living-breathing life could change for the better. After forty years of recovery, it’s all the higher power that I seem to need.

In the face of the pandemic, my brand of spirituality gets me through uncertain times without the need for answers. Like in the days of the AIDS epidemic, I modify my behavior according to what science tells me and leave the rest to unfold as it will. Call me “Mary Sunshine,” but I know that if things don’t turn out as I’d hoped, but they will be okay in the end. It has happened before and, although I don’t know for sure how or when, I have no reason to doubt that it won’t happen again.

When I met my husband Sean ten years ago, he told me that he was an avowed atheist and I didn’t blink. I also didn’t explain my spirituality beyond saying that is was non-religious. In my experience, most people don’t really care what I do or don’t believe, but when he asked me if I believed in an afterlife, I responded, without missing a beat, that the thought of being with my family in eternity was not a comfort to me.

Although I now understand that my parents did the best they could with what they had, I still prefer for our shared past to remain in the past. If I should wake up in a happily-ever-after, white-light place with them after I’ve popped off, it will come as a glorious surprise. In the meantime, making the most of my one-and-only life for however long it lasts in the here-and-now feels like the right place for my attention and energies.

UNORIGINAL SIN

To the best of my recollection, all of the priests at St. Mike’s were married. Maybe that’s why they never mentioned sex since, unlike the Catholic clergy, it was just a natural part of their lives. The word “homosexual” never crossed anyone’s lips in the chapel, or anywhere else, since the mere mention of the word would have acknowledged that such a thing existed in the 1950s.

When I came out in 1970, I was mystified by gay friends who anguished about their sexuality because of their religious pasts where Original Sin was a constant presence. In my experience, St. Mike’s never pushed this doctrine. Whenever I heard about sin, it was usually in the context of not treating people well in thought, word or deed. It had nothing to do with sex.

Although Masters and Johnson conducted their research in St. Louis at the same time as I was grappling with adolescent male attractions, I was totally in the dark about any kind of sex. When boys made jokes about female body parts in the locker room, I faked a chortle but had no clue what their punch lines meant. I could have used a little guidance.

When I was twelve, Mom left a pamphlet on my bed entitled What My Child Should Know. Upon returning home from school, I read it and came away bewildered by weird anatomical line-drawings and metaphors about how the man’s “pearl drops fertilize the female eggs.” I hadn’t masturbated yet, so the “pearl drops” meant nothing and the thought of “fertilizing a girl’s eggs” blew my mind. The only eggs I’d seen were in our refrigerator and the only fertilizer I knew was the manure in our garden. What had been a simple question mark in my mind became a muddle of pearls, eggshells and poop.

When I passed Mom in the hall that evening, she asked if I had read the pamphlet. I said “yes” and there endeth my sex education.

Luckily, the sexual revolution came at just the right time for me. After taking a Mental Hygiene class at college, I was convinced that an interest in sex was essential to my emotional and psychological well-being. Around the time that my attraction to men began to bubble up inside, I happened upon a Time Magazine article about the Stonewall Riots in the library. I read and re-read the article and learned that homosexuals were thriving in places like New York and San Francisco. When I noticed the words “Gay is Good” spray-painted on a train bridge near campus, I realized that they even existed in Charlottesville, Virginia.

As I started to come out to myself, I became intensely curious about gay sex, but there was no one that I could ask about it. Fate intervened when a friend came out to me in the summer before our sophomore year. He took me to my first gay bar and showed me his porn magazines depicting man-on-man sex. Although I was really turned on by the images, my main concern at that time was figuring out how could I actually love another man.

My friend couldn’t offer any advice because, like me, his insides were swirling with testosterone and adrenaline. Without role models for same-sex relationships, I just careened like a wanton pinball through the hyper-sexual world of bars, bathhouses, bookstores and the occasional bedroom.

At nineteen, most everybody I had sex with was older, but they weren’t wise elders. It may have just been good fortune that none of them ever tried to violate me (unless I wanted them to), but to a man, they were gentle and patient. I was a quick study in the mechanics of sex, and I had a lot of fun, but it didn’t take me long to realize that all my human needs weren’t getting met.

I needed some good counsel in those days that only a gay elder could have provided, someone I could go to without any sexual dynamics getting in the way. I’m sure that I still would have made my mistakes, contracted my share of STDs and suffered heartbreak in my early years, but it might have helped to have an older shoulder to cry on, a shoulder attached to a crepe-y neck below a mouth weighted down by hard-won wisdom, a mouth that might have told me:

“Don’t worry, honey. I’ve been there too. Here’s how I handled it ...”

Navigating sex and love on my own was hard enough, but shouldering the added burden of Hell and Original Sin would have been too much for me as a gay newbie. Had I been spiritually conflicted about my homosexuality, I might never have moved to San Francisco in 1973 and plunged into the closest thing to heaven I’ve ever known: a burgeoning community of gay people that was open and diverse beyond my imagination.

No, I would have probably stayed in my privileged cadre in St. Louis, become a closeted, entitled white guy with a white-collar job. Another “confirmed bachelor” escorting debutantes to social events, then bee-lining it downtown to dark corners of the YMCA, or risking arrest in outdoor cruising areas, for a few minutes of shame-ridden sex.

Thanks Mom and Dad, wherever you are, for sparing me all that when you dropped me off at the back steps of St. Mike’s.

[Post Script: I know where my parents are. A few months before Dad died in 1989, he noticed an announcement in the St. Mike’s newsletter about a columbarium being built near the main entrance. After showing it to Mom, he went directly to the church’s office and bought a niche. Although I can’t remember ever seeing Mom and Dad in the pews of St. Mike’s, their ashes are permanently interred inside a serpentine wall that encircles its garden. Even though I can’t believe it for myself, I like to imagine that my parents are finally experiencing the peace “in spirit” that they never found in life.]