PRIDE PRAISE AND PREJUDICE

Pride month in the United States is almost over!

As a gay man who also (attempts t0) walk a sacred path (bhakti-yoga) connected to a large religious (not too spiritual) community of opinionated and outspoken people, I often find an uptick of myself either ”defending” myself against the notion that being gay and walking a sacred path are inherently diametric; or placating other devoted gay men (sometimes women) who doubt the reconciliation of what they are now with their spiritual ideal because of the (homophobic) way their communities speak to them about their location. The intersection of our sexuality and spirituality has it that we’re “too gay” for our religious communities and “too religious” for the gay community. I have only one things to say to this prejudice—pre-judgement—in this article.

But first, an (important) aside: Joe Biden during his 2020 presidential campaign, was invited to a radio show interview co-hosted by a Charlamagne tha God. Toward the end of the interview, Charlamagne invited the would be president to meet up with him in New York because he had more questions to which Biden, in Freudian-slip fashion, said “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” He would later apologize for this flagrant and unbecoming condescension. I bring it up here only to say that just as race has become a political ideology, more and more removed from actual race, so also the LGBT “movement” has become more of a political ideology, increasingly removed from concerns of sexuality so much so that in 2024, it might be believed that one holds to certain views because of their sexuality as if the two were somehow intrinsically related. This social phenomena means that postmodern religious crusaders likely envisage themselves as fighting against the spread of a social pathogen, i.e. a political ideology that is morally compromised, and their concern, despite the lip service they offer of “compassion” etc., is never primarily in consideration of the experience and efflorescence of the individual undergoing a gay and devoted experience. Such individuals are, in the likely consideration of our crusading religious “brethren,” little more than a political opponent to be “saved,” i.e defeated.

This distinction is important because we devoted gays tend to take the homophobia—real or imagined—too personally, when the religious crusade has little to do with us as an individual. Still, especially in light of the sad religious history around “otherness,” we may justifiably feel call to take a stand, practically as well as metaphysically.

Having had many “communal“ interlocutors on this subject over the last ten years, I have garnered many perspectives that have enriched my capacity for empathy if not my understanding (of their view). But there is one position that I have held through and through once I came to terms with my awkward location at the intersection of my spirituality and sexuality. It is the one position I start with in my dialectics with a communal member, and the metaphysical truth that protects from capitulating too the pressure for toxic conformity. It is this one point alone that I want to make here:

YOU DON’T HAVE TO JUSTIFY YOUR EXISTENCE EVEN TO GOD!

Some soul-truth (ātmā-tattva) 101:

• The ātmān (souls) are co-eternal with God [e.g. BG 2.12, 13.20, 15.7], just as the rays are coterminous with the Sun (and this comparison of the souls to rays and God to the sun is a traditional analogy [e.g. Caitanya-Caritamrta 2.20.108-9])
• God is the “cause of all causes” in the sense that he is the foundation or ground of Being for all beings in the same way the sun is the foundation of the (contemporaneous) rays. In fact the word ātmān is a name of God, fundamentally referring to THAT (tat) ubiquitous and indwelling Reality and only derivatively to other souls.
• Just as the rays, without being grounded in the sun moment to moment, would fall out of existence, so also all beings are grounded in God moment to moment, lest they fall out of existence; and this is as true for the saint as it is the sinner; a Gandhi as it is for a Hitler.
• The reason we need not justify our existence even to God is because we exist only because God exist (as the first ontological cause of all beings and things). And as alarming as it might initially strike the ideological devotional mind (in contradistinction from say a fully blossomed devotional mind), the truth is that the experience of existence whatsoever is fundamentally the experience of God and only immediately (for most in this world at least) the experience of inner and outer phenomena, what we might call māyā [Bhagavata Purana 2.9.34]

There‘s this psycho-somatic categorial imperative for belonging and validation that would have us surrender the sovereignty of our being rooted in the sovereignty of God to seeking approval—rather it be a religious or secular one— for an existence that is already self-evidently approved by the fact of being here now!

To be “balanced,” I take it to be true that awareness-potential is at present delimited, even severely so, by our ego constructs which include, and are certainly not limited to, sexuality and religious id’s. The experience of this delimitation is a psychological feeling known as separateness [bhagavata-pūrana 3.29.8-10] and is remedied by the flowering of awareness in and before ever-love [3.29.11-12]. Be that as it may, the ontological truth is none are ever separated from God, even for a moment, not even in the dizzies of the cesspool of the lowest degrees of separateness; and therefore, whenever a soul is ready to commune with God—yoga NOW (atha yogānuśāśanam or athātho brahma-jijñasa)—NOW (atha), at that precious moment, communion is possible because God was always there as the upanishadic motif of the two birds speaks to:

Although the two birds are in the same tree, the eating bird is fully engrossed with anxiety and moroseness as the enjoyer of the fruits of the tree. But if in some way or other he turns his face to his friend the Lord and knows His glories – at once the suffering bird becomes free from all anxieties.”

Whatever point our religious brethren are making about homosexuality cutting one off from God is at best a description of one of the variegated ways separateness cuts the soul off from its potential in awareness, a potential that can be actualized at that sacred point of NOW (atha)—whatever you are, wherever you are. After all, as frustrating as it is for religious ideologues to hear “All men follow My path” [mama vartma anuvartante—Gita 4.11], i.e. all seek God (read bliss or beatitude) knowingly or unknowingly.

The power to self-validate, and thus be protected from self-betrayal in seeking validation outside the self, comes from affirming the indwelling SELF, the SOUL of the soul, i.e. the very ground of our being. In affirming the SELF, what sacred literature generically calls prayer or praise, the self is validated, its location in psychophysical nature notwithstanding. This is the pride of praise that protects from prejudice from wherever it comes in this world.

To be continued….