Subject: "Right to Be Spiritual" -- Patricia Nell Warren
From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 16:04:44 -0400

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NEWS YOU DIDN'T SEE ON TV

Commentary by Patricia Nell Warren                      
6/7/96

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THE RIGHT TO BE SPIRITUAL

By Patricia Nell Warren

The other day, a young lesbian sent me an email about her 
struggle to reconcile her  love of God with her love of women.  
She feels lost, totally confused.  The only "spiritual people" that 
she knows are church folks who hate homosexuals. 

After I answered,  I got to thinking about all the "rights"  being
argued  today.  The right to marry.  The right to attend school 
in safety. The right to express yourself.  The right to have rights.  
But how about the right to  be spiritual?

In college in the 1950s, as an intensely spiritual kid, I had my 
own struggle with her question.  It started with Catholicism: how
would I reconcile my own dawning truths with the Pope's self-
appointed  right to be "right"?  Why do some religions have 
Goddesses, and others only Gods?

After I came out in 1974 and published my first  novels about 
gay life, the questions rankled deeper yet.  Why do same-sex 
attractions persist, in spite of what some religions do  to stamp 
out homosexuals?   I became convinced that  religion as jury-rigged  
by homophobic Western males  would never meet my spiritual 
needs.  Religion didn't matter anyway. I  was out, wasn't I?  My 
new self-honesty was enough, wasn't it? So I buried that young 
spiritual part of myself...only to discover, as the 80s neared, that
 it was still there, and had gotten strangely sad and sick.   Writing
 got hard, and I didn't have much to say.

The discovery shocked me into re-confronting the old questions. 

Alone on a mountaintop one night in the 80s,  I built a little fire.  
My native aunties call the fire Cheemah.  I sat watching  the many 
 fantastic shapes that Cheemah shaped  with Her  flames. Were 
these not the myriad possibilities that lay before the human spirit?  
 As I prayed with my fire, I found that I had to gave myself  the 
RIGHT to be there -- to be spiritual in my own way, to be who my 
vision tells me that I am.  So many people had tried to dictate to 
me about  "spiritual" is that I wasn't sure I had this right.

Unfortunately, our notions of what is  "spiritual" are  shaped 
by culture, politics, and what we see in the media.  In the 50s, 
"spiritual" was radio broadcasts by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. By 
the late '60s, "spirit" wore beads, in pop music and Hollywood. 
 In the '70s and 80s, news shows and cable made their big break 
into power -- "spirit" was either  on the news as a Jesus freak being 
dragged out of a cult, or as New Agers  reading <Seven Arrows>. 
 Today, TV virtually rules our lives, and the most  muscular TV 
spiritual presence is the born-again variety. You have to have money
 and good publicists to command TV, and evangelical Protestantism 
has both -- it dominates the news, and controls several major 
channels.  Even Catholicism takes a back seat to EP.

For many people, this means that "spiritual"  is more and more
identified with a strident, controlling, affluent brand of Protestantism.  
Many, like my young correspondent,  feel forced to deny their need
for spiritual healing, because of this scary association.

Historically, many gay people have ravenous spirits, because so 
many religions reject them. They responded to these rejections by 
creating  their own churches and spiritual practices.  In the early 70s, 
I remember feeling very moved when I visited the Church of the Beloved 
Disciple, a tiny Gothic marvel with stained-glass windows in downtown
 New York City. I could feel the hunger that created it, and the rage that 
gay people could not pray openly in "real" cathedrals. Global growth of
 the Metropolitan Community Church was parallelled by growing gay 
New Ageism, complete with gay men pounding on drums.

The problem is, TV never shows gay people at prayer.    If it did, the 
public would have a radically different perception of us!  Despite 
right-wing allegations of our overweening affluence,  we don't 
command the money to buy our way into that kind of visibility 
that Pat Robertson has bought.  Indeed, he and other TV cultists 
have succeeded in upstaging the whole gamut of U.S. spiritualities 
 --  from Muslims praying towards  Mecca, to native Americans 
praying with eagle feathers.  Even the Interfaith Alliance, that new 
coalition of  churches who oppose the radical right, still has a low 
profile in the media.

No wonder my young correspondent feels "lost."  

A dangerous journey faces her, as she struggles to separate what
is "spiritual" from what is "political". But  she has a right to make
that journey.

Spirit is standard equipment for humans.  It isn't a special gift 
given to a few.  It isn't something you automatically get by joining 
a church or doing a sweat.   Spirit hungers  to be nourished as 
much as body, mind and emotion do. Young people hunger for  
spiritual growth as much as they do for sexual growth.   This is 
how the cultists get their hooks into kids -- by pandering to kids' 
need to belong, to feel the first rushes of vision.

Today every human spirit  faces the challenge of breaking through 
that  wall of media images that money and politics  have built 
around us.   Beyond that wall is a vast vista of  possibility. Prayer 
can heal anyone, regardless of gender, ethnic background or 
orientation.   Even atheists pray when they talk to themselves 
about their lives.  Everyone can have a vision, no matter who they 
want for U.S. President.  No one achieves anything positive 
without a conviction of one's own sacredness and destiny.  

I hope  the young woman who wrote me can  give herself that
right to heal  her own spirit.  Isn't that what "life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness" really means?

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Patricia Nell Warren is author of "The Front Runner" and other
bestselling  books about gay life.  Her publisher is Wildcat 
Press.  For information on her books, her Web page is at
http://www.gaywired.com/wildcat/wildcat.htm

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Copyright (c) 1996 by Patricia Nell Warren. All Rights Reserved. 
This letter may be crossposted on the Internet  without change
and in its entirety for non-commercial purposes without prior 
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For permission to reprint in print media, please call 213/966-2466, 
or fax 213/966-2467, or email [email-masked].   Please run
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Wildcat Press, 8306 Wilshire Blvd. Box 8306, 
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
U.S.A. 

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