Spiritual teachers

I’m a fairly non-confrontational person and I naturally tend to shy away from relationships that aren’t easy. Or maybe I just naturally focus on relationships that flow easily and smoothly. I’ve made a lot of progress with this, but there are still relationships in my life that remind me that I still have work to do in this area. Generally speaking, it isn’t necessarily out of fear or anger but probably more out of laziness and frustration. Some relationships require more emotional and mental gymnastics than other relationships. Some relationships require more maturity on my part than I think I’m willing to live up to.

I realize I’m deficient in this area (and others) and this is why I love the idea of a spiritual teacher, someone who doesn’t claim to have the answers but is willing to explore with me and help me find mine. I have quite a few in my life, some in formal roles and some are more informal. I love how they bring their own unique personal experience, personality and expertise to help me explore the aforementioned issue and help me see my blind spots.

One teacher has me stare at a flower pot for 3 minutes and asks me to tell her what I see. I spend about 20 seconds doing that and then start moving into what it all means. She stops me and tells me to go back to just describing what I see. Then she tells me to move to the other side of the pot and do the same thing. She notes afterwards how quickly I moved into meaning and says that one of the things that she loves about me is that I try to find meaning. She also tells me that sometimes it’s good to stick with “what is” for a while longer instead of immediately jumping to assigning meaning too quickly; otherwise, I miss out on some of the details. Details like the differing textures and smells of the different flowers and leaves, or the way the late afternoon sunlight filters through the leaves above and plays with the different textures in the flower pot below.

Another teacher skypes with me early in the morning while I make my morning smoothie. He explains to me how his relationship with his children has helped him understand his relationship with his parents. He asks me if I’d cut off a broken arm. Of course I wouldn’t and I hadn’t ever considered it, but perhaps I do it subconsciously/unintentionally. I smile as I realize that the severed hand that travels throughout my house will now take on new meaning.

A third teacher shares with me his own experience that mirrors some of my own experience. Empathizes like only he can. Then he shares this excerpt from a talk by Dian Saderup:

"We talked for another hour. I basked in the almost-tangible bond of the Rudolph's love, built over decades of trial, rejoicing, error, and success. The texture of accumulated life shared between Brother and Sister Rudolph radiates with joyous mystery. Her mind is as clear and active as almost any I have encountered, while Brother Rudolph, I venture to say, has scarcely an intellectual bone in his body. Yet I have never seen marital love and union more complete, more refreshing, more subtle. Maybe I am foolishly idealistic, but I nurture the hope that one day my bond with [insert person/entity with whom engaging is difficult] will be as deep, rich, and mysterious as the bond Eveline Rudolph has with her husband. I may find myself unlike [person/entity] in many ways, but there is always the possibility — through time and endurance in collective experience — of transcendence, of tolerant, fruitful love, and humble respect."

It's actually not quite the same thing

Have you ever heard the line that asking gay members of the church to remain celibate isn’t any different than asking single sisters who don’t marry to remain celibate? That statement is like nails on chalkboard to me. It completely dismisses the full reality faced by members of the church who experience feelings of attraction for the same sex.

I recently listened to this Mormon Stories interview with Natasha Parker, who is an LDS marriage and family therapist. Of the many topics they discussed, homosexuality was one of them. John Dehlin (the interviewer) explored with Natasha the options that are available to gay members. Natasha says right up front that none of the options are really that fantastic. I think she boiled them down to three options. One option is to leave the church and pursue a same sex relationship, a second option is to stay in the church and pursue a relationship with someone of the opposite sex, and a third is to stay in the church and remain celibate. Clearly, these aren’t the only options, but probably the three most well traveled paths.

At one point in the interview, John brings up the commonly stated idea that what the church asks of gay members isn’t different than asking single sisters (I also think it’s funny that it’s always single sisters and not single people in general) to remain celibate. He also mentions other scenarios, like what if one spouse experiences some kind of medical condition that renders him or her unable to be physically intimate, like paralysis. You could also say that sex isn’t everything and a lot of marriages become sexless anyway, so what’s the big deal? Anyway, John presents these scenarios and asks Natasha if that is a fair comparison to what is asked of gay members. Thankfully, Natasha responds that it’s not really the same thing.

I want to take it a step further and explain why it isn’t the same thing. With single sisters, there is at least still a hope that they will one day be able to be with someone who they love and are attracted to and either way, in the next life everything will be taken care of, right? I think there’s an assumption that that applies for homosexuals as well, meaning that everything will work out in the next life, and you won’t be gay. I don't think we magically become someone different in the next life. I don’t think we know exactly how things will work out in the next life. I believe that they will, I just don’t think we can fully know or understand how they will.

The comparison to marriages that become sexless anyway to justify marrying someone of the opposite sex doesn’t work for me either. Just because some marriages go through phases of little to no intimacy doesn’t mean I want to start out a marriage with that built in issue. Plus, the attraction to the same sex is about a lot more than just sex. I think a common misperception is that homosexuality is some kind of sexual addiction. Those are two completely different things. Sexual addiction can destroy you. I don’t think homosexuality can. Conflating the two only leads to misunderstandings that lead to failures in communication and understanding each other and what the real issues are.

There are emotional and intellectual and even intangible aspects to the attraction as well. If I had to choose between a sexless marriage to a woman and a sexless marriage to a man, I’d probably still choose a man. And it’s not because I don’t get along with women. Trust me, that has never been an issue. I went through a phase where I thought I got along too well with women and that part of curing the gay would be for me to try and not get along so well. That resulted in me slowly dying inside.

There’s just an intangible energy with men that I’m attracted to that isn’t necessarily only physical. If you are straight, try to explain the attraction that you have to your spouse or significant other or whomever you are attracted to. If it’s a mature attraction, it’s probably not purely physical and I’m guessing it would be difficult to fully explain why you are attracted. There are probably emotional and intellectual and spiritual aspects to your attraction as well as those intangible aspects that are hard to explain.

So bottom line is that the comparisons mentioned earlier just don’t work for me. To clarify, though, the purpose of this post isn’t to try and get the church to change its doctrine. That’s obviously not up to me to dictate. The purpose also isn’t to try and win the My-Life-is-the-Absolute-Worst-So-I-Deserve-the-Most-Pity competition.

In the July 2010 First Presidency message, President Eyring talks about faithful friends. He says, “When we reach out to give succor and to lift a burden, He reaches with us. He will lead us to those in need. He will bless us to feel what they feel. As we persist in our efforts to serve them, we will more and more be given the gift of feeling His love for them.” I just think that unless and until we really seek to understand and acknowledge the full reality of what other people face, there’s no way we can feel what they feel or experience true unconditional love for them. That's the purpose of this post.

New Roommate

I have a roommate for the summer. He moved in a few weeks ago and right about the time that he moved in, I found this under my pillow one night:

And now this severed hand keeps mysteriously showing up all over the place, but it turns out that he's quite handy. (ok, yeah, that pun was intended) He pours milk on my cereal in the morning.

Sometimes he likes to play the piano.

Or help out in the shower.

He pats my face dry after I wash it at night.

Brushes my teeth.

When we do donuts in an empty parking lot in the snow, he's the one who insists on pulling the emergency brake.

And after a long day, he pulls the bed down at night and tucks me in.

Did I mention that my new roommate is a mortician?

On a side note, I ate this for dinner tonight. This burger at Metrovino was recently named the best burger in Portland. I still think Yakuza's is better.

Intergenerational Healing

I’ve never really had a burning in my bosom for the doctrine of redeeming the dead. I mean intellectually, I get it. If you believe that every person needs to be baptized by one having proper authority in order to be saved, then yes, it’s good to have this backup plan for those who might not have had a proper opportunity in their lifetime. I guess it’s never really resonated more deeply than on a mere intellectual level though. Until I read this. Even if you aren’t Mormon or no longer espouse Mormon theology, I think the talk is still well worth the read. To me, it speaks more to the beautiful idea of intergenerational healing.

I think most people would be willing to admit that they carry baggage from their family of origin (FOO), some obviously more than others, but the baggage is there. I think any claim by someone that he or she carries no baggage at all would fall into the unkown unknowns category. Things you don’t know that you don’t know.

At any rate, I believe that the baggage comes from being raised by parents who at best, had no idea what they were doing, and at the very worst, intentionally inflicted abuse and their own buried pain on their children. In many cases, those parents are doing the best they can with what they had because they too were raised by parents who probably spent their fair share of time stewing in emotional dysfunction. And back it goes.

Then I begin to see how I am the product of generations of accrued emotional dysfunction, passive aggressiveness, emotional dishonesty, manipulation, etc. You also add growing up in a state with a high concentration of people with the same beliefs and you get another generous layer of generations of accrued Mormon cultural baggage. I imagine all our ancestors looking down and saying amongst themselves, “Good grief, what the hell did we do?” I imagine them saying that because I think most of it was unintentional, but now that they know what they know, they see and understand the negative aspects of their legacy.

This is where each one of us can step in and redeem them. And this is where redeeming the dead suddenly becomes one of the most beautiful things I can conceive of. I have the opportunity to practice unconditional love and forgiveness of what has been passed on to me and I can deconstruct it and build something much healthier. As a result, I free myself and those who have gone before me from prisons of dysfunction that are partly of our own making and partly inherited from those who have gone before. That’s true sealing power.

Ridiculous Friday Things

Someone posted this on Facebook. Have any of you seen it? I had so many questions as I watched it. Perhaps you can guess what some of them are...

Also, have any of you seen the Very Mary-Kate episodes? They are completely ridiculous. There are 19 episodes and each episode is roughly one minute. Just a warning though, if you have sensitive ears, you might want to avoid any of the episodes with Philip Seymour Hoffman. Turns out he's kind of a perv.

Very Mary-Kate: Moving Out from Mary-Kate Olsen on Vimeo.

Unknown Unknowns

A little while ago, I read an article in The New York Times called The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is. An anosognosic is someone who has a disability, but who is unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, typically a physical one, like paralysis or a missing limb. The article expands on that thought and discusses the idea that there are things that we know, things that we don’t know, things that we know we don’t know and things that we don’t know we don’t know. Stop and digest.

Typically we would probably think of the things we know as being what makes up our lives and who we are. It’s amazing though, to stop and consider how much of an effect the things that we don’t even know that we don’t know have on our lives. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

At this point, it’s fairly easy to stop and consider how ignorant other people are. How people are clueless about the things that they do that annoy others. It’s trickier though, to stop and think about all the things I don’t know, partly because sometimes I just don’t know what I don’t know.

Take, for example, the very tricky art of attaining happiness and contentment in life. When I was in middle school, I was not very happy. Weird, I know. Part of my discontent came from feeling like I didn’t fit in anywhere, particularly with other guys. Again, very strange for middle school. I thought it was simply because I wasn’t very gifted athletically. I thought all I’d have to do was learn how to play sports enough to be able to bond with other guys and all my problems would be solved. I think that’s why it was so easy for me to latch onto reparative therapy when it was introduced to me. Only problem was I didn’t have the competitive drive that the other guys did when it came to competitive sports and so it was easier to just avoid it.

After my mission, when I started to own the fact that I was attracted to other guys and not to girls, the issue became my homosexuality (or my SSA as I referred to it then). THAT’s what was preventing me from being happy. It was kind of easy to blame everything on the gay. It makes for a nice scapegoat. All I needed to do was eradicate that from myself in order to be happy. Simple enough.

Now I’m to the point that I realize that part of true happiness and contentment lies in loving and accepting myself as I am and constantly striving to learn and grow and helping others do the same. I can look back and see how my limited understanding of things led to my clumsy search for happiness. My unknown unknowns prevented me from being content with myself. In all of this, I’ve learned that it’s never the issue; it’s how I hold the issue. Even if I encounter an issue that I’m able to resolve, other issues will arise and many will probably be issues that I can’t really do anything about. That’s why it’s never the issue, but how I hold the issue. How I choose to exist with it. Do I resent it or do I soak in it and listen to what it tells me?

Then I stop and think about all the things that I still don’t know that I don’t know. And I smile.

The dance party is on PCP

I've gone a little bit youtube crazy lately but I just can't help myself. This one is partly because I was introducing a friend to Mika through some of his music videos on youtube and partly because tonight I'm going to the Portland Cello Project's (PCP) dance party at the Doug Fir. I went last year and it was fantastic. This is also partly because it's finally beautiful and sunny and warm in Portland and partly because I had delicious homemade Indian food poolside last night.

The Middle

Here's a little something special for the middle of a post holiday weekend week. This is my beautiful and talented friend KaRyn, who will soon be embarking on the "Cougar Cougar Project". If you are a 21 year old boy at BYU (and probably straight, right KaRyn?) she would like to date you.

This is one of her many songs. The Middle.

I Can't Do It, Coach

I've already posted Eric's Secret Prayer and Joe Learns to Keep His Body Clean. The third moving filmstrip in this series is called I Can't Do It, Coach. Be patient with this one. It starts with a long and bizarre dream sequence, but if you stick with it, you get the payoff of watching Creed's creepy coach interrupt the dream sequence by coming into his bedroom?/dormroom? to try and get him to drink some wine so he'll sleep better that night before the track meet. What? There are like fifteen hundred jokes you can insert here. I'll let you go ahead and do that. The moral of the story though, is that one glass of wine can make a whole lot of people really sick. Enjoy. Just a warning though, there are a lot of farmer tans and pasty white, hairy legs in short shorts in this one.

The end is kind of confusing. Apparently, it wasn't enough to have Creed win one race; in a surprise twist he has to run another race right after the first and he wins that one too. There's no dialogue or narration at the end, but you know Creed's coach learned his lesson. And probably got baptized the next day at church.

I've added some links over to the right to the Moho Directory and the Moho Map. The Moho Directory is a listing of other moho blogs and there are quite a few. Horizon/GMB recently put together the map that shows where moho bloggers live (not exactly though, so you can't stalk) as well as some basic information about each blogger (but not enough for you to steal their identities.) The moho map has instructions for how to get yourself on the map. I think it's a fantastic resource.

Also, I think this is cool. Happy 4th!

Give me my colored coat

Look closely at the pancake, do you see it? It’s not the Virgin Mary. It’s an angry cartoon man face, sent to me by my friend Ruth. I’ve known Ruth almost as long as I’ve known just about anybody. My parents lived with the fear that Ruth would burn our house down. She never did though. She just liked playing with fire.

In high school, I would pick her up in the morning and give her rides to school. We giggled most of the time, about pretty much anything. She would tell me about her insane dreams, like how Norm from Cheers got her pregnant. Or she’d change the words to high school dance themes. Have You Ever Been in Love became Have You Ever Been a Slug.

Since we were both in concert choir, we were also in the school musicals as well. Junior year it was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Of course. I swear every person in Utah has seen that show at least 15 times. We had to have golden sneakers to wear with our white pants and brightly colored t-shirts. I’m not sure why, because all of this was hidden by a white choir robe that was only taken off at the very end during the Joseph Megamix. Spray painting our sneakers gold wasn’t enough. We also spray painted my slippers gold. Because every boy needs some golden slippers to kick around the house in.

I told Ruth of my proclivity for men about a year ago. She didn’t assume anything when finding out. She didn’t assume I’d stay in the church or out of the church or that I’d marry a woman or try pursuing a relationship with a man and didn’t try to nudge me in any direction. She just wanted to know that I was OK and happy and she wanted me to know that she loved me. That’s when it feels nice to come out and shed the bland white choir robe to reveal the white pants, brightly colored t-shirt and the golden sneakers that lie beneath.