I ended up attending a small liberal arts college in my hometown that was not very diverse. ![]() This particular movement was one of remembering love but privileging the need to speak my own truth. It wasn’t until I graduated from high school that I was able to gain distance from the community in order to start articulating my inner experience of my sexuality and body as it related to other male bodies. The silence was constricting, and it spoke just as loudly as any sermon on the sin of homosexuality. I barely remember any anti-queer sentiments openly expressed growing up, but what I do remember was the silence that pertained not only to queerness but also to sexuality. On top of that, I slowly began to notice and accept my overwhelming sexual attraction to other men. I lived in the South, and old, angry white men were dangerous, so I grew up being afraid of God. I never understood who Jesus was and felt that God was like an old, angry white man. I rarely agreed with what I was learning, though. My church upbringing was my first lesson in what a spiritual community was and its power in shaping the lives of all its members. It was and still remains invaluable for the community. My mom’s insistence that I be present was part of how both she and the church loved me. The Black church was, among many things, a strategy to negotiate the brutality of systematic racism and the unrelenting demands of white supremacist culture to forget centuries of psychophysical trauma. Like most Black folks now and since slavery, I was drawn to the Black church because it was the only place I felt protected, affirmed, and seen. It was first and foremost the will of my mother who never gave me a choice! Yet, as I remember, I recall that it was something deeper that drew me to church. ![]() It was never the theology that drew me to church. Growing up in church, I never really understood Christianity or Jesus. In the sentiment of my home community, I may not be where I’m going, but I am grateful that I’m not where I used to be. I remember to offer myself the grace to grieve for the person I used to be. I remember not as an act of moving back into the past but as a memorial to the struggle of movement. As I have moved in my life, I have also experienced the death of who and what I was before the movement. These are the same experiences that the Buddha longed to make meaning of and which eventually motivated him to leave his home in search of transcendence from these sufferings. Each movement of the requiem was a shift to permit the listener and performer to be creatures experiencing the suffering of old age, sickness, and death. I knew nothing of requiems or Catholicism at the time, but what moved me most about the genre was how it evolved from Eucharist services for the dead to emotional and dramatic performance works that often embodied and echoed the human struggle to make meaning of death and impermanence. By college, I had discovered the genre of concert requiems. I have seen them as movements.Īs a young Black boy growing up in the South, my love of Black root music of traditional gospel, jazz, R&B, and soul was punctuated by a growing appetite for classical European music. Yet, these have been the choices that I have most often made. The most difficult part of leaving is remembering what has been left, articulating the why of my leaving, regardless of how it may put me at odds with those closest to me. Avoiding the present because dealing with right now is sometimes the hardest thing to do. Teetering between the past and the future. ![]() Never landing in a place but somehow feeling that the place lands on me. I am thinking of movement and memories of movement, always leaving and having to return again and again. ![]() I am thinking of wanderings from lover to lover, from glimpses of light to memories of light, away from identity to identity and back again from one kind of ignorance to another. I am thinking of the long journeys that have taken me from one locale to another, from one country to another the journeys over waters and mountains, through deserts, through places haunted and infested, through dark places, and darkness itself. I am wondering what it has meant for me to leave home. For those graduating and entering new periods of their life this month, the journey is just beginning. In this excerpt from Radical Dharma, co-author Lama Rod Owens describes his own personal and spiritual journeys, and coming home to himself.
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