Dear Toby, letters to my gay nephew

Yes and . . .  Dear James,  Your “ Best Read on Jesus and His Message ” was more than quick summation of the Jesus sayings, miracle stories, resurrection narratives, including possible source materials, how they were collected, and the way the early church used them, including the split between the Jerusalem vs the Greek/gentile communities. It is, from my understanding, pretty accurate. It might be a good jumping off point if we are just looking to examine the impact of what comes down to us, for both good and ill, of the “the Jesus Teaching.” I have to admit that it took me in another direction. Can I tell you that your Unitarian training is showing? Let me chime in from the more liturgical Catholic point of view, even though I am definitely a former Catholic with little affinity left for ritual observance of any kind, even the spare zen kind. I’ll call this “Going back to a year that might have changed my life.” This morning I find myself thinking about the year and half I ...

Dear Toby, There’s an old saw: things work out for the best. I am not sure. The only thing that I’ll say with certainty is that things work out one way or another. A friend of Kumar’s decided to leave college one semester before completing his degree. It broke my heart and stirred up an old memory, and stirred a few hot coals under an old regret. At almost 80 years old I don’t have too many regrets in my life, but there is one thing that I wish I could do over. I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I got in, I did the work. There were parts I loved, parts I struggled with, but for the most part I loved it. I was no good in the engineering structural part. But in my last year I decided that I wanted to do theology. I was convinced that it was the best decision for me. I dropped out of Graduate School Design. I finished the exams for the second to last semester. I told myself that I would return and finish the degree if I needed it. One thing led to another. I never went back,...

You’re right. I’m not exactly shocked, more surprised. I did not expect a letter from you, especially one so friendly. Thank you. I thought that we had both just decided to end any possibility of a relationship for whatever personal reasons. In the messy aftermath of mother and AJ’s deaths then dad’s going to live with John, I felt that we all got lost in blame and recriminations, punching and counter punching. I certainly don’t want to rehash that mess. We all did our best to keep it together while they were alive, but after they were gone, anchors adrift, all hell broke loose. I think that is especially true with regard to mother as she generated the strongest psychological pull. I forgot that I did that interview for the Dartmouth oral history project. I do remember that the interviewer was very skilled. He asked questions about things that I had pushed aside or relegated to the not important column. I’ll have to reread it myself. My actual assessment is that both our parents were j...

Thanks for the mention of  "Obama's Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model." I am not going to mail 25 scarce bucks to Horowitz, or anyone for that matter, but it sent me back to my roots. During my “regency” I worked for a priest in Boston, Michael Groden, who was also a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in urban planning. Mike started a small office in Haymarket Square called the Planning Office for Urban Affairs. I wrote a proposal for the seed money from HUD for what became the East Boston Community Development Corporation which in turn became the first of many low income housing projects that Mike initiated. The impetus for Mike’s activism was his work with Saul Alinsky. Later I found out that our Morgan had been shaped by Alinsky’s training. I suspect I see evidence that John Baumann also exhibits some of these traits. So I have to thank the member who got my Irish going, and turned my mind back to my own Alinsky roots. I googled Mike, not easy as he...

Dear Toby, I could just tell this story as if it were bumping into a very effeminate gay man on the street in the Casto. He just happened to be a Zen priest, and he invited me to join him in creating a hospice for people with HIV. Our meeting was in fact quite ordinary. During the first Zen Hospice Volunteer training. Issan had been invited to come to one of the sessions and answer our questions. I asked a question and he answered. I remember that my question was about all the things that were going on in my mind while I was trying to take care of the basic needs of Nancy Storm when she was dying. I knew that he was paying attention to me in a way that was quite profound, and I knew that I was going to work with him in some capacity., I could link it to my Jesuit roots. I could order the sequence of events as they actually happened. After 35 years, a chance meeting with a Zen priest who was starting a hospice for people with AIDS turned my attention back to meditation practice. It also...

I live in a small town of 15,000 people, 8 or 9 thousand of them monks and nuns. There is a Thai monastery next to my flat. We have one Tibetan monk who is doing a completely isolated 3 plus year retreat in a house just down the hill, a house I rented for two years early on during my trips. The community knows he’s there and in subtle ways support his meditation. I’ve worked with a few lama friends on Buddhist projects. One is actually very interesting. Kunga Dakpa, a Nyingmapa khenpo and I are working on bi-lingual version of a very important Zen text, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. It has not been in Tibetan for almost a thousand years. I hope we are near the end. It’s been three years since we began. I live 200 meters from the residence of HH the Dalai Lama, but, as he no longer walks his dogs, I’ve only met him twice in 12 years. I do go to teachings and classes from time to time. I have very few western friends here, the closest is a young Mexican gay guy who just had ...

Dear Toby, I read in the news today a report about the widespread support in Russia for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. By and large the ordinary Russian is thinking some variation of “if they fear us, they will respect us.” This ordinary Russian may or may not have had a hard time under communism or the various regimes that have held power since Gorbachov’s glasnost. There are now a whole generation of Russians for whom the great war, the siege of Moscow by Hitler towards the end of the second great war, is depicted in an almost mythological way in the authorized history telling. People with real memories have to be my age or older, and probably don’t talk about it. So we are left with this fear and anger driven rendition of history. I have some first hand experience of talking about mythology. Who were the winners and the losers? The people who survived and keep the emotional story alive. The same dynamic applies to stories about being bullied. It’s hard to even admit that I was bulli...

Dear Toby I want to say a bit about "the gay cabal" in the Jesuits. In polite society we never talked about being gay. In the Church we never talked about sex. We never talked about HIV, yet just among men that I knew in Seminary. I was just reviewing the number of men who died before the advent of protease inhibitors. There are more than a few, and the cause of their deaths will remain hidden to the world. My late dear friend and former Jesuit, Frank Munns, once dared me to relate my experience with the “Jesuit Gay Lobby,” so in honor of Frank, here goes. I am sure that I will be treading into murky, and for some, yukky waters. I am also going to be talking in a general way about men whom you might know, or have known, or recognize, but as they say on TV crime shows, any allusion to real people or situations will be vigorously denied. I am going to allow myself to be more vulnerable here than in the pretty forceful way that I usually address the topic of sexuality and spirit...

The Catonsville 9, The Boston 5.  “[A] good peace movement starts out small and gets smaller.” --Dan Berrigan Two days ago agents of the FBI raided a former president’s tacky Florida xanadu looking for classified documents that he lifted from the White House. The papers had to deal with some very sensitive information about our national security. He’s such an idiot he’s acting like he didn't know what to expect or how to behave.  He could have asked me. I can’t pinpoint the exact dates but I know that it was before the Kent State Massacre on May 4, 1970. Three very serious, dark suited men came to the gate of the small apartment that we’d rented at 75 Oak Street in Somerville. John Galvani had told us to expect a visit. We were to ask to see a search warrant, and not let them into the house without one. May 9. Mobe sponsored "Kent State/Cambodia Incursion Protest, Washington, D.C." between 75,000 and 100,000 demonstrators converged on Washington, D.C. to protest the Kent ...

“Follow the Money” I just learned that my friend Edward Harding "Ed" MacBurney died last year (October 30, 1927 – March 17, 2022). He’d almost reached 97 years, and I imagine that they were very good years. He had a zest of friendship. He was immensely likable, intelligent and a dedicated listener, the kind of person that would always be open to honest conversation, especially if it opened the door to a topic close to his heart and he thought it might go somewhere. He held clear positions with regard to matters of faith, but the term pastoral would also be a good fit. My mother remembered that at a certain point in life my grandmother faithfully read the Sunday obituaries in the Bridgeport Post to see how many friends she’d lost. Now in the day of Google, I join my grandmother in this pursuit, but I do not consider it at all morbid. I even do it with the joy of honoring my friends by revisiting our conversations, seeing how things stand and where we would be today if we were ...

In the wall-to-wall news coverage of despicable, unbelievable denials of sexual misconduct by people in high places—today Matt Gaetz, yesterday Donald Trump—I began to wonder about the prevalence of explicit sex innuendo, the circumlocution, the double talk and outright lying about sex that we’re expected to countenance. People say that the times have changed, that we can be more open about our sex lives now in a way that we couldn’t be even a few decades ago—that this openness causes problems as well as giving us a degree of freedom that our parents didn’t have. The real problem, however, has always been the lies about sex. Yesterday I had the honor of hosting the distinguished Tibetan Rinpoche, Khyongla Rato, along with Nicky Vreeland Rinpoche and his attendant Lama Norbu for a small lunch in my McLeod Ganj flat. My friend Alex asked if I was going to leave up some of my own art, visual puns, combining Greek pottery figures with French primitive art from the late 19th century. It’s n...

Hocus Pocus!  My dinner with a bishop of the Old Catholic Church was right out of Buñuel. I had dinner with the Bishop of the Western Diocese of the Old Catholic Church in America who by chance or grace, had recently been transferred from a laundromat South of Market to a substantial house in the Forest Knolls section of San Francisco, west enough to be deep in the fog bank, high enough to be swept by the same winds that blew the fog down from Twin Peaks into the Castro. Out of the Jesuits for less than a few years, I had moved to San Francisco, and started my almost 2 decade relationship with Terry Regan. We lived at Haight and Fillmore on the fourth floor. It was just about the time that I began venturing into the Castro. Terry and I were in a relationship and, though I can’t remember if he was sleeping around, probably he was, I was trying very hard to have as respectable a relationship as my mother would have approved of, which was of course totally impossible. I had begun to l...

I’d been around death for some years. I use ”been around” in a most intimate way. In the Hospice work with Issan and Maitri, death never lost its finality nor its unpredictability, and it was always in the context of Buddhist practice which allowed for some deeper exploration of feeling the personal impact and consequences. In 2010 I was living in a room on 14 th Street a few blocks above Castro. I found the room on Craigslist. The man who had the lease on the flat worked online from home. He was facing some financial difficulties and my $800 really helped him defray the cost of his living expenses. Or so I thought.  Sometime around the Memorial Day extended holiday, I went to Berkeley to house sit for Jon Logan. I came home to discover my roommate's bloated body dead for at least three days. Just the smell of the house was overwhelming. The shock sent me spinning emotionally and psychologically. The police and medical examiners suggested that I call a friend. The man I called cam...

In 1973 I was finishing my first year at Woodstock College, the almost legendary Jesuit Theologate that had recently relocated from its bucolic Maryland campus to rented quarters close to Columbia University. I began my final training for the priesthood after leaving the Graduate School of Design at Harvard without formally finishing my degree. I was a highly educated and bright young 28 year old Jesuit who’d completed almost 8 years of rigorous religious training on top of an Ivy league education. I was enthusiastic, inquisitive and, to most observers, engaged in my life. I had invested a lot in getting to that point in my life, both in terms of constructing what I thought was a well reasoned personal sense of my world and its purpose as well as building a very tough defense system. I was unhappy and frustrated and, although I tried to hide from it, I knew that I was at a turning point in my life, and looking back, desperately looking for a way out. I loved the Jesuits and had done we...