Self-confidence is a sign that you have arrived spiritually, according to syndicated columnist Norris Burkes. In “Spirituality: Be your own person,” the Air National Guard chaplain writes:

Jesus …  flat out ask[ed] his adoring crowds, “Who do people say that I am?”

The throng fired back some wild-eyed guesses, as some even said he was the ghost of an old prophet.

Others said he was a lunatic, but Jesus brushed those speculations aside and turned to those who were important in his life, his students, and asked, “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter stood and set it straight. “You da man!”

OK, he didn’t exactly say that. Peter said, “You’re the Christ.”

Jesus responded to this astute conclusion with an astounding command. He told them to not tell a soul.

Why would Jesus ask for such anonymity? Some scholars say that he was trying to avoid being crucified prematurely.

I think it was much more.

I think Jesus had arrived at the moment in his life where he knew that he didn’t need to “proclaim” who he was.

His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.

He knew his purpose, and he knew he was the only one who needed to feel contentment in that purpose.

Read the whole thing.

World Spirituality suggests that Burkes has identified an important principal of enlightenment, that moment which he says you stop trying to proclaim who you are and just put your effort into being who God wants you to be. Of course, there are many different ways of interpreting what God wants, and I am using this expression as another way of pointing to the Thou in the I/Thou relationship we all have with All That Is.

Norris says of Jesus: “His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.”

Or … He exuded the confidence of one who was truly himself, fully realized in Unique Self.

Photo Credit: Andy Houghton

Joe Perez is an author who has published books on Gay and Bi Men’s Spirituality.

By Joe Perez

In certain places in America, conservatives are so scarce they’ve begun to import them from abroad. Specifically, in Tampa, Florida, where 1,000 delegates gathered for the United Methodist Church’s General Conference. While liberal American Methodists pleaded for tolerance for gay people, conservatives from overseas compared homosexuality to bestiality.

A report on Huffington Post:

Gay rights advocates in the UMC viewed the compromise proposals as the best chance to advance their cause at this year’s General Conference, which convenes every four years. On Friday, delegates are expected to debate the church’s bans on noncelibate gay clergy and same-sex marriage.

With nearly 8 million members in the U.S., the UMC remains the country’s largest mainline Protestant denomination. But United Methodism is shrinking in the U.S. and growing in Africa and Asia, shifting the balance of power to overseas conservatives. Nearly 40 percent of the delegates gathered in Tampa live outside the U.S.

Thursday’s debate put the denomination’s wide diversity on display — as gays and lesbians pleaded for recognition of their “sacred worth” and an African delegate, speaking through an interpreter, compared homosexuality to bestiality.

The conservatives won the day, proclaiming publicly that “homosexual acts” are “incompatible with Christian teaching” in the largest mainstream Protestant denomination in the U.S.A. Of course, it’s their right to run their church as they see fit and nobody is forcing anybody to be part who doesn’t find a welcoming home there. And of course, many of us would much prefer that if the conservatives can’t at least be willing to agree to disagree, then they would stay quiet.

But then again, we aren’t really the folks the Methodist leaders are speaking to. They say they are speaking to the world, but they are really addressing only those willing to listen, mainly their flocks which are increasingly hailing from the developing world and less so North America and Europe. Thus, the fate of gays and lesbians in the “first world” is tied to the fate of gays and lesbians everywhere. There is no progress on the LGBT dignity front in America if the LGBT folks in places like Bangladesh and Uganda and Argentina are left out.

Thus, religion is providing a uniting thread linking the fate of persecuted minorities everywhere. Today there are Methodists in every country, or almost every country, where there are Christians. And where people share a common religion, if their religion leaves them out, they will share a common persecution. Fear will rule over love when love grows too weak.

Our fates are linked because in the final analysis We are Them and They are Us: there is only one True Self, and it expresses itself (sometimes in beautiful or expaseratingly crazy ways) through homophiles and heterophiles, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and in all the ways that Love does its thing, same-to-same or same-to-other or what have you.

And our fates are linked because we cannot know Love unless we also stand in the unknowable, the Fear which does its own thing, other-fear or same-fear, homophobia or heterophobia. As each of us heals our homophobia, one by one, Spirit releases a bit more Fear and evolves a little closer to an even more radical expression of Love.

Ultimately gays will find liberation only in the most difficult, blessedly difficult, of paths: by linking gay/human rights to the quest for recognition of their “sacred worth” in every religion in every land. Until then, we can expect conservative religionists to gain clout not only abroad where they are more abundant, but also in the U.S., where their leadership is imported by groups like the United Methodists with deep international linkages.

Religions which intertwine internationally link people deeply and profoundly towards a common goal on the human adventure. The news about the United Methodists may suggest that this is a bad thing, that somehow foreigners have a veto over the collective consciousness of American Christians.

But the reality is more complex. The internationalization of spirituality is a good thing when it lifts the boats of people in distress, requiring religious adherents in privileged countries to work on behalf of international development, forcing those invested in the gay rights struggle in one country to seek universal human rights worldwide.

World Spirituality participates in such global linkages, helping to build the bonds which one day can be tunnels for human liberation to emerge out of fear. An Integral approach to gay rights requires a global view, invested as it is in expanding the degree to which we are all more deeply accepting of our humanity and sexuality.

Photo Credit: Religion News Service

Joe Perez is an author who has published books on Gay and Bi Men’s Spirituality.

In “Out and Ordained,” Brett Webb-Mitchell tells of his journey as a gay Presbyterian pastor and offers his prayers for the Church. In 2011, the Presbyterian Church formally allowed openly gay and lesbian ministers. Now, there are new challenges ahead:

Webb-Mitchell writes:

In order to become more inclusive, there are many “next steps” to be taken in righting past wrongs. For example, as more states permit LGBTQ people to wed, churches will need to craft a theology of marriage that includes LGBTQ congregants.

To this, I offer my prayer that theologians in the Presbyterian communion realize that their work is not to be done in isolation, looking mainly to the Bible and the Westminster Confession.

We live in times in which people in every religion are awakening to see their sacred texts as historically conditioned and requiring much discernment to see how their authority can be reconciled with recognition of the dignity of gays and lesbians and others.

A theology of marriage must not rest content with looking to old texts to seeing how they have been misinterpreted; we must be willing to see our knowledge of God evolving over time in the fullness of history. A theology of marriage inclusive of gays must be one which acknowledges spiritual evolution, or it will only be a stopgap, an ethnocentric adjustment made at a time when what is most needed is a worldcentric transformation.

Affirming the sacredness of gay marriage isn’t about people embracing diversity for diversity’s sake, but finding in committed same-sex partnerships a new and essential expression of the Divine Love.

That’s why the perspective I staked out in Soulfully Gay is so relevant to the future discussion about the sacramental worth or sacredness of gay marriage.

In my book I take a step beyond the “diversity for diversity’s sake” rationale offered by postmodern religionists for affirming gay marriage, staking out an argument for gay marriage based on a philosophical and spiritual anthropology (that is, a vision of human nature) which describes how understanding the proper nature of gay love is essential to understanding the nature of God’s love for creation.

Theologically, affirming gay marriage is an evolutionary step forward in humankind’s understanding of the nature of Divine Love, a gift from God for all people, not just a tiny minority. The love of Same to Same is viewed as theologically distinct from the love of Same to Other, one giving us a mirror to self-immanence and the other a reflection of self-transcendence. Heterophilia gives us a picture of how humanity loves God; homophilia gives us a picture of how God loves humanity.

Such a vision is not merely a Presbyterian theology or even a Christian vision. It’s a philosophical-spiritual statement about human nature that can be affirmed by integral Christians, integral Jews, integral Muslims, integral Buddhists, integral Hindus, and even — by looking at self-immanence and self-transcendence as biological drives situated within a general theory meta-theory of evolution — integral secular humanists.

Kevin, a reader of Awake, Alive & Aware, writes:

Spirituality? Questions? Who am I? Yes. Yes. And yes. I would add the search for meaning and a willingness to risk change. Getting anywhere with these very personal matters requires a very personal approach. For me, real, concrete and life changing answers come by way of letting go of who I think I am and what I think I know. I’m a thinker. It’s a preference for sure. But I believe it’s in my genes. And it’s become a honed skill. So when I became conscious of my spirit and the spiritual path it was by way of thinking and rationality. To make a long story short my conscious journey on the spiritual path began as an effort to make sense of my life and find sanity. But it quickly became a quest to integrate thoughts, feelings and relationships. Twenty-seven years later I feel I’m beginning to make some progress. Today, one question I struggle with concerns individual and personal conscience and society’s structures and moral codes. It feels like religion is saying the seat of morality is personal conscience which is experienced as God’s still, small voice. But religion demonizes and lionizes people based on what religion judges to be moral and immoral not by what people say their conscience compels them to do and advocate.

Thanks Joe. What’s been your experience?

As you say, Kevin, these are highly personal matters and no one size answer fits all. Spiritual autobiography is a key practice of World Spirituality. I’ve found the enlightenment teaching of Unique Self so valuable to me: it suggests to me not only that you and I may each be approaching our search for meaning in unique ways, but that uniqueness is essential to Who We Really Are … which is paradoxically distinct but not separate.

But to elaborate on this answer… “Who am I?” first became a pressing question in my spiritual life around the time of my 30th birthday (12 years ago). At the turn of the Millennium (it was September 1999), I experienced the most bizarre and unbelievable spiritual experience of my life. (I wrote a memoir in which I tell about what happened in the book’s twisty final chapter.) For the first time, I had no idea who or what or when or how I was. It was a total upheaval of everything that I took to be real.

My experience in 1999 was not my first mystical experience, but it was the first time that I really encountered the limits of the rational mind in terms of providing an explanation of or way of integrating the experience. As a young man in my 20s, I found that I could experience God directly or experience a powerful and abiding and non-cognitive realization of Bliss … at least on occasion. But I was torn between relating to these experiences through liberal Christian theology, the psychological study of religion (e.g., William James’s pragmatism), or atheistic scientific materialism, or any of a variety of other intellectual paradigms.

I could not integrate these mystical experiences in my 20s because I had found no way to honor the truth in such a diversity of conflicting, antagonistic perspectives about mysticism. It seemed for a long while that I was doomed to a perpetual agnosticism, and perpetually keeping the profound depths of the spiritual experiences away from my consciousness.

But it was also true that none of my wrestling, no matter how sincere, really penetrated to the depth of the question: “Who am I?” I felt alienated, not at home in the world. (The image above is of the Archangel Gabriel as portrayed by Andy Whitfield in the movie Gabriel, a depiction of a spiritual being lost in a strange, surreal purgatory.)

Eventually, my Millennium experience forced the question to the front of my consciousness. I knew from reading the writings of mystics and sages (and of the psychologists and religion scholars who studied them) that almost universally these people encountered themselves as indistinct from God or Spirit or Divinity or some Absolute Reality however they defined it. They basically answered the question, “Who am I?” with “I am GOD.”

Long story short, it wasn’t an easy ride, but eventually I began to find my own way of owning my mystical realization. The world today doesn’t exactly make it easy for people to go around saying, “I am God.” You can get locked up for that. You can lose friends and jobs. Even people in your religion will be frightened or angry by your discovery of inner divinity, if they have not also understood their own lack of separation from the Divine. Fortunately, there are more skillful and nuanced ways of talking about spirituality that don’t quite sound so crazy.

So yes, Kevin, like you, my path has been one of letting go of who I thought I was and being willing to embrace more of the mystery of life. And it has at times brought me into conflict with those parts of religion which have become fixated on condemning people who didn’t fit into the mainstream rather than embracing God’s presence directly, transforming lives, entering the Kingdom of Heaven, or realizing enlightenment.