"You are to be lamps for yourselves. You are to be a refuge for yourselves. Do not seek any external refuge.... Do not look to anyone beside yourselves as a refuge."
Maha Parinibbana Sutta 2.26

Ever since I first encountered these words attributed to Gautama the Buddha some thirty years ago, they have sustained me on my journey toward a healthy spirituality. These words have such resonance for me, most importantly because I am a gay man. For it has been my sexual desire for other men that has been the oil which most strongly fuels the flame of my spiritual lamp so steadily as I continue to wander down various corridors on my journey toward realizing a consciousness that is grounded in the "Really Real" for which the word "God" is but one of many metaphors.

I began my experimentations on the spiritual path at a very early age, somewhere around three or four years old, if my memory serves me well. Born into a southern Italian, Roman Catholic family in the early 1950s, I was an enigma of sorts, at least when it came to religion. Like many immigrant families from a predominantly Catholic country, mine inherited a profound distrust of the Roman Catholic Church as an institution, and an even more profound suspicion of its hierarchy, most especially priests. We rarely went to Mass on Sundays. In fact, we rarely went on any of the major feasts of the Christian liturgical calendar such as Holy Thursday, Good Friday Easter Sunday, Christmas, or any of the other Holy Days of Obligation.

Yet despite being from an "unchurched" family, I exhibited a profound spiritual awareness and longing which defies explanation, most especially since my parents had little to practically no concern for the spiritual dimensions of life. This was so much so the case, that when her time came to die, my mother was essentially unable to surrender herself to the process despite her incredible pain and suffering. Sadly, she had never really given any thought to the spiritual dimension of human life, but only to the immediately apparent material and physical level of existence. Thus she found herself poorly equipped for the journey that lay before her.

I, on the other hand, have always been obsessed with what dimensions of consciousness and life might lie beyond the veils of material existence. As a young child I had all sorts of spiritually haunting dreams—dreams of flying, dreams populated by various spirits, saints, angels, witches and wizards, and old men with beards who wanted to prevent me from flying. I also heard voices and I had many different ideas about the nature of God and about the invisible world of the spirit that I can clearly remember scared me in many ways.

Probably my most profound moment of spiritual awakening was when I was around four or five years old. After whirling around in a circle until I was considerably dizzy, I can remember falling to the ground in front of the tenement in which my family lived, unable to get up. Looking up at the sky and as it whirled past me in the way that only dizziness can make it whirl, I thought to myself, "What if God is not in Heaven, but right here, right now? What if the world is God's body and we humans are just part of that body?" Filled with awe at such forbidden thoughts, I quickly pushed them out of my mind, fearing that should I be found out for thinking them I would be in deep trouble. Thus my first flickering attempts at being a lamp unto myself were extinguished by the dominant forces of "compulsory religion" not to surface again until some years later as my sexuality emerged and I was confronted with Christianity's hegemony and its condemnation of same sex desire and activity. Needless to say, but I will anyway, hearing that I was on the road to hell for my sexual feelings was quite traumatizing. I am reminded here of Bob Goss's reference to those scriptures which have been used to cast us into the flames as "texts of terror" (Goss 2002:185-220). I was indeed terrorized by the Roman Catholic Church's adverse teachings about homosexuality but, paradoxically, I was also energized. It was at this point that I began my life-long mystical journey to rend the veils of illusion that stand between ordinary consciousness and that greater part of my consciousness whose orientation is the Really Real. Since that time, I have traversed many different paths, some of the them formal and some of them not. And perhaps it might be helpful to outline what some of these paths have been, although I suspect others have traversed the same or similar paths along the way.

Way-Stations on the Journey Toward a Healthy Spirituality

In my search for healthy spirituality, I have tried or joined at least three or four denominations of Christianity along the way. In addition to having been raised Roman Catholic, I have also tried and formally joined the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Episcopal Church. Additionally, when I was in my early twenties I tried being Roman Catholic once again. I even went so far as to enter two Roman Catholic religious orders. In both of these attempts I was a dismal failure, not only because I was a gay man struggling with the coming out process, but more importantly because I had serious conflicts with Christian theology in general, mostly resulting from my exposure in the 1960s to Vedanta, Tantra, and various forms of Buddhist Meditation.

In terms of cultivating healthy spirituality, what each of these experiences taught me is that when the quest for the Really Real is institutionally controlled and defined, healthy spirituality is in grave danger of being diminished or thwarted entirely. Necessary as they are for some aspects of social life, religious institutions have the capacity to smother the divine spark that lives within each of us by its dogmas, doctrines, creeds, and policing of orthodoxy, often blocking any new revelations which might break through from the Sacred Presence that pervades humanity collectively as well as the planetary being of which we are but a part.

Although I am certainly capable of thinking metaphorically and symbolically, as a young gay man struggling to find my place within organized religion while simultaneously being told I had no place, I could find little room for applying such modes of thought and perception to the Christian mysteries. Fortunately, I can and do so now with great spiritual benefit. Suffice it to say that the classical Christian mystics continue to be a stable in my spiritual corpus. The lesson learned here for the cultivation of healthy spirituality is that the capacity to think metaphorically and symbolically is essential to living a healthy spiritual life. Ironically, we are reminded of this by the Christian apostle Paul when he writes, "It is the letter of the law that kills, but the spirit of the law that gives life" (NRSV 2 Co:3-6).

This does not mean that we should shun all forms of institutionalized religion. Rather, as gay men we must learn that our survival and spiritual health depend on our refusal, perhaps even active resistance, to becoming mired in institutional structures. One way that I have managed to make peace with these limitations is to associate myself with those traditions that have as little structure and hierarchy as required for survival. Thus, for most of the last thirty-five years, I have consistently been a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). Fortunately, the Quakers are a fluid enough religious tradition that they have always encouraged me to explore and search out other spiritual paths and techniques as a way of fortifying myself for the journey. Along these lines, I have explored, and continue to explore, Christian esotericism, a topic about which I am enthusiastic both as a spiritual wayfarer and as a scholar of religion.

Interestingly, among Christian esotericists there is the belief that the institutionalized church of denominations and sects is the "great whore of Babylon." For them, the true church is invisible and spiritual, not an earthly institution. Those who belong to the true church are from all faiths and traditions and not just Christianity. Members of the esoteric church are those who have wisely learned to live from the heart based on direct experience of the divine in its diverse forms. It is this capacity to live from the heart based on direct experience of the divine that enable them to recognize each other. Members of the invisible, spiritual church have also wisely learned that life itself is the true Holy Book of Divine Revelation. And it is their direct encounter with the Divine Presence in their hearts that enables them to read and interpret the Holy Book of Life.

During most of the 1980s and into the early 90s, I spent a number of years as a student and practitioner of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism. Overlapping with this, I simultaneously practiced Zen meditation (mostly in the Soto Zen tradition). For the most part, Zen continues to be the basic form my daily meditation takes—although I think of my daily practice more as a silent prayer of the heart. Since the late 1960s, I have studied the writings of many Sufi mystics and I have experimented with various Sufi practices, most especially the practice of Zhikr, or Divine Remembrance, as well as various forms of dance and body movement which grow out of the Sufi tradition.

Here, too, the important lesson for cultivating a healthy spirituality is that no guru or spiritual master, no matter how appealing and magnetic, has his or her finger on the magic button that is going to propel me into a higher state of consciousness or guarantee me a first-class ticket to nirvana or any other form of liberation. My experience with gurus and the like is that I have benefited most from their instructions when measured or checked against my own Inner Light.

I have also been a practitioner of hatha and tantric yoga, which inevitably led me to study and incorporate into my spiritual repertoire the insights gleaned from Vedanta and Bhakti philosophy and practice. For a while, I explored Wicca and various forms of "Neo-Paganism," although much of it never really took for me.

Each of these traditions have helped me to cultivate healthy spirituality in that they have served as a means of liberating myself from dualisms such as spirit/flesh, heaven/earth. hedonism/asceticism, gay/straight, and all other forms of binary black-and-white thinking. Approached with respect and awe, life in all of its aspects can be and should be explored as a means to cultivating healthy spirituality.

For approximately twenty-five years, I was a student and practitioner of astrology, even having lectured and done it on a semi-professional basis. I have long been fascinated with various forms of divination. As an anthropologist of religion, my fascination with these intricate symbolic systems continues, but I rarely if ever employ a specific form of divination in my own life any longer. Probably the most important lesson I learned from using such systems is how to more easily access my innate capacity to read and discern the movement of the spirit in my own life and in the lives of others. I have also learned that a large part of healthy spirituality, in regards to the capacity to divine the movement of the spirit for others, is to know when to speak and when to keep my mouth shut. More often, the leading of the spirit I receive about the lives of others is to keep my mouth shut, thus allowing others to work out their path to healthy spirituality in their own way and in their own time.

Over the years, I have devoted much time to the teachings of Theosophy, most especially the writings of H.P. Blavatsky, Annie Besant, C.W. Leadbetter, and Colonel Henry Olcott. The writings and teachings of Rudolph Steiner have also held great value for me. I have incorporated much of what I gleaned from these teachings into my current spiritual worldview. Each of these sources have been but variations on a theme already mentioned above—an appreciation for metaphor and symbol in the spiritual quest.

The bulk of my graduate studies were taken up with the African-based traditions of the Caribbean and Latin America, particularly Haitian Vodou. As part of my fieldwork for my Ph.D. in Religion and Society, I spent approximately six years as the apprentice to a Haitian Vodou Manbo (priestess) in New Jersey where I live, and where there are large numbers of Haitians. I learned much about spirituality and its links to sexuality from both Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria. It is from these rich traditions that I have learned to honor my body and my emotions as powerful sacraments on the path of healthy spirituality rather than to see them as obstacles that must be overcome. Fortunately, in these traditions there is not war between the spirit and the flesh.

As I am sure my readers can imagine, some of these paths have been more perilous than others, but, nevertheless, I do not regret having taken any of them. Each of them has taught me important lessons as I continue to define what I understand to be healthy spirituality.

Guidelines for Healthy Spirituality

Having shared all of this with my readers, the question now becomes what is it that each of these explorations has taught me about healthy spirituality? Before I outline its contours, it is important to point out that I by no means consider this to be a definitive list. I clearly recognize that "becoming" is a continual process. At various points in my life, healthy spirituality has meant different things and involved different practices. However, most of what I share below are insights in which I trust and think they continue to be sound guidance for the long haul.

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