Ten Little Jizos, a Bodhisattva and a Family

I received a remarkable and deeply meaningful gift from Mark for Christmas: one large Jizo statute and ten smaller statues, all of which now grace our back patio. Anyone who knows me will recognize the significance of the number ten - it's how many children we have. Each statue represents one of them. The large statue represents me.

One has to know a bit about Jizo in order to understand and appreciate this gift. He is one of the most beloved and revered Bodhisattvas in Buddhism. A Bodhisattva is an archetypal being dedicated to helping others, and embodying specific spiritual qualities. Jizo is known for making a vow, despite the fact that he achieved enlightenment, to be present with and benefit all suffering beings on their respective paths to enlightenment.

This was the first Jizo statue we saw, in Ueno Park in Tokyo. This depiction is more severe than the many others we saw, but he is recognizable as Jizo because of his staff holding six keys (whose jingling is said to warn animals of his approach, thus preventing mutual harm) and the jewel he holds in his left hand, "the bright jewel of Dharma truth," the light of which banishes all fear.

I first learned about Jizo when Mark and I made our trip to Japan a year ago this past fall. Temple after temple, we ran into him, or rather statues of him. He is a beloved figure in Japan, special to pregnant women and to those whose children have died, and thousands of Jizo statues in Japan are particularly dedicated to children who have been aborted.  

We saw hundreds of Jizo statues at Hase-Dera Temple outside of Kamakura, Japan, all in memory of a child who had been aborted, stillborn or died young.

Jizo statues are often wearing tiny children's clothing or bibs, and grieving parents place toys and other offerings beside the Jizo statue to invoke his protection of their dead child. We ran across the very beautiful and poignant statute depicted below at another temple. Note a small child rests atop the Dharma jewel. The second picture shows items left at the feet of Jizo in memory of a lost child.

In North America, the personage of Jizo takes on a more archetypal and less literal meaning. His qualities include unflagging optimism, courage, and gentleness, and a nurturing love for all beings. He plunges fearlessly into any place or situation to help those in need and is especially concerned with taking care of those who are vulnerable. In this regard, Jizo is said to be the patron saint of lost causes because he never gives up. As the protector of travelers, he seeks to benefit travelers at important life crossroads.

I love Mark's gift. To me, the large Jizo statue that represents me is a constant reminder to strive always to develop the qualities represented by him: optimism, courage, gentleness and compassion. It is also a challenge to remind me of my role as father of my children: to be a guide for them, to be with them and help them in time of need, to never "give up" on them and to love them unconditionally.

The smaller Jizos represent each of our ten children, and together with the large Jizo, are deeply symbolic of life's journey, of my love for each one of them and of the roles they in turn will fill as they go through life - as parents, as friends, as human beings who seek to walk through this life with love and compassion.

Lastly, the Jizos will also be a constant reminder of the role that Mark has played as a Jizo-figure to my children. He has truly been an example to them of love and compassion and nurturance, and their lives have been blessed as a result.

This fact was beautifully expressed in another gift Mark and I received this past Christmas from our daughter Rachel - a video she made in which many of the children express their love for Mark (and for me) and what he has meant to them. As our daughter Hannah so beautifully expresses in the video, Mark filled a need - a gap - that they didn't even know was there. I cannot think of a better definition of a true Boddhisattva.

Jesus: Of Paris, Desires and Dreams

It had been building for weeks.

I was a Mormon missionary in Paris, France. When I had joined the LDS Church almost two years before, I had truly believed that I could leave my same-sex attractions behind me. I had worked diligently to discipline my mind. I had done everything I was “supposed” to do, and more.

The first four months of my mission were fine, i.e., I experienced no “temptations,” and I had little trouble controlling my thoughts. But then I was transferred to Paris, and temptations seemed to come at me from everywhere. Gorgeous men who attended our English class. Beautiful men on the street. Sensuality that was palpable.  

For the first (and only) time in my life, I was propositioned by a guy – directly, unmistakably, in a store in the heart of Paris. An older male member of the Church befriended me. I knew he was probably gay, but I didn’t care. Another male member, also probably gay, seemed to see right through my mask. 

All of this was extremely unsettling to me. For the first time since joining the Church, I allowed the genie of my repressed sexual orientation to escape from the bottle and allowed myself to contemplate who I really was.  It was exhilarating, but it was also frightening – particularly since I was a missionary.

It was after struggling with these thoughts and emotions that swirled around me for a number of weeks that I had a dream that was unlike any dream I have ever had, then or since.  It was so palpable, so real, so revelatory. I have written about this dream before, but the time has come to write about it again.

I dreamt that I saw a person in a large room filled with people dressed in white.  His presence seemed to tower over the others. I knew it was Jesus. As I made my way to the front of the room, my eyes became locked with His and He beckoned me to come to Him, to take His hand and embrace Him. As soon as I did so, we were transported, just the two of us, to another place, where we sat and talked – I talked, He listened lovingly and patiently - about my fears and joys, the deepest corners of my soul … and my ultimate secret. 

My gaze never left His countenance, and in His beautiful eyes, I saw love such as I had never before felt. In those eyes, I saw no judgment, no guile; only perfect, total understanding. His very countenance radiated such intense purity that I felt as if I would faint from bathing in such exquisite peace and love. In this setting, enveloped in love and light and truth, He told me that it was okay – my “attraction” – and that He loved me just the way I was. And that was the message I woke up with.

Now, one would have thought that this experience would have given me permission to embrace my gay self. But the message of the dream and the message of the Mormon Church regarding homosexuality were completely opposite each other. And I wasn’t strong enough to embrace who I really was.

This dream remained vivid in my mind for the next 25 years. It played a crucial role in the events that catapulted me out of the closet. But it wasn’t until yesterday that I feel I came to see the true significance of the dream. 

The insight came in a flash, seemingly out of nowhere: that dream, from a Jungian perspective (which posits that dreams are vehicles through which our subconscious tries to tell or teach us something), was really ME telling myself that it was okay to be gay. I assumed the personage was Jesus because my subconscious recognized that I viewed him – particularly at that point in my life – as the supreme Validator.

When I shared this with Mark, he provided the rest of the stunning insight. He posited that the love I had felt emanating from “Jesus” was really from my own deep Self, extending love and acceptance to my troubled, anxious self who was trying to do the right thing as a Mormon missionary and a Mormon man who desperately wanted his homosexuality to go away.

In addition, this dream – from this perspective, showed me who I truly am (and, by extension, who each of us is): a person capable of deep (even perfect) love, compassion and knowledge. It dramatically showed me what it means to be Christ-like, to be enlightened, to be full of compassion. Looked at from this perspective, the dream gives me hope that I not only CAN be the personage I saw in the dream, but also inspires faith that I AM the personage in the dream. 

 “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to [including oneself] may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.”

~ C.S. Lewis

A Mother and Her Gay Son

I originally wrote the following post in April 2011 and published it on my former blog.  I am re-posting it today in remembrance of my mother.

I’ve been thinking a fair bit lately about my mother.  She died a few years ago.  I never told her I am gay.  I never told her a lot of things.  You see, my mother and I became estranged as I got older due to the abuse that I suffered as a child at her hand.  It’s complicated, but about 15 years ago, I basically came to a point where I couldn’t go on pretending that what happened to me, didn’t happen.  After confronting her about some things and experiencing a disappointing response, I finally came to realize that she had certain limitations that she would never get beyond, no matter how much I wished our relationship was different.  So I (reluctantly) accepted that and moved on.

Because of the hurt, the pain and the realization that I will always carry the emotional scars of childhood abuse, I had not able to “forgive” my mother. The platitudes I had heard about simply forgiving and “applying the atonement of Christ” simply did not apply here – as anyone who knows anything about the legacies of child abuse can understand.  Frankly, I was not able to feel much if any love for her.  For a long time, I felt guilty about this; but I finally felt that I simply had to let it go and “give it to God.”  That gave me a certain degree of peace.

Since coming out, however, I have “revisited” many periods of my life – including my childhood and youth - sifting, sorting, re-thinking.  In fact, coming out has enabled me to look back on my entire life through a different lens.  Before finally acknowledging and embracing my true sexuality, try as I might to be “broad-minded” about my past, I was handicapped in that I looked at this past through a “Mormon” lens.  Particularly as a convert (comparing my experience to that of the Mormon ideal), I frankly (to my discredit) looked upon my family of origin with intolerance and shame and I viewed my dysfunctional childhood and youth as something to be ashamed of.  

This intolerance and shame were in turn overlain by an extremely thick and virtually impermeable coat of shame that covered everything - my entire self - as a result of my hidden homosexuality. I have been stripping away that coat of shame and working at exorcising the intolerance that has lived within me for so long.  Doing so has enabled me to love myself more and, perhaps as a result, to have more compassion toward my mother and to re-examine my feelings toward her.

For example, I have recently been thinking about what my mother probably knew or surmised about me as a child.  Examining the evidence, I find the following:

- My two older brothers were very athletic.  I was not.  Yet, I do not recall ever being forced by my mother (or my father, for that matter) to participate in sports. 

- I had apparently evinced an aptitude for interior decorating at a very young age:  my mother used to like to tell the story about how I started rearranging the furniture at one of her friend’s house when I was only four.

- My mother also used to like to tell the story of how she and I would sit together and listen to classical music.  I don’t have that recollection, but I supposed it was because I was probably very young.  What has impressed me recently about this memory of hers, however, is that it stuck out in her memory as something that was special to her.

- I suppose I was probably always a sensitive child.  I don’t remember much of anything from when I was very young, but I do recall as I got older that I loved art, music and church.  I also liked school, once I was old enough to go, and I excelled at it – something my older brothers didn’t.

As I look back on all of this, I have realized that I don’t recall ever being “put down” by my mother, or being called a “sissy” – neither by her or by anyone else in my family (except my next oldest brother).  I think, frankly, that my mother saw a lot of things in me that appealed to her, that she liked; and I wonder if she knew, even then, that I was a gay little boy.

Thinking about these things has helped me to have compassion on my mother, despite everything that she did to me.

I have also gained compassion for her as I look back on my own experience in my marriage and as a parent.  Coming out has helped me to see how getting married and denying my true self created a conflict in the very heart of me that generated not only unhappiness, but also a lot of anger and intolerance.  This unhappiness, anger and intolerance seethed and bubbled deep inside of me, and as hard as I might try to control or even ignore these emotions, they nevertheless found their way to the surface at regular intervals, poisoning my marriage and adversely affecting my relationship with my children.

As I have thought about these things, I have reflected back on my mother (pictured above on the right, the earliest picture we have of her).  She came from an abusive and dysfunctional background, too.  At least I know her father was abusive.  He and my grandmother divorced in the 30’s, and my mom grew up in various cities in the Midwest, moving fairly often as her mother scratched out a living then, later, as her step-father’s job took the family from place to place.  We frankly don’t know much about my mother’s childhood because she never talked about it.  The only things I do know are what my grandmother told me years ago.

When I was a younger man, in my early married years, I excused my mother’s behavior toward me as a child on the basis that she herself had been abused as a child.  (This is a typical behavior pattern in an abused child; the child cannot blame the parent and so inevitably takes upon him or herself the “blame” for the abuse.)  Later, I came to realize that this wasn’t a healthy behavior, and I placed responsibility where it belonged, i.e., with her.

I still view her as responsible for her behavior, but looking at my own life through the increased clarity and different perspective proffered by the process of coming out, I am able to have more compassion for her.  I am able to look at the elements of her marriage and her life that perhaps made her feel trapped.

In this regard, as I have looked back recently at the pictures I have of my mother, I have noticed something:  in almost all of the pictures taken before her marriage and in the early years of her marriage, she is smiling.  She looks happy.

With each passing year, however, she seemed to appear less happy in her pictures.  Frankly, by the time I came along, I think she was miserable.

Compassion literally means, “to suffer with.”  Looking back on my own life, reflecting on the deep unhappiness that I experienced in my marriage caused in large part by the rejection of my true gay identity, and acknowledging the toll that my unhappiness took not only on me but upon my wife and my children – in doing these things, I am able to “suffer with” my mother in what she went through; to have compassion towards her; to accept her for who she was, faults and all.  In so doing, I find myself able to do something I had not previously been able to do:  extend forgiveness to her and, ultimately, to find a love for her that I thought was extinguished forever.

________________________

Since writing this post a little over a year ago, I have had other realizations and experiences that have helped me to forgive my mother.  Perhaps one of the most powerful, and the most definitive, came when I was driving home from Denver a couple of months ago.  I was listening to a podcast of Oprah Winfrey interviewing Wayne Dyer, who was describing the process he had gone through to forgive his alcoholic father who had abandoned Dyer, his mother and his siblings when he was only a toddler.

Dyer hated his father and had dreams of finding him in a bar and beating him up.  Dyer described visiting his father's grave, stomping on the ground for hours, then ultimately coming to an almost blessed state of forgiveness.  He said that he came to realize that one of the main reasons he was here in this life was to learn forgiveness, and in order to do that, it was necessary for him to experience something BIG to forgive, i.e., there had to be blame before forgiveness.  He then quoted Mark Twain:

"Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

I cried as I heard this story, and as I did so, I felt a similar blessing of forgiveness and compassion for my mother.  I knew she had done the best she could with what had been dealt to her.

Furthermore, I came to know and accept that what I experienced as a child was necessary in order for me to learn.  What, exactly, I still don't fully understand.  I'm still working through that.  But!  Knowing this enables me, more than ever, to forgive my mother and to love her.

So, Mom, on this Mother's Day, your gay son would like to present you a bouquet of violets - the kind I used to gather as a boy on the grounds of St. Theresa's School across the street from our house in Salem, then bring home to you.  Happy Mother's Day, Mom.  I love you.