Terry Shirreffs
Jeffrey Skaar
(Ed. by L. McCue)
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For many years, the U.S. gay population has formed and sustained an ever-enlarging sense of community in response to homophobia, prejudice, ignorance, bigotry, hate, and fear. The Stonewall riots, our ongoing struggle for civil rights, and our response to AIDS have helped our community grow, advancing our public presence and our political influence. |
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Like most minorities, we mobilize out of crisis. This is a reactionary defense of finding safety in numbers, of closing ranks and pulling together for survival. This helps protect our rights, advance our culture, and repulse external threat, expanding our sense of belonging to a legitimate community. |
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The story is not new. This great country was created by oppressed peoples seeking life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Still, many Americans, including Native Americans and African Americans, have been forced to fight for equality and acceptance. Yet there is a major difference between their struggles and our own: that is the spiritual bond that is so strong in most minority cultures, providing individuals with internal strength through external support, enabling them to survive a hostile environment. |
| Historically, spiritual direction has been denied to gays. We have been dealt a double blow: ostracized by society (where we are labeled outwardly evil for what we do), and then rejected by organized religion (where we are viewed as inwardly or spiritually damaged for who we are). As a result we are left socially fragmented and spiritually hungry. The innocent and innate spirituality of our childhood has been oppressed or annihilated. Only recently have we seen some positive changes in mainstream religions' attitude towards gays and lesbians, but such grudging acceptance is not enough to provide us with the spiritual empowerment we need. Remember: nobody owns God! |
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The depth of our wounds has been magnified by the AIDS crisis: we are increasingly confronted with our own mortality, but feel we have no place to turn for guidance. AIDS has awakened a need for deeper spiritual connections and relationships to help us understand our inner-being's soul and purpose. Often unsure of what we long or grieve for, we have no place to fully explore questions and seek answers, unless we hide in established churches or remain on the fringes of some of the New Age metaphysical spiritual communities. How do we begin to meet our unique needs with such inadequate resources? We can and must create our own.
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| One such creation is intentional spiritual community. Intentional community is modeled upon traditional spiritual community, integrating the necessary elements of choice, inclusion, non-judgmentalness, commitment, love and good will; a place where we can undergo incredible and powerful healing experiences surrounded by loving and fully accepting people. Spiritual community is formed in response to our need to love and be loved and our desire for growth and fulfillment. Thus, intentional spiritual community is unlike crisis-based community, which is fueled by fear of immediate or impending external threat and by the desire to sustain current values and lifestyles. |
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With intentional spiritual community, we come together in fellowship and brotherhood to share common struggles, successes, joys, hopes, and fears. We become vulnerable and intimate with one another so as to support each other and to be supported. Because we come from every societal, cultural, and ethnic group, we can rejoice in our rich diversity and grow from it.
God, how wonderful it is that you have made us all different, for you delight in variety and so do we. By practicing inclusion, not the exclusion we often face as gay men and women, we can bond at a higher level and begin to transcend fear, rejection, isolation, bias, and prejudice, giving us new strength to face both the self-inflicted and the external wounds we bear. By empowering ourselves and starting anew with an individually defined spirituality, we can facilitate healing, receive therapeutic and cathartic benefits, embrace newly found freedom, reclaim our wholeness, and shed our outdated and limiting defenses. This will allow us to go forward to live richer and more meaningful lives.
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| In intentional spiritual community we create a safe, supportive, nurturing, non-judgmental and unconditionally loving environment, a place to share our journeys, hopes, fears, joys, wounds and struggles. Together; teaching and learning the Skills of Loving: seeing, hearing, responding to needs, extending good will, honoring feelings and ideas, and supporting each other to grow. |
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The retreat process provides an opportunity to deeply explore our wounds and obstacles, to go through them, to transform, to advance our inner awareness and to leap forward. Our common struggles, crises, pain, wounds, addictions, brokenness, and needs allow us to help ourselves by helping others, and to love ourselves by loving others. We become stronger mending the broken places, and love is the healer. Love is response to need. We cannot love someone who does not show the need, or be loved until we show our need. Each and every one of us must take responsibility to do our soul work and to take the risk of being vulnerable and trusting to form our intentional spiritual community. Are you ready?
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