| Excerpt from Queer Dharma Grief and the Path to Awakening: Appreciating What a Gay Sangha Offers  Mark Marion Hope can neither be affirmed or denied. Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally there was no path. Yet, as people walk all the time in the same spot, a way appears. --Lu Xon |  |
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In Tibet there is the story of Krisha Gotami, a young woman who had the good fortune to live at the time of the Buddha. When her first child was about a year old, it fell ill and died. Grief stricken and clutching its little body, Krisha Gotami roamed the streets begging anyone she met for a medicine that would restore her child to life.
Some ignored her, others laughed at her, and some thought her mad. But
finally she met a wise man who told her that the only person in the world who could perform the miracle she was looking for was the Buddha. So she went to the Buddha, lay the body of her child at his feet, and told him her story.
The Buddha listened with infinite compassion, and then said gently,
"There is only one way to heal your affliction. Go down to the city and bring me back a mustard seed from any house in which there has never been a death."
Krisha Gotami felt elated and set off at once for the city. She stopped at the first house she saw and said, "I've been told by the Buddha to fetch a mustard seed from a house that has never known death." "Many people have died in this house," she was told. She went on to the next house. There have been countless deaths in our family," they said. And so to a third and a fourth house, until she had been all around the city and real- that the Buddha's condition could not be fulfilled.
So she took the body of her child to the burial ground and said good-bye to him for the last time, and then returned to the Buddha. "Did you bring the mustard seed?" he asked. "No," she said, "I'm beginning to understand the lesson you are trying to teach me. Grief made me blind and I thought that only I had suffered at the hands of death." "Why have you come back?" asked the Buddha. "To ask you to teach me the truth," she replied, "of what death is, what might lie behind and beyond death, and what in me, if anything, will not die." The Buddha began to teach her, saying, "If you want to know the truth of life and death, you must reflect continually on this: there is only one law in the universe that never changes --that all things change and that all things are impermanent.... Because pain has now made you ready to learn and your heart is opening to the truth, I will show it to you."
The first time I came across the story of Krisha Gotami, I felt the whole of my mind and body becoming still, as only happens when I am hearing something that all my experience tells me is true. I had listened to parts of this story many times before from friends, family, and people I worked with, but I had never truly heard it. But in exploring the meaning of sangha --of a gay sangha--my mind keeps returning to this story again and again.
There is a legacy that we all share as gay men, of separation and of loss, that I believe gives us an affinity for Buddhist practice. A gay sangha is a natural result of this affinity, and offers the opportunity to join with other gay men on a spiritual path. Together we can discover that our life experiences of separation and loss, this shared legacy, is no longer an impediment to fulfillment. It is, instead, a doorway to awakening to fulfillment. Of all the many meanings of the word "sangha," my favorite is simply,
working together to discover our true nature" (thanks to GBF member David Sunseri).
Finding Buddhist practice and a gay sangha has been a lifesaver for me that I would not have pursued if not for the separation and loss in my own life. There was a time, about six years ago, when the bottom fell out of my life. Very quickly, dearly held assumptions about who I was and what life was about (in which I had invested my security and sanity) began to crumble.
I was working part-time as the HIV/AIDS counselor/advocate at an East Bay agency. My job was to provide crisis counseling for people with HIV and their family, friends, and lovers. I was also coordinating an HIV antibody test site and supervising support groups. In addition to all of this, I was maintaining a private practice.
This schedule was demanding, but I thought I was doing OK. I became used to dealing with illness and death in my work, and depended upon my private sense of spirituality to keep things in perspective. I thought that was enough.
But then a sequence of events happened that began to erode what I thought was solid ground. First, I became ill with hepatitis, but since it was not casually contagious, I continued working. My joke about it was that, since I was now jaundiced to a vivid orange from my toes to my eyeballs, I could finally wear all those fashionable earth-tone colors that had previously clashed with my waspish white pallor.
Lame humor only provided me with temporary relief, however, because in the weeks that followed, key members of my biological as well as my "gay family" began dying. Between cancer, heart disease, and AIDS several people who had been emotional anchors for me were suddenly gone. Although I had lost people before who were close to me, the relentlessness and timing of these deaths cut to the core.
The line between the reality I experienced at work and at home began to blur. Although I recognized I was still one of the lucky ones (my losses paled in comparison to those of most of the people I was working with), still, the cumulative impact was immobilizing.
On the surface, I was handling it well. I mapped out my own grieving process and focused on the positives in my life. For one thing, my lover and I were forging a deeper bond as we went through these losses together. Also, the slowness of my recovery from jaundice brought numerous compliments from surviving friends and family about my "fabulous tan" at one memorial service after another.
But underneath, living had stopped for me. The expanding universe suddenly began contracting, collapsing under the weight of its own gravity, shutting out the light. I wanted my friends and family back. I wanted my life to return to the way it had been. More than anything, I wanted to escape the powerlessness and the lack of control I felt, the sense that the world was no longer a safe or friendly place. Somehow I also wanted to be able to protect my friends and myself from the pain and death that seemed to be everywhere. Like Krisha Gotami, I refused to accept the truth; I was searching for something that would restore life to the way it had been.
It is ironic that loss--while being perhaps the most universal experience of the human condition--can still make each of us feel alone, separate, and uniquely wronged. And like Cleopatra, queen of denial, my royal decree was that the people I loved and needed were not permitted to die and leave me behind.
As a therapist, I frequently reminded my clients that separation and withdrawal are natural ways we react to loss or trauma. They serve as the psyche's internal circuit-breaker, shutting down the power when feelings of loss overwhelm us. But what is a temporary survival instinct can become a permanent condition. Then it ultimately becomes a refusal of life itself.
Somewhere in my own withdrawal and depression, sentiments along the lines of "Physician, heal thyself!" must have pointed me toward Buddhism and GBF. I think I was attracted to Buddhist practice because it deals so
honestly with the truth of suffering. There was no sidestepping or sugar coating. There was no running away, but instead, opening to the truth of impermanence. I was not interested in going on the spiritual journey alone--I'd already done enough of that. Nor was I interested in being a part of a community where being gay was spiritually questionable or even just plain different. (I'd done enough of that, too.) So GBF felt like home.
In the time that has passed since the bottom fell out of my life, living for me has been a practice in finding the courage to open to the grief of unacceptable loss. Sometimes I fear the absolute nakedness of it. At such times, I experience a slowing down and contraction. At other times, I feel myself opening up and expanding into the vast emptiness of it. Then I experience a "letting go." In the silence of meditation, I hear the words of the Buddha to Krisha Gotami: "Because pain has now made you ready to learn and your heart is opening to the truth, I will show it to you ... there is one way and one way only out of Samsara's ceaseless round of birth and death, which is the path of liberation." In either case, to practice together with other gay men who have suffered separation and loss just like me has helped me to rediscover a sense of meaning and hope that I couldn't have found alone.
For me, a gay Sangha unites two of the most important components of lasting meaning and genuine hope. One is the sharing of the experiences, gifts, and challenges that come with being gay. The other is practicing together and supporting each other in awakening, and discovering our true nature. In GBF, both of these components are present.
A gay Sangha provides us with a home where we can rediscover and deepen our acceptance of ourselves and our ability to trust others. It is also a place where we can use the grief and alienation that have been part of our lives to deepen our practice, and to stimulate questions that can lead us back to our own true nature, questions such as: "What can bring a lasting self acceptance and belonging?" "What, if anything, is real?" "What in me, if anything, will not die?"
As a beginning practitioner I'm not yet at the point where I can view the suffering that happens in my own, or someone else's life, as a wonderful opportunity for spiritual growth. As I heard another GBF member concisely (if politically incorrectly) put it, "Samsara sucks." Especially in the form of AIDS, it is infuriating and horrifying. With more than a decade of unprecedented grief and loss, many of us are very weary. Facing ongoing loss seems to leave few options, for sanity's sake, except either denial or despair.
Buddha offered to Krisha Gotami an alternative, and in the Dharma we are also offered this alternative. What allowed Krisha Gotami to see the alternative was opening to the truth of suffering. For myself, I take the alternative begrudgingly. Even after getting whacked relentlessly over the head by the sledgehammer of suffering, illness, and death, my ego shows itself to be remarkably resilient, and still wanting control.
But this is starting to change for me. A spaciousness is almost imperceptibly opening up around my ego's grasping. It's like the answer a friend gave me when I asked him how life was going for him. He replied, "Considering the enormity of my expectations and the depths of my ingratitude, I have to admit, I'm doing OK. " Sometimes I can smile at the ego's expectations and ingratitude.
Through heart-felt dharma talks and discussions at GBF sittings, I am slowly opening to whatever is happening, including aloneness or grief, as well as surrender and joy. I find courage, inspiration, and support within the practice and fellowship of a gay sangha.
Before finding GBF, I often felt like a solo explorer on the spiritual path. Facing the truth of suffering and death alone sometimes was like staring into a dark, bottomless abyss. But in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, I discover what amounts to a new set of eyes with which to gaze into that abyss--a new vision that is radiant, boundless, deathless.
Everything in experience--including the most unpleasant--can be turned back toward our practice. We can allow it to propel us together toward the discovery of our true nature. MARK MARION (San Francisco) is a psychotherapist, whose Buddhist practice is in the Vipassana tradition. He has written a chapter about coping with multiple loss in the gay community for the book Gay and Lesbian Mental Health: A Sourcebook for Practitioners New York: Haworth Press, 1996). He also participates in the Bay Area's Gay Buddhist Fellowship. *The story of Krisha Gotami is paraphrased from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche (Santa Cruz, CA: Rigpa Fellowship, 1992). See also the website of the Gay Buddhist Fellowship |
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