“Ne te quaesiveris extra”

Regardless of faith, finances, social status, or any other factor I can imagine, life is a tear paved street that has many stores of Joy. We find happiness and love from those closest to us in spirit and in heart. We struggle with the same demons all our lives with mere moments of release. For every struggle we overcome we find that the foot hills only lead us to the mountains that will be our biggest challenges in life. We are fragile jars of clay that contain the greatest of treasures.

Our hearts are fragile and the trials of this life threaten to fossilize it. Our lips are parched and we thirst, we thirst for ever more, more of God, more of pleasure, more of all that we seek and rarely realize that peace is found in the Now. That the past is gone though we still feel it, it can hurt us no longer. The future is uncertain and nothing is promised to us for tomorrow, that which we love, that which we loath interchange so rapidly, and are always mere moments from departing from us. We find the balm for our hearts deep within ourselves. Some know of this as the Spirit of God, others call it their Self.

I use to identify myself as a Christian because I had accepted Jesus as my Christ, and God as my father. I saw the love and compassion in the gospels and had hoped that I would find the same in his church. I thought I had found it, and felt it while we sang to the heavens of God’s glory.

Yet during my time at not one, but two Bible Colleges I found that others identified people as Christian by what they did and did not do. Not only that but I found that the church saw a hierarchy of Spirituality the more you did, the closer you ‘evidenced’ your relationship with God. I learned that even though God had taught me that He loved me without one plea, His Church could only do likewise so long as I conformed, behaved, and pretended to be someone I was not. When I confessed to my floor mates and the leaders of the school about my sexuality I was prayed for, and counseled. I was told that I had the gift of celibacy and unless I wanted to work for a Gay outreach program I should keep my secret.

During four years of training for the ministry I found others that shared my sexuality and I saw how we carried this as if it were a demon within us. I met one boy that had lived as a street hustler, he professed loudly how he hated gays, and that they deserved death a week later he asked me if he could borrow some socks from me as he had none left to wear, as I retrieved the socks for him he exposed himself to me while stroking himself. I pretended that nothing had happened and walked away handing him the socks. A year later a floor mate that had professed the wickedness of gays, crawled into my bed in the middle of the night while I slept, when I jumped out of bed he claimed to of been sleep walking, and left my room at full attention so to speak. When I asked for prayers and help to fight against being gay I had someone that represented the school try to convince me that massaging each other would be a good way of venting out our latent sexuality without sinning. I listened to those I respected the most tell me how homosexuals were self absorbed narcissistic people that only sought to love themselves. I listened as still yet other leaders of the school I attended tell me that Homosexuals were cursed by God because they didn’t love him.

For my senior year internship I decided to work with an Ex-Gay ministry in New Hampshire that was related to the Exodus Ministries. I thought that if I worked with a ministry that directed God’s love to homosexuals that I would find something different. I thought that I would see mercy and compassion but more than anything acceptance. Once again I found that being a Christian was defined as a black and white concept, if you slept with men you lived in Sin, if you lived in Sin then you lived without the Spirit of God. Our actions defined us, not what truly resided in our hearts.

While interning with the Exodus Affiliate I started going to a Youth Outreach program for Gay, Lesbian, and Transgendered youth in Boston. There I found a diverse group of kids who were as different from each other as night and day yet still they forged a friendship. It wasn’t so much that their friendships were formed because they were Gay, their friendships were forged out of a desire to be accepted by others, to find a place where what resided in their hearts would not be placed as an item of shame and condemnation. Their desire was my own.

During that summer I found peace with myself. Through watching the people in the Exodus program, and watching these children at the GLBT Youth Support group in Boston. I discovered that if we do not find a healthy way to express that which we are, then we find pathological ways to become our true selves. Learning this I felt I had to leave Bible College, had to leave the Church and had to find my own way in this life.

Within a year I went from identifying myself as a Christian, to an agnostic, to an atheist. During that time I fell in love for the first time. The relationship was intense and ended almost four years later. During the course of that relationship I read Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance.” The passages of this essay moved me; I was absorbed with what this man had to say. His essay taught that love first came from self and then went out to others, that unless I truly loved myself I could not love others. It reminded me of Jesus teaching the greatest of all of God’s laws, Love your brother as yourself. I tapped into this Self Love and absorbed many New Age books on loving yourself and loving those around you. Their water was sweet to the taste, but always proved a path with no destination, driven by Authors that sought self glory.

My mother passed from breast cancer four years ago, and within the course of a year my father had remarried, and pitted himself against his children. I fell into a deep dark depression in which I wanted release from this life. I felt the hunger that surrounds us, people’s desires that they seek to satisfy without regard to the damage that they do to others. I held on for one reason and one reason alone, I could not add to the misery of others by taking my own life. I started going to therapy for my depression, and started trying to deal with my issues in a more healthy fashion.

I turn back to Emerson’s Essay on Self Reliance, and the teachings of the Gospels that peace comes from within. That Love in its purist of forms is Self Love, and without it all our actions are that of loathing and hunger. I don’t speak on narcissism which is not Love, but self obsession. I speak on living with a healthy Ego that allows us to share Love with others.

We are fragile Jars of Clay that contain the most valuable of all gifts. It does not matter if we call it the Soul, the Holy Spirit, or the Self, all that matters is learning to Live in Love of self and Love of others.

When I think of what it means to be a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Believer I find the definition to be the same: Someone who has found that Spirit of Love inside, and desires to share it.

“Ne te quaesiveris extra”