Mortality

Mortality Raises its Lovely Head Again

Some of my Friends have a comment, when I speak of my impending death, of saying. “Father, God needs you so much here; you are immortal.”

Yes, but. Yes, I shall live forever with God. But right now I have received another wakeup call that the transition is impending.

Yesterday I happened to catch the Larry King Live show. He devoted the whole hour to Prostate Cancer. One after the other, well-known figures with prostate cancer were interviewed or spoken about. One spoken about was Merv Griffin. He was told he had prostate cancer, and he said, ”I am off to a Mediterranean Cruise on my Yacht.” He soon died of prostate cancer.

The other people interviewed heeded the advice to have early detection and early treatment and live longer and never die of prostate cancer. Colin Powel, Mayor Guiliani, Billy Graham, and so many others. The key is regular PSA tests after age 40. I have had PSA tests. The last one was so good, my doctor triumphantly announced, “You don’t have cancer.” But my sin is that that was a couple of years ago. So that is why I call the Larry King show a wake call. Tine for another PSA.

I could be like Merv Griffin, but there really is still work to do. A woman texted me the other day. “Father I am dying of a cerebral aneurism and would like to have my wedding with my long time partner before I die.” I replied I would cooperate with her in that, but, I said, “I am dying, too. I just don’t know when. Don’t we all start toward dying the day we were born, because we really are not immortal on this earth.?” She texted back, “But, father, you are needed so much. You are the only one who understands us.” When I saw her I explained that we have seminarians who are preparing, slowly, to take my place, do my work, so I have to try to die slowly.

The first wake up call was when President Aquino died this month of Colon Cancer. I wrote about that, and said since I was a colon cancer survivor, I should go and have my overdue check up (colonoscopy). So, here I sit facing mortality, and what am I going to do? Lord, if it is Thy will, let the seminarians finish first. I want to be with you, but if you have more work for me to do, help me not to waste my time while time shall last.

My prayer companion sent me some more beautiful prayers by email today. Because he is working out of town now, we can’t kneel down and pray together as frequently as we did when he was in town. But still it is joy to pray long distance in the prayers of Jim Cotter, Michel Quoist, St. Alphonsus Liguori – in addition to the Prayer Book he and I compiled together some time ago.

Then I remembered I had already done some reflections on mortality which I decided to share with him – and you – today.

Some thoughts on vocation and mortality and sexuality

[I intend to tape record these words for possible use in connection with my wake and funeral. God willing.]

God called me at an early age to be keenly interested in the things of God. Even when I was too young to go to church every Sunday, I begged to be allowed to go with my devout parents. When I was in the second grade, my first Holy Communion started me on a path of religious enthusiasm. It was my first spiritual awakening, and the beginning of a life-long devotion to the Blessed Sacrament.

In the fifth grade I defended my faith against an anti-Catholic public school teacher. When I was in the sixth grade, the death of Pope Pius XI and the election of Pope Pius XII sparked my interest in the works of the universal church. Little did I know then that a couple of decades later I would thrill to the excitement of receiving the blessing of Pope Pius XII borne past me on the historic Sedia Gestatoria used by popes then to be carried into the Great St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in Christendom, for the weekly general audiences.

At 13 my parents allowed me to make the decision to enter the minor seminary to begin to tread the path toward the goal to which I was called, the holy priesthood. I donned the simple black cassock with pride. This time it was the daily uniform of my vocation –even though for years I had been wearing it to perform the duties of an altar boy in my hometown – every chance I got – a service dear to my young heart, serving Mass before school in the morning (after milking the cow at home) and serving mass in the Hospice for elderly people on Saturdays.

In the seminary I knelt daily in private prayer before the Blessed Sacrament or in front of the altar of the Blessed Mother, beseeching help from heaven to persevere and push forward in my studies and in my formation for ordination to the holy priesthood. It was my focus, my obsession, the path along which I was nudged by the very Spirit of God calling me.

Every night in our community evening prayer we impressionable teenage seminarians prayed a gruesome prayer which remained powerful in my mind and memory – and motivation – to this day into my old age. I call it gruesome because by psychological standards, it is deemed depressing. Be that as it may, even though later I became a doctor of psychology, that prayer was like a beacon challenging and motivating me from then until now.

Life is short, and death is sure,
The hour of death remains obscure;
A soul you have, and only one,
If that be lost, all hope is gone;
Waste not your time, while time shall last,
For after death tis ever past.

Actually the prayer went on for paragraph after paragraph in our little community prayer book. But that’s the part that stuck with me to this day.

Now, I have been a workaholic all my life. Perhaps I was born that way, but that prayer fed the drive in me: “Waste not your time, while time shall last.” I saw 12 long years ahead of me – studies in preparation for the priesthood. I was imbued with the drive to do all I could at this moment and then be ready to do all I can the next moment. Today sixty some years later, I cannot say it has always been a virtue, but that same impulse has driven me all through the years.

Today, after three quarters of a century, and not every goal has been attained, I realize the life ahead is shorter than the life which has gone before, so all the more reason to “waste not your time, while time shall last.” Pope John Paul II must have been driven by the same divine impulse. He was blessing the people until mere hours before his death, perhaps minutes.

Years later in the major seminary a priest professor told us that “most of the people in mental hospitals are there because of religion or sex. “ That was food for thought for even my more mature young mind, now in my 20’s. But it worried me, because neither that professor (a Ph.D. in psychology) nor the other priest-professors were trained or equipped to guide us along the path of sanity in sex, which of course, then overlapped into the area of sanity in religion. The tension was great. We were too young, too unguided, to know that sanity in religion and sex comes from the proper integration of spirituality and sexuality. In fact that was an unheard of concept in those days. Because of what happened to me there and what happened to me as my life evolved, the focus of my ministry in later years was just that: for myself and others: remaining in the friendship of God while bringing into union God’s great gifts of spirituality and sexuality.

In the seminary I was a sexual person. I prayed to “be delivered from this plague.” The counseling I received could be summed up in “Don’t masturbate.” I tried and nearly went crazy trying to control my need to masturbate and living with my totally deflated self esteem each time I succumbed to what I had been taught to believe was an “unchristian, abominable, unspeakable sin.”

Because they did not understand my sexuality, because they did not know how to counsel me in my integration of sexuality and spirituality, they advised me to leave the religious order and get married and “all would be all right.” That was inadequate counseling, and, of course it did violence to the calling I had received from God.

I was obedient. I was an unquestioning Catholic and did what I was told. Eight times God gave me the profound gift of new life – the inestimable joy of the father driving the mother and baby home from the hospital and stopping to pray at the parish church and dedicating the child at the altar of the Blessed Mother to God’s care through the protection and prayers of Jesus’ mother.

I taught religion to high school students in my hometown and pursued a path that led me to many valuable spiritual encounters . The first deeply spiritual experience was the Cursillo, both as a local leader and as a national leader where I worked with Ralph Martin (who is today a well-known Catholic televangelist) and Steve Clark (who today is recognized as a popular charismatic author), to the Catholic Charismatic movement as a pioneer with Ralph Martin and Steve Clark (with them, working with them as they "invented" the Life in the Spirit Seminar), while they were American national leaders of that movement. Through these and other experiences, among which was the great privilege of working for many years with the Rev. Troy Perry, a gifted and sincere man of God, finally beginning to learn to shape my life into the one unified spiritual and sexual life that God gave me. And that, then, became the focus of my mission.

Along the way, I made a lot of sexual mistakes, trying to learn the hard way, by hit and miss, doing it wrong, hurting people, and trying to lead others before I mastered the wholesome truth of God’s beautiful plan for our lives.

That plan, of course is that God loves me and us – unconditionally, as we are, having given us our yearning for friendship with God and our yearning for friendship with others and for intimacy in companionship. It’s not, as I was implicitly taught: spirituality, yes; and sexuality, no. It’s spirituality, yes, and sexuality yes. (Even those who, by God’s grace are celibate, are sexual.) We are all sexual, even when we are not genital.

But into my forties, it was taking a psychological toll. I did not realize then, but with later acquired psychological understandings, I realize that not being equipped to handle my sexuality and my spirituality simultaneously caused me to have less than wholesome mental health. I began to drink. In 1971 I admitted that I was an alcoholic, so I went to a Christian Rehabilitation Center in the mountains of upstate New York – and it was an experience that profoundly affected my life -- to this day.

It was outstanding in many ways, but, besides never another drink, two prominent elements of the program had a lasting impact on my life. The first was a spiritual experience that bolstered and fortified my effort to “Waste not” my time. The community taught me the Jesus Prayer and introduced me to the “The Way of the Pilgrim,” a novel about the secret of unending prayer, the Jesus Prayer method of practicing the presence of God. That simple historic prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” became my constant companion for the rest of my life. It not only carried the seed of all prayer, but gave me the springboard for trying to maintain a spirit of ceaseless prayer, filling in every otherwise “idle” moment with the name of Jesus, and almost unwittingly holding me to the ideal of “waste not your time while time shall last.”

The second element of the program at Eastridge Recovery Community was its giving me a solid grounding in the Twelve Steps of the Twelve Step recovery program. For the rest of my life my own spiritual life was affected by the Twelve Steps, “the most effective spiritual program ever invented by human beings” it has been called. Over and over again, through the years, I was able to propose the Twelve Step program for others with various kinds of addictions, alcohol, drugs, sexual impulsiveness, overeating, smoking, etc.

In short it took me decades with the help of therapy, the recovery program, and prayer to begin to function with integrity in a wholistic wellbeing that finally put the pieces together with spirituality and sexuality fully functioning in balance and harmony with all components of my God-given humanity.

The seventies brought the works of more and more scholars of sex-positive theology to publication and to the forefront of helping create a whole new climate – an alternative climate to the ignorance of the past, an alternative to the untenable, unbelievable, unworkable, unsound sex-negative approaches of the past, which, sad to say, still persists in the minds and teachings of such saintly people as Pope John Paul II.
[More work on this paragraph]

Thank God, early on I was able not only to read some of these great new scholars, but to meet some of them in person. With the help of emerging great spiritual writers, who had the same struggles in their own lives, great theologians, like Father John McNeill, and Father Norman Pittenger who learned to live their life integrating their friendship with God with the love of neighbor. And they wrote books about it.

I had the privilege of meeting these great men personally, of reading their books, and eventually reading the books of other scholars who dismantled the harmful and destructive powers of sex-negative theology and set me (and their other readers) on the path of realizing that God is the author of sex-positive theology. And therein lies our liberation and salvation from the crippling effects of the monolithic negative approach, “Don’t masturbate, Don’t use condoms, Don’t have sex except when married to make babies, Don’t ever have sex in your whole life in any way if God brings you into this world as a homosexual.” When i realized I could be out of the shackles of this moral slavery, I sae my mission to unshackle as many as came to me.

Well, before I was truly able to live a responsible sexuality myself and then teach it to others, I was already nearly fifty. I wrote and published my first book on the subject when I was 47. It helped hundreds begin to understand their sexuality, but even then I was still making sexual mistakes in my own life, and it was more than a decade later that God led me to synthesize theory and practice and make spirituality and sexuality united in the path toward friendship with God and friendship with people, responsibly dealing with the normal sexuality God gave me. I was a poor one to set myself up as a teacher of others, not as totally unlearned in sexuality as my priest professors of bygone years, but still searching for an authentic message.

Through the Order of St. Aelred, the very teachings of St. Aelred, the principles on which the St. Aelred Friendship Society is founded, I came to realize that finally God was using me authentically for an authentic message of the integration of spirituality and sexuality.

I did not set myself up as a moral judge of the spirituality or sexuality of others. The gift God gave me was to reach out a hand of understanding to as many of God’s children as God led to me and speak to them of God’s unconditional love, not in a litany of “Don’ts,” but in the warm and embracing and accepting arms of the God who offers them total Friendship, and urges them to live in friendship with one another. My prayer was that certainly some of God's beloved children could be spared the pain and shame of moral slavery long before they were 50, and learn to live a wholisdtic life under the mantle of God's unconditional love.

For this, then, I am impelled to “waste not your time while time shall last, for after death tis ever past.” The work is not done until every gay and lesbian, every man, woman and child that God sends to me, hears of God’s love and can experience the all-loving embrace of God’s Friendship.

Then I won’t regret the moment to come when “after death, all is past.” When I have been called out of this body which God gave me, which took so many decades before I could appreciate it as the gift God had given, my body will decompose while I encounter the magnificence of the presence of God. Here as through a dark glass I saw and loved the One who loves me unconditionally. When you look upon my body slumbering in the coffin or stand over the grave which encloses my body, I will already be in the awesome state that I could only hope for here, could only begin to feel in your smile, in your friendship, in your love and encouragement. Yes, I felt it most intensely in your loving embrace, my beloved Simon, but each and every friend God gave me provided a foretaste of the embrace of God.

Yes, I have been released from my body to dwell in that place where I have the privilege of the beloved disciple, to lie with my head on the very heart of Jesus. And best of all, as I am united with my Beloved, nothing can separate me from you. I am with God. God is Love, and Joy, and Peace. I live in that state forever; and deep within you lies all the beauty and wonder of God’s love for you, God’s all-loving embrace of you. We are in the same embrace.

I am happier now than you can imagine. I was happy doing the work God privileged me to do to tell of God’s love. Even though you cannot imagine the full wonder of that Presence, as it was with me then, you can get glimpses of it in your love for one another, in precious moments contemplating the Presence of God, on earth, which I now enjoy in its full splendor.

You, too, will know this, will know what not even St. John (who had that great privilege of lying with his head on the heart of Jesus), could find words to describe. When you also put off the body to be with us forever, with us, your God, your loved ones, then time will no longer matter. With us, at last, you will feel we have never been apart. I don’t want to steal Jesus’ words, but I want to assure you, we are with you.

If you need anything, ask; I will hear you. If you look for me and call out to me, I will hear your thoughts. I will never be canonized through the rules of a prejudiced system. You are already totally eligible for the same wonderful experience of union with God, where you are now, and where you will be forever, not through canonization, but through the will of our ever-loving God. You can see me, you can experience God all around you. I am with you wherever you are, I am with God and God is everywhere.

Thus, my dear friend, do not regret the times when you did not have a chance to be with me when I perhaps would have wanted it. That is bygone. Don’t think of me as dead. Actually, I am more alive than ever before. I used to be lazy sometimes. Now energy is automatic. The death I experienced did not kill me. It merely saw me through to the destination I was seeking all these years. Life there was but a moment, like a dream in which I sought what was hoped for. Now hope has given way to the real life, the real vision, the total experience of Love. In that Love I love you forever.

When your moment comes to make the change from the veiled experience to the beauty of total happiness, we will be together hand in hand, or arm in arm, or heart to heart in a special way, for we will be one in the very awesome presence of God.

So, think of me when you see the gifts of God. Think of me when you think of the gifts God has given you; think of me when God gives you a chance to tell someone of God’s all-embracing unconditional love. That was my mission. I don’t regret it. I rejoice in it. Now I know it was truly the Truth. Look for me in everything in which our God has had a hand. You know that I am with you because you will know the Love, and the Peace, and Joy of God. And I am with God and with you. I love you.