Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com












Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com









Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com











Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com












Gratitude for the Gifts of the Holy Spirit


I believe a new form of adult, mature spirituality is rapidly repl;acing the immature dependence in spiritual life on external authority. Jesus prdicted that maturing process at the last supper when he told the apostles 'it is necessary that I go away for the Spirit to come to you"! So too our dependence on external authoity must give way to a dependence on the Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts

In this advent season of gratitude I want to share my personal gratitude to the role the Holy Spirit has played in my ministry to LBGT people by posting the talk I gave at the New Ways Ministry award to me of the Building Bridges award.



Acceptance Speech for Building Bridges Award



I want to express my gratitude to Jeannine Gramick, SL., Frank DeBernardo

and the Board and Staff of New Ways Ministry for honoring me with the Bridge Builder Award.



Let us pause for a moment of silent prayer and invite the Holy Spirit to be with us here in this room and touch our heats with God’s love!



Meister Eckhardt once wrote: If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was one heartfelt “thank you, God,” that would suffice for salvation!



And Ignatius Loyola in the preamble to his spiritual exercises wrote: “All the good things in this world belong to us, but the glory belongs to God.” The way we make sure that the glory goes to God, Ignatius pointed out, was by a continuous spirit of gratitude.



I am aware that the Holy Spirit has been with me always over the past 84 years. I would like to reflect with you on some dramatic moments in my life and ministry when the action of the Holy Spirit was palpable and express my debt of gratitude and hope that you will search for parallel moments in your life.



One of those special gifts of the Holy Spirit over the past few weeks was reading the memoirs of Archbishop Weakland: A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church, an extraordinary book by a gay member of the hierarchy which throws incredible hope-filled light on the future of the church. I emailed Archbishop Weakland and asked him if he had a message for this audience. Rembert wrote to me that his message would be simple. “Be not afraid. Cast out into the deep!”



My text for these remarks today is the words ascribed to Jesus in Mark 12 quoting Psalm 118: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. This was the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.”



The first moment I want to recall goes back 65 years. Having enlisted in the army when I was 17, I went into combat with General Patton’s third army on the border of Germany. My infantry unit managed to cross the border. The German army counterattacked. My unit found itself surrounded by German tanks. I remember taking off my T-shirt to signal my surrender. A German soldier was assigned to march me back to a prisoner collection point. I was certain that the guard intended to shoot me. As we walked down a country lane we came upon a roadside shrine with a crucifix. I signaled the guard that I wanted to say a prayer. As he leaned on his rifle and smoked one of my camel cigarettes, I knelt to pray. I remember making an act of contrition. And then saying:” Lord I am only 18; I am too young to die!”

Well, here I am at 84 still in decent health, so that prayer was certainly answered.



The next event occurred while I was a kriegsgefangenen (prisoner of war). The Germans starved the American prisoners. I went down to 90 lbs and looked like a skeleton. One day we were sent out to a farm to chop wood where the SS were raising mink. A slave laborer from eastern Europe was mixing a mash of vegetables for the animals. I could not take my eyes off the food. While the guard’s back was turned the slave laborer took a potato from the mash and threw it to me. The guard would have killed him if he saw him feed a prisoner. I made a gesture of thanks and the slave laborer’s response was to make the sign of the cross. That action was like a flash of lightning on a dark night. I date my vocation to religious life to that moment. Here was a man who had the courage to risk his life to feed a total stranger. And he found that courage in his faith and trust in Jesus Christ. I wanted to be able to imitate that man. My prayer from that moment to this is: Lord, grant me the grace to know what your will for me is and grant me the courage to be able to do it.



The next memorable moment was my discovery of the philosophical writings of Maurice Blondel while studying theology at Woodstock seminary. Fr. Sponga, the rector, gave a seminar on Blondel. A whole new world of philosophical and theological thinking opened up to me and filled me with joy and hope. I was set on fire by Blondel’s opening words in his book, Philosophy of Action: “I find myself condemned to life, condemned to death, condemned to eternity, Unless I can choose life, choose death, choose eternity , I am not.” God created us free and will always respect that freedom! I will never forget reading this line in Blondel’s philosophy of action: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God, is by becoming one with our authentic self!” (One of my deepest regrets is not having done more to make Blondel’s thought available to an American audience. My nephew Tim McNeill the publisher of Dalai Lama’s Wisdom Press is in the process of putting my doctorate thesis, from Louvain University published under the title, The Blondelian Synthesis, on the computer.)



One of the next striking manifestations of the Holy Spirit in my life occurred at one of the darkest moments in my life. I was in France doing graduate studies. In my loneliness, I began to compulsively act out sexually. I was so filled with shame, guilt and self-loathing that I began to contemplate suicide. Right at that moment I felt I heard the Spirit assuring me that I should continue to trust God; that somehow he would make use of this moment in my future ministry. I felt peace flood back into my heart. I did not fully understand what happened until years later when I first read Henri Nouwen”s great book, Wounded Healers, with its message that the greatest gift a spiritual healer brings to his ministry is his own experience of having been healed in his woundedness.



The next occurrence was during a trip to Toronto from Le Moyne college in Syracuse, NY, during the Vietnam war, on New Years Eve of 1965. I had been an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam. So much so that the Democratic party asked me to enter the Democratic primary as a peace candidate for congress against the hawk candidate, James Hanley. When I asked permission to do this from my Jesuit provincial he advised against it pointing out that Fr. Drinan was running for congress that same year in Boston. He felt that if there were two Jesuits running for congress that would be interpreted as a Jesuit conspiracy to take over America.



I had gone to Toronto to try to bolster the moral of my students who fled to Canada because their status as conscientious objectors to the war had been denied. While there I visited a gay bar called the St. Charles bar and met Charles Chiarelli who has been my life partner since then for the past 43 years. I could never have carried out my ministry if I had not had a deep personal experience with Charlie of the goodness and holiness of gay love.



Another debt of gratitude I owe the Holy Spirit is the support I have received from my sister, Sister Sheila. Sis was a Franciscan nun in the convent of St. Mary of the Angels in Williamsville, NY. Sister had a progressive bone disease for many years and lived in the infirmary of her mother house. When she heard that I was involved in a ministry to gay and lesbians, she prayed to the Spirit for a sign to confirm that my ministry was from God. A fellow nun returned from the missions in Africa asked my sister if the John McNeill who wrote The Church and the Homosexual was her brother. When Sis said yes the nun asked her to thank me. Nearly all her personnel at the hospital she directed were gay men. She did not know how to deal with them until she read my book. That book put her at ease in dealing with the gay orderlies. Sis took that as her sign. She told me whenever I gave a retreat or talk to a gay or lesbian audience let her know exactly when. She would gather twenty to thirty elderly nuns in the infirmary and they would pray in front of the blessed sacrament that God would use me to bring the message of God’s love to my audience. I was always consciously aware of the spiritual power of those prayers. As symbol of that spiritual alliance, Sis had this beautiful rainbow stole made for me. We continued that ministerial alliance until Sis’s death from bone cancer in 1995. I am sure Sis is still with us with her prayers today.



Several events occurred during the writing of my first book that I ascribed to the Holy Spirit working overtime. After several years of research I wrote a long article titled, The Christian Male Homosexual and mailed it off to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review, a conservative priests’ journal. The editor wrote back that my article arrived just in time. He had made the decision to resign as editor and enter the Trappist order. So he decided to publish the article over three issues in 1972. The response was so positive that my Jesuit colleagues at Woodstock seminary asked me to major the articles into a book.

While doing research on my book the librarian at Union Theological gave me a copy of an anonymous research article on scripture and homosexuality which I found out several years later was the first draft of John Boswell’s brilliant book: Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality.



Once the manuscript of the book was completed, I began the process of undergoing censorship within the Jesuit order to receive an imprimi potest. First, on a request from Jesuit headquarters in Rome, I sent it to seven Jesuit moral theologians in the United States. All seven found it a serious theological contribution and approved its publication. General Pedro Arrupé hesitated and requested that I mail the manuscript to Rome where it would be censored by several Roman Jesuit moralists. They also approved publication.



Just as my manuscript arrived on Father Arrupé’s desk, a world famous sculptress named Jacqueline Ziegler arrived from the United States to sculpt the head of Father Arrupé. Jacqueline, several years before, had come to Syracuse, New York after many years with the peace corps in Africa and joined the faculty of Le Moyne college as the professor of fine arts. We became close friends. Jacqueline made the decision to convert from Judaism to Catholicism and asked me to be her spiritual director. On the feast of St. Ignatius in July 1974, I baptized her in the student chapel at Le Moyne. (Jacqueline did a larger than life sculpture of my head which is now with my archives at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley.)



Just as Pedro Arrupé began to read my manuscript, Jacqueline began to sculpt his head and tell him about this wonderful Jesuit, who baptized her, named John McNeill at Le Moyne college. I don’t know what effect this had on Father Arrupé’s decision to grant me his imprimi potest. But I am sure it did not hurt.



Archbishop Weakland in his memoirs has this to say about Arrupé: “If from all the people I have known in my life in the Church, I had to select only one for sainthood, it would be Pedro Arrupé”.

.



The next event was the actual publication of the book, The Church and the Homosexual in 1976. I had prayed to God to act as my public relations agent and God certainly delivered. A major article by the religion editor Kenneth Briggs was on the front page of the New York Times. Special articles appeared in Time magazine and Newsweek. I made three appearances on the Phil Donohue show and several on the Larry King Live show.



The day of its publication I was invited to appear on the Today show. It was Tom Brokaw’s first day as host. He did not feel confident to handle such a hot potato as a theological work on homosexuality, so he invited Russell Barber, the religion editor, to sit in with him for the interview. Russell told me later that he was furious at having to take my book with him for his weekend on Fire Island, but ended up delighted when he read the book and invited me to appear on his Review of Religion show a few days later.



There were innumerable manifestations of the grace of the Holy Spirit over the years. But the one that stands out as most remarkable occurred during a trip to Europe in 1988 after the publication of my second major work, Taking a Chance on God: Liberation Theology for Gays, Lesbians, and Their Families, and Friends. Charlie and I had been invited to do a series of conferences at various universities in Holland. We decided to take a trip to Paris for a few days. On arriving in Paris, I called Jacques Perotti, the assistant to Père André and the founder of David and Jonathan, a gay group for French speaking Catholics. Jacques told me that there was an international meeting of David and Jonathan groups in a monastery outside of Paris and invited me to address the group. I warned him that my French was almost non-existent and I would need a translator. When I arrived I gave a one hour talk in the best French I ever used. I believe that God gave me the gift of tongues that day. As a result David and Jonathon translated my book into French and made it their official manual.



Once again I felt the presence of the Holy Spirit when I faced the choice of giving up all ministries to LGBT people or being dismissed from the Jesuits after 40 years. I went to Gethsemane Abbey to seek God’s help in making that decision. While there, a Trappist monk came to my room and gave me a copy of the Buddist boddisatva vow of universal compassion. As I read that vow it became clear to me what God wanted of me…to continue the ministry and pay the price. I sought the spiritual help of Fr. Matthew Kelty, the guest master at the monastery. I remember him saying to me: “John, God has put you in touch with the suffering of the gay and lesbian community in a special way. Now it is your duty to do whatever you can do to relieve that suffering!”



Shortly after my dismissal from the Society of Jesus, Walter Wink, the biblical theologian and my colleague on the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, wrote me a letter in which he said: “John, when the Vatican imprudently slammed the door on you, it blew open a thousand other doors.” That was a prophetic statement. Bishop Paul Moore, of the New York Episcopal diocese wrote to me inviting me to join his church and carry on my ministry there. When William Sloane Coffin retired as minister at Riverside Church, the Maranatha gay group at Riverside submitted my name as a candidate to replace him as pastor. (I always hoped Cardinal O’Connor got wind of that!) Robert Raines, the Methodist director of Kirkridge Retreat Center organized a letter of protest to Rome signed by several famous protestant pastors and theologians, among them, Paul Moore, Harvey Cox and Sloan Coffin. In the letter, they asked the Vatican to restore me because my ministry to LGBT people was as important to their churches as it was to the Roman church. Scores of gay clergy from all denominations began to flock to my retreats for gay Christians at Kirkridge; among them Gene Robinson, the future gay bishop.



I would be remiss today if I failed to pay tribute to Rev. Joseph Doucé. Joseph was a Baptist minister. He was born in Belgium and became a minister in the church in Holland. He opened a specialized ministry in Paris called Christ, the Liberator, to all sexual outcasts, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgender and transsexuals. He had a special ministry to pedophiles and the victims of pedophiles



When Rev. Doucé heard of my work, he came to New York to meet with me. On several occasions I attended and spoke at his Sunday services in Paris. Joseph was responsible for the publication and distribution of my books in French. In 1990, Rev. Doucé invited Charlie and me to come to Strasburg for me to be the keynote speaker at a meeting of all the Christian gay and lesbian groups in Europe. After the conference he and his lover returned together with us to Paris. The next day we flew back to New York. A few days later we received a tearful phone call from his lover. He told us that men disguised as Parisian police came to the center and arrested Joseph. When his lover went to the police station they denied any knowledge of the arrest. We eventually found out that he was kidnapped by secret police who brought him to a secret prison in Paris where they tortured him for several weeks and finally murdered him and dumped his body in a woods outside of Paris. They were acting on a rumor that Rev Doucé had a list of high government officials who were pederasts and they wanted that information at any cost. Later we heard that the murderers of Rev. Doucé were openly bragging about their murder of the pedophile Doucé. To my knowledge they were never brought to justice. Rev. Joseph Doucé is a true martyr in the cause of gay liberation.



To bring this reflection to a close, I believe that we are witnessing an extraordinary transformation of the Church from a patriarchal, authoritative institution into a Church of the Holy Spirit, a democratic Church that recognizes the Holy Spirit dwelling within all its members and sees authority as coming from the ground up.



At his discourse at the last supper Jesus is reported in the gospel of John: “It is necessary that I should go away before the Spirit can come to you. If I go away I will send the Spirit to you. The Spirit will dwell in your hearts and lead you into all truth.” What was that necessity? Why could the Holy Spirit not come as long as Jesus was alive?



I believe that Jesus was expressing a basic law governing human growth into spiritual maturity. As humans, we must grow from dependence on external authority to dependence on an authority that dwells within us. To achieve that growth we need fallible authorities. If our parents had been infallible we could never develop into mature adults making our own decisions and taking responsibility for them.



Thank God that Church authorities have proved so fallible. The result has been a maturing of the people of God. This began when the Vatican fumbled the issue of birth control, forcing millions of Catholic to exercise their freedom of conscience, make their own decisions and take responsibility for them. I have a sneaking suspicion that this is what the present Pope is against when he decries moral relativism. Speaking of our last Pope, Archbishop Weakland had this to say:



He (John Paul II) did not read the signs of the time, namely, the opening of Vatican II toward more participatory government on all levels of church life…Discerning the action of the Spirit in the whole Church was not on his agenda. This failure was probably the most important lost opportunity of the post-conciliar period (pp.407-408).



One of the greatest beneficiaries of the fallibility of church authorities has been the LGBT Catholic community. We came to realize early on that we could not accept and obey Church teaching on homosexuality without destroying ourselves physically, psychologically and spirituality. Consequently, as a matter of survival we had to take distance from Church teaching, develop our freedom of conscience and learn to hear what the Spirit of God is saying to us through our experience. The result has been that the LGBT community is leading the way to transform the Catholic Church into a Church of the Holy Spirit.



“The stone the builders rejected has become the corner stone! This is the Lord’s doing and it is amazing in our eyes.” THANK YOU!! New Ways Ministry for your many decades of heroic service to the Church and to the Catholic LGBT community Thank you, God, for all the special maturing graces you are pouring out on the people of God. Thank you especially for the special role you are calling the LGBT community to play in establishing the kingdom of God.

Veni creator spiritus. Mentes tuorum visita; Imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora. A special heartfelt thank you, Holy Spirit!



John J. McNeill



jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com

Misogyny and Homophobia

There was and continues to be a profound connection between misogyny and homophobia in our culture. Misogyny is defined as a fear and hatred of woman. It manifests itself psychologically in the repression of everything in the psyche that is traditionally connected with the feminine. Among other things this includes all emotions, feelings of compassion, all spiritual feelings, all dependency and all need of community. In the future I would prefer to substitute misogyny with the word feminaphobia.

Over sixty years ago G. Rattrey Taylor in his classic book, Sex in History (New York: Vanguard Press 1954, Chap. 4, pp72ff.) attempted to expose some of the culturally conditioned attitudes on sexuality. He found a universal phenomenon in cultures based on a patriarchal principle. These cultures with few exceptions tend to combine a strongly subordinationist view of woman with a repression and horror of male homosexual practices. The institution in today’s culture which continues to hold on to the clearest expression of that form of patriarchy, including its homophobia, is the Roman Catholic Church.

In contrast, those cultures based on a matriarchal principle are inclined to combine an enhancement of the status of women with a relative tolerance for male homosexual practices. Taylor concludes that the tradition of the Christian West has been fundamentally based on patriarchal culture This may help to explain certain striking anomalies from an ethical viewpoint in that tradition.

One of the most remarkable of these anomalies is the almost complete disregard of lesbianism in western Christian tradition. Although the Holiness code, in the Old Testament, for example, explicitly condemns under penalty of death male homosexual practices and female bestiality, no mention is made of female lesbian practices. (This should not be surprising when we recall that King David reputedly had a harem of nearly a thousand women.). Apart from a disputed reference to unnatural female acts by Paul in Romans 1:26 there is no other reference to female lesbian activity in scripture and scarcely any at all in all the other documents of Christian tradition.

There is a marked tendency in all the sources of Christian tradition to condemn sodomy in terms of a man “playing the role of a woman” with another man or using another man “like a woman”. This has led to the cultural tradition of respecting the man who plays the active role of penetration in male homosexual activity and despising the man who plays the passive role of receiver.  As Bailey remarked, this has been looked upon in tradition not so much as a violation of human nature but rather as a degradation of the male as such.

If there is a certain message in the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is the belief of that time in the absolute respect that should be shown to males and the relative lack of concern for the female.

A perfect example of that are Lot’s words to the mob threatening to attack his male guests:
"Please, my friends be not so depraved. I have two daughters who never had intercourse with a man, let me bring them out to you that you may do with them what you will, only do nothing to these men, inasmuch as they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Gen 19: 7-8).

Every Jewish male in Old Testament times would in his morning prayers “thank God that I was not created a woman!”

To stimulate or encourage or compel another man to simulate the passive coital function represented a perversion intolerable for a society organized according to the theory of the essential subordination of women to men, a society which particularly valued male aggressiveness and dominance.. Consequently, as Bailey remarks, a man who “acted like a woman’ in a sexual act was treated as one who betrayed not only himself but his whole sex, dragging his fellow men down with him in his voluntary disgrace.

Bailey concludes with this statement:
"It might perhaps be well for us frankly to face the fact that rationalization of sexual prejudices, animated by false notions of sexual privileges, have played no inconsiderable part in forming the tradition we have inherited and probably controls opinion and policy today in the matter of homosexuality to a greater extent than is commonly realized."

More recently a strong light has been cast on the historical connection of feminaphobia and homosexuality by Richard Tarnas in his brilliant study of the evolution of western culture: Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991).. Tarnas’ basic insight is that the period of the past three thousand years in the development of philosophy, science, religion, and culture has been an exclusively male phenomenon from start to finish. It is my belief that the historical dialectical process that led to the development of the masculine archetype with the repression of the feminine represents the working out of the anima/animus mundi. Its past thesis was the development of the masculine archetype which, for some mysterious reason, had to be accomplished first; its present and future antithesis will be the working out of a feminine archetype, which will not contradict or repress the masculine, but eventually will result in the synthesis of an androgynous fulfillment of all humans, male and female.

I suspect that the historical process given to first of all working out of the masculine archetype creating the separated and independent human individual had to do with the greater power and closeness to life and nature of the feminine. If the feminine archetype had been worked out first, the masculine development, which is much more fragile, could never have occurred or taken place only with extreme difficulty. At this point in the dialectic we can no more simply return to the maternal matrix, than an adult could find fulfillment by returning to the mother’s womb.

The “man” of the Western tradition has been a questing hero, a Promethean biological and metaphysical rebel who has constantly sought freedom and progress for himself, and who has thus constantly striven to differentiate himself from and obtain control over the matrix out of which he emerged. This Promethean hero has been present in both men and women. The evolution of the Western mind has been driven by a heroic impulse to forge an autonomous, conscious, rational self by separating it from the primordial unity with nature. The result of that process has been the transcendent self, the independent individual ego, the self-determining human being in its existential uniqueness, separateness and freedom.

The balancing feminine moment has to do with building a loving spiritual community and achieving a deep passionate relationship of personal love with each other and the divine, a relationship built not on any submersion of our ego and identity into any collectivity or matrix, but built instead on a relationship and a community freely entered into by free, autonomous, independent, and self-determining individuals.

Why, Tarnas asks, has the pervasive masculinity of Western intellectual and spiritual tradition become so apparent to us over the past forty years, when it remained invisible and unconscious in almost every previous generation? It is only through the feminist movement in the last forty years that we have become conscious of how exclusively masculine, for example, our common prayers and liturgies were. Hegel once made the observation: “The owl of Minerva spreads her wings only at the falling of dusk.” Every civilization is unconscious of itself, until it reaches its dying stages; it is only then that it becomes fully conscious of what it is all about. True wisdom and insight can only be reached at the end point. The three thousand year masculine tradition of Western civilization is reaching its apogee; it has been pressed to its one-sided extreme in the consciousness of the late modern mind.

The evolution of the Western mind has been founded on the repression of the feminine, “on the repression of undifferentiated unitary consciousness, of the participation mystique with nature, a progressive denial of the anima mundi, of the soul of the world, of the community of being, of mystery and ambiguity, of imagination, emotion, instinct, body sexuality, nature and women.” (Tarnas: p. 442).

Today men and women face the existential crisis of being solitary and mortal conscious egos thrown into an ultimately meaningless and unknowable universe, an environment that is increasingly artificial, mechanistic, fragmented, soulless, and self-destructive. The evolution of the masculine archetype has reached an impasse. If we continue in this one-sided dialectic the human race faces the real possibility of self-destruction through nuclear warfare or widespread environmental collapse. Human beings are feeling progressively isolated, alienated from their communities, from nature, and from each other.

Tarnas believes that the resolution of this crisis is already occurring in the tremendous emergence of the feminine archetype in our culture. He sees this phenomenon as visible in the rise of feminism, the growing empowerment of women, and the widespread opening up to feminine values by both men and women. He finds further evidence of this in the widespread urge to reconnect with the body, the emotions, the unconscious, the imagination and intuition.

The deepest passion of the Western Mind has been to reunite with the ground of its being. The driving impulse of the West’s consciousness has been its dialectical quest not only to realize itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, to recover its connection with the whole; to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life; to differentiate itself from but then to rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. And that reunion can now occur on a new and profoundly different level from that of the primordial unconscious unity, for the long evolution of human consciousness prepared it to be capable at last of embracing the ground and matrix of its own being freely and consciously. The telos, the inner direction and goal, of the Western mind has been to reconnect with the cosmic in a mature participation mystique, to surrender itself feely and consciously, in the embrace of a larger unity that preserves human autonomy while also transcending human alienation. (Tarnas: pp 443-444).

Tarnas concludes his great work with the statement that the restless inner development and incessantly masculine ordering of reality characteristic of the Western mind has been gradually leading toward reconciliation with the lost feminine unity, toward a profound and many leveled marriage of the masculine and the feminine, a triumphant and healing reunion. “Our time is struggling to bring forth something new in human history. We seem to be witnessing, suffering the birth labor of a new reality, a new form of human existence, a “child” that would be the fruit of this great archetypal marriage, and that would bear within itself all its antecedents in a new form.”

This stupendous Western project should be seen as a necessary and noble part of a great dialectic and not just rejected as an imperialist-chauvinistic plot. Not only has this tradition achieved the fundamental differentiation and autonomy of the human which alone could allow the possibility of such a larger synthesis, it has also painstakingly prepared the way for its own self-transcendence. Moreover, this tradition possesses resources, left behind and cut off by its own Promethean advance, that we have scarcely begun to integrate and that, paradoxically, only the opening to the feminine will enable us to integrate. Each perspective, masculine and feminine, is here both affirmed and transcended, recognized as part of a larger whole; for each polarity requires the other for its fulfillment. And their synthesis leads to something beyond itself: It brings an unexpected opening to a larger reality that cannot be grasped before it arrives; because this new reality is itself a creative act (Tarnas: p.445).

The Role of the LBGT Community in the Great Dialectic

Although to my astonishment Tarnas makes no mention of it, parallel to the emergence of woman’s liberation over the past fifty years has been the emergence of a positive gay identity on all levels – social. political, cultural and spiritual – all over the world. Jacque Perotti, the founder of the Catholic gay group, David and Jonathon, in French speaking Europe, speaks of this same era as a “declic, a special moment in history, a revelation of the slow emergence of a positive homosexual identity from the heart of the world. After so many ages of rejection, destruction and intimidation, a wind of freedom has begun to blow.” In our day that wind has become a hurricane.

This emergence of a positive gay identity has accelerated in the past few years to a remarkable extent and, I believe it has a teleological purpose in the development of the anima-animus mundi. This presence of a visible gay and lesbian world community, for the first time in the past three thousand years, is an integral part of that dialectic and is another aspect of the recovery of the feminine or, what I prefer to call, the balancing of the masculine and feminine in a new synthesis in the human personality

Clearly the dominant dialectic of the masculine archetype in the past with its repression of the feminine has also included the repression of the homosexual. As G. Rattrey Taylor pointed out the patriarchal cultures combine a subordinationist view of women with a strong repression of male homosexual practices. The rise of the feminist liberation movement in recent years gives gay people a reason to hope that GLBT people will be fully accepted in the future human community. At the heart of all homophobia is feminaphobia and the repression of the feminine. Gay men are seen as a threat to patriarchy because they are frequently in touch with and act in accord with the feminine dimension of themselves. It is clear that feminine and gay liberation are so intimately linked that gays should give full support to women’s liberation and vice versa.

No dialectical process can succeed unless it carries within itself the seed of synthesis. That seed of synthesis is to be found in the gay community. The synthesis can only succeed through the emergence of a visible group that can live out fully both its masculine and feminine dimensions without the need to repress either. We need a group that will model the ideal goal of humanity’s present evolution, people who can keep their masculine and feminine dimension in good equilibrium and bring forth a balanced synthesis of the two. This, I believe, is the providential role of the GLBT political and spiritual groups that have come into being over the past fifty years. We who are gay and lesbian need a vision and must be clear about what are the special gifts we bring to this moment in history and the central role we must play in bringing about the fullness of life for all humans. That role is being played out in a special way in the gay setting of a new paradigm for human marriage, replacing the now destructive patriarchal paradigm. In gay marriage both partners relate to each other as equals. Neither party is under pressure to repress a whole dimension of his or her humanity, the feminine for men, the masculine for women. Both parties can relate to each other as full human beings. Seen in this light gay marriage is a gift from God which can rescue all marriages from their present proclivity to failure.
jjmcneill@aol.com

www.johnjmcneill.com

Phone 954 963 6559

Sexual Play: God's Gift To The Poor

Almost two years ago I published my fifth book on lgbt liberation from a spiritual theological perspective. My God-given purpose in all five books was to try with the help of the Holy Spirit to free gay Christians from the lies of pathological homophobic religion.


Hearing the news of so many teenage suicides gives a new urgency to get the news out about my books [confer http://www.johnjmcneill.com/] For that purpose I have summarized the message of my most recent book in the following blog.

In my most recent publication: Sex As God Intended: A Reflection on Human Sexualty As Play, I made the observation that scripture , especially The Song of Songs, makes it abudantly clear that God intended human sexuality to be an experience of play. As St Irenaus said: Gloria Dei, homo vivens. The glory of God are humans fully alive. That includes being sexually fully alive. It delights God to see the creatures he loves enjoying God's gift of playful sex within an intimate loving relationship with a spirit of gratitude.

But what makes sex play? The human experience of play, like love, is indefinable. We know what play is when we experience it, but we cant define it. Sociologists observe that a disturbed child ceases to play when it experiences the absence of love. Tht child can be freed to begin to play again only when it feels the security of uncondiional love. Simlarly, we adults are free to play only if we feel loved. Ultimately it is the human experience of God's unconditional love that frees us to totally indulge the spirit of play all our lives.

What makes a human activity play? Play is usually contrasted to work. The human activity of work is frequently based on anxiety. The child who does not feel loved will work hard to earn that love. When one is working what one is doing in the present moment takes its meaning from what the future will bring. Work empties the present moment of its meaning and renders the worker a prisoner to the tyranny of time.

What makes human activity play is the fact that platful activity has its meaning totally in the present moment. The perfect example of that is dancing. The activity of dancing takes its meaning totally from what is happening in the present moment with no reference to the future. The result is a joyful liberation from the tyranny of time.

If human sexual activity is undertaken for the conscious purpose of procreation , it become another form of work subject to the tyranny of time. In Gen 2 we read that God looked at Adam and said"It is not good that the human be alone. Every human should have a companion of his or her own kind" Obviously God intended human sexuality to be a cure for lonliness and help humans enter into deep intimate love relations.. In playful sex we must relate to our sexual partner as end in him or herself and not as a means to something beyond the partner him or her self. Adam and Eve enjoyed playful sex in the garden of Eden in the presence of God. By restoring our awareness of God's love, Christ wanted to restore human sexuality to the same joyful play it was in Eden.

St Augustine once wrote: Ama! Et fac quod vis! "Love and then do wahatever you want!" Exactly! Because what ever a lover wants will be in complete harmony with the spirit of God!

I will never forget several decades ago the first time I heard the famous British theologian, Norman Pittenger, make the statement: "Granting that we are dealing with consenting adults, there is no such thing as bad sex; there is only good, better and best sex!" A wave of laughter went through the room. You could feel the spirit of joyful liberation those words brought from decades of shame, guilt and self-hatred. And every time since when I repeated that statement I witnessed the same result.


We know from Revelation that God created us sexual beings and delights in our sexual play. Every human being has a God-given right to sexual fulfillment. In this article I speak primarily as a psychotherapist as I ask the question what makes sex good, better or best? Best sex is obviously two humans enjoying mutual sexual pleasure within a committed loving relationship. Where this kind of sexual relation can be achieved, it brings with it not only superb sexual pleasure but, as Genesis 2 said, on an even deeper level it brings with it escape from loneliness and isolation into the deepest experience humans can have of intimacy, and frequently opens the door to a mystical experience of intimacy with God.

I am aware as a psychotherapist with several decades of experience that many, if not most, human beings grow up with badly damaged psyches and a wounded self image that render them incapable , except with extreme difficulty, to enter into a committed relation based on mutual love. However, these psychically wounded humans still have a right to sexual fulfillment to the best of their ability. Ia distinction between alpha sex and omega sex. When we perform alpha sex we are entirely absorbed in our own pleasure. We use our sexual partner as a sexual obect in order to obtain our pleasure. In omega sex, on the other hand, we are entirely caught up in the pleasure of our partner. Our primary pleasure comes from the plesure of our partner. As humans, as we mature, we are all caught somewhere in the transition from alpha sex to omega sex.

If all one is capable of is a solitary act of masturbation, then that masturbatory act, undertaken with gratitude to God for the gift of sexual pleasure, is good sex. Even better sex occurs when two wounded humans reach out to each other to share mutual sexual pleasure in a 'one night stand'. I always liked the joke I heard many years ago about an aging queen in the Bowery who went into a bar with a parakeet on his shoulder. Standing at the end of the bar he announced in a loud voice, "I will go to bed with anyone who guesses the weight of my parakeet!" One drunk looked up and guessed two hundred pounds. "Close enough!" responded the queen. What is happening here. Two psychically badly damaged human beings will share a moment of mutual sexual pleasure . That is all they are capable of and that is good, even better, sex. Even better still is the relation of two "sex buddies" that meet regularly for sexual fulfillment in the context of mutual friendship.

These reflections make it patently clear that no human being has the right to make moral judgments on the sexual activities of others. Only God knows if the person involved in a sexual act is living up to her or his potential. Humans are under an obligation to achieve the highest level of intimacy they are capable of. If you are blessed with a healthy psyche that opens the possibility of best sex for you, be grateful to God and refrain from any judgmentalism about the sex life of your neighor.

jjmcneill@aol.com

Spiritual Maturity and Theology of Fallibility Part 3

Jesus' Founding of the Church of the Holy Spirit at the Last Supper

At the last supper, Jesus informed his disciples that it was necssary that he should "go away" in order to make it possible for the Holy Spirit to come into the world and dwell in our hearts: "Yet you are sad at heart because I have told you this. Still, I am telling you the truth, it is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you, but if I go I will send him to you...However when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth" (John 16: 6-13).

Over many decades of theological reflection on this passage I have wondered what was that necessary link between Jesus' death and the coming of the Holy Spirit. Why could the Holy Spirit come to us only after Jesus' death. One central interpretation of that neccesity has to do with the issue of the spiritual matuurity of Jesus' followers! As long as Jesus remained alive and present, his disciples had their center of authority outside themselves. As a result they were not totally responsible for their actions. They were striving to meet the expectations of an external authority. They had not yet become fully creative and responsible adults.

But after Jesus' death his Spirit became what Paul called 'the glorious freedom of the children of God!': "The proof that you are sons and daughters is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the spirit that cries,'Abba Father'; and it is this that makes you a son or daughter; you are not a slave anymore" (Gal 4: 6-7). Paul clearly understood the good news of the evangelium, the gospel message, is exactly the message of our freedom... "Christ set us free, so we should remain free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be fastened again to the yoke of slavery" (Gal 5:1-20).

Paul has the same understanding of freedom as found in the Sanscrit root of the word. The word freedom in Sanscrit had two independent meanings. First it meant to be a free member as against a slave member of the household. Second it meant to be loved by the master. Anyone in the household that the master loved, by that very fact became a free member of the household. Anyone who was not loved was a slave member of the household.

I find the insight that comes from this double meaning of the word very profound. It is love; it is knowing that we are loved; it is by living in the atmosphere of love that we humans are genuinly free. The child that knows it is loved with an unconditional love is free to play and to develop in a healthy way. We adults, if we are fully conscious of God's love for us, are psychically free to mature and to play life to its fullness in the presence of a loving God. As Iranaeus, the Greek Father, put it: The Glory of God are humans fully alive!" Love creates the space in which freedom florishes.

Paul saw the pagans as not free but slaves in relation to their gods because they related to their gods in a spirit of fear. But Christians, he argues, are free because their God is a God of love, who has adopted us all into his family.

"All who are guided by the Spirit of God are sons and daughters of God; for what you received is not a spirit of slavery to bring you back into fear; you received the spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry out "Abba. Father"! The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God. And as we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God." (Rom, 8:14-17).

Paul continuously repeats the theme that God's Spirit dwells within us and, if we ask, will empower us. "The Spirit too comes within us in our weakness: for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that could never be put into words..." {Rom.8:26}.

There is a yearning and longing deep in our psyche which is not just that of our ego, but that of the Spirit of God dwelling in the depths of our spirit. Maurice Blondel gave a philosophical expression to this same theme in his Philosophy of Action: "Our God dwells within us, and the only way to become one with that God is to become one with the authentic self!'

James Alison, my favorite theologian who happens to be a gay mam, in his most recent book Broken Hearts & New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal, in Chapter 15: Befriending the Vacuum, comes up with an original and profound reading of Jesus' discourse at the Last Supper. Alison interprets the discourse as deliberate settong Jesus" death and resurrection3 in the context of the original account of creation in Genesis "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was a formless void, there was darkness over the deep, and God's spirit hovered over the water" (Gen 1: 1-2).

My hunch is this: that Luke portrays Jesus, in between Gethsemani and the cross, as deliberately retracing in historical form the route back from (present) created reality, to being outside of and thus prior to Creation. From his prayer of obedience and sweat "like clots of blood", in which he is fulfilling Genesis 3:19,so that the new Adam is able to get right what the old Adam had fouled up, he moves to the formless and dark void which is described at the beggining of Genesis, and once again in the darkness and failed sun that accompanied the Crucifixtion, Thus, in breathing out his Spirit to the Father on the Cross, he is entrusting to the Father the concrete historical and human form of the bringing into being of the New Creation; which he has opened up by going to his death. {Luke23:44-46). It is from then, until it is breathed upon us that the Spirit hovers over the vacuum.

Alison advances the thesis that just as the old Adam tried to achieve immortality without God's help and ended up with the dualist idea of immortal soull and mortal body; Jesus , as the new Adam. in obedience to God, his Father, entered into the void of death. This act of obedience enables God's spirit to undertake the new creation by sending the immortal Spirit to dwell in our hearts.

(Part 4 will deal with how the LBGT Christian community should deal with a fallible and homophobic leadership in the Church)

Spiritual Maturity and Theology of Fallibility: Part 2

Freedom of Conscience

One of the most central teachings of Jesus, without doubt of utmost importance to all Christians and especially to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered Christians is freedom of conscience. This teaching is founded on Jesus' promise to his followers to send them the Holy Spirit who will dwell in their hearts and lead them into all truth.

In John 7:37-39 Jesus made the promise of "Living Water"!

On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood there (in the Temple) and cried out:

"If any human is thirsty, let him or her come to me!

Let the man (or woman) come and drink who believes in me!"



As the scripture says: From his breast will flow fountains of living water.

John adds this comment on the mysterious connection of Jesus' death on the cross and the gift of the Holy Spirit:

He was speaking of the Spirit which those who believed in him were to receive; for there was no Spirit as yet because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

At the last supper John records Jesus as promising: "I shall ask the Father and he will give you another Paraclete (the Greek word means advocate) to be with you forever, the Spirit of Truth whom the world can never accept since it never sees nor knows him." (John 14: 16-17) Jesus declared further: "I have said these things to you while still with you, but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you." (John 14: 16-17)

Jesus declared further: "I have said these things to you while still with you but the Advocate, the Holy Spiirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you." (John14: 25-26) The title Advocate which Jesus gives the Spirit means we will have our own public defender, one who speaks with us and for us; one who will plead our cause.

Fulfilling the Prophets

Paul, in his Epistle to the Hebrews, sees Jesus' gift of the Holy Spirit as the fulfillment of this prophesy of Jeremiah:

Look, the days are coming, Yahwey declared, when I shall make a new covenant with the House of Isreal when those days have come...Then I shall plant my Law, writing in their heart. Then I shall be their God and they will be my people. There will be no further need for everyone to teach neighbor or brother, saying, "learn to know Yahwey"! No, they will all know me, from the least to the greatest...since I shall forgive their guilt, and never more call their sins to mind (Jer. 31-34).

Notice that Jeremiah foresees that the new covenant in which every human being from the least to the greatest who believes in the messiah will have direct access to God who dwells in their hearts. This access to God will not be a privilege of the few who are gifted with extraordinary intelligence, or ritual rank, or even holiness! The Holy Spirit is portrayed in the prophets as a thoroughgoing respector of democratic process. There is no hint here that one must depend on extrinsic authority in order to inform one's conscience and learn what God wants. After the coming of the Holy Spirit, God will directly and immediately inform our conscience.

In the Acts of the Apostles on Pentecost sunday, Peter records these words of the prophet Joel: "I shall pour out my Spirit on all humanity. Your sons and daughters will prophesy; your young people shall see visions, your old people dream dreams. Even on slaves, men and women, shall I pour out my Spirit" (Acts 2: 17-18; Joel 3: 1-2.).

It should be clear from these passages that the Prophets foretold that the spiritual movement created by Jesus through the gift of the Holy Spirit will of its esssence be a democratic movement in which all members are equal in authority because of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It follows that all authority will be based on a discernment of spirits that happens from the bottom up and not from the top down.

(Part 3 will deal with Jesus' message concerning the Holy Spirit at the last supper.)

Spiritual Maturity and Theology of Fallibility

A theology of fallibility lies at the very heart of Jesus' life and teaching and is, I believe, deliberately ignored by the Catholic church because it threatens the hierarchy's claim to absolute authority. That theology was a major part of Jesus' message at the last supper as recounted in the gospel according to John. This theology has enormous implications for the structure of authority in a Church that claims to be based on the revelation of God's will made by Jesus and the prophets. In my next three blogs I will deal with that theology and its implications. (The theme of this series of blogs is dealt with in a much fuller way in my book: Freedom, Glorious Freedom: The Spiritual Journey to the Fullness of Life for Gays, Lesbians and Everybody Else. That book, with a new preface by Rebecca Mertz, was recently re-issued by Lethe press.)

What constitutes Maturity?

A healthy maturing process is the psychological process by means of which we separate off from our dependence on parents, family and external religious authorities and become autonomous adults, making our own choices and taking responsibility for them. Maturity can be defined as the ability to live one's life according to one's own insights and feelings and no longer live in a continuous effort to meet the expectation of others. Theologian Sebastian Moore goes so far as to write "living your life to meet the expectation of others" is a form of sin. On both the psychological and the spiritual levels maturity means the ability to discern what is the true self and to find the courage to act out that true self.

What is the role of fallibility of authority in that process? Thank God for blessing us with finite, fallible parents! It was precisely when we knew that our parents were wrong that we found the courage to separate off from them. Had they been infallible, it would have been close to impossible for us to mature into autonomous and responsible adults.

In his book of liberation theology on the spiritual journey of the poor in the base communities of Central and South America, Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian theologian, expressed the same understanding of spiritual maturity. The title of his book: We Drink From Our Own Wells, derives from a famous saying of the medieval monk, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: "Everyone has to drink from his (or her) own well!" "Spirituality", Gustavo writes, "is like living waters that spring up from the very depths of our own personal spiritual experience." The basic teaching of base communities was a personal capacity for discernment of spirits to understand how Gospel values could be implemented in the lives of the poor.

This understanding of spiritual life based on personal experience the Hierarchy perceived as a threat to its external authority and leading to a democratization of the Church. Comsequently, the Vatican went on an all out political attack against Bishops who embraced liberation theology, replacing them with conservative Opus Dei bishops who proclaimed the absolute authority of the hierarcy and renounced the preferential option for the poor supported by the Jesuits and liberation theologians in favor of a preferential option for the rich. This decision was recently identified as the underlying cause of the impotence of the Church in Mexico to have any influence in stopping the violence in the drug wars. After all, the leaders of the drug cartels are the rich! The Opus Dei Church is almost totally out of touch with the ordinary people of central and south America and cannot get back in touch, I believe, without restoring the base communities founded by liberation theologians!

D. W. Winnicott, the famous English specialist in child psychology, wrote: "Every child knows in its bones that in its wickedness lies hope; in its conformity and false socialization lies despair!" Winnicott meant that most chilren remain hopeful that they will continue to be loved and respected even when they do not conform to parental expectations. But if a child believes that the only way it will be loved is by conforming to the expectations of others and hiding the real self in a closet, it has already dispaired of life.

The central message of Jesus in the New Testament is that we are unconditionally loved by God, our father. "While you were yet sinners, I loved you!" God's unconditional love frees us to play all our lives in the presence of an unconditionally loving God.

Maturity for a gay person must include coming out of the closet; just as spiritual maturity must include coming out of the closet with God. We must risk that we are loved by God just as we are. We must "take a chance on God"!

(Part 11 of Spiritual Maturity and Theology of Fallibility will explore the understanding of spiritual maturity proclaimed by Jesus at the last supper.)