White Crane - Gay Culture & Wisdom

WC81 - Joel Anastasi's The Second Coming

Rev81_anastasi
The Second Coming:
The Archangel Gabriel Proclaims a New Age

By Joel D. Anastasi
iUniverse, 340 pages.  $20.95.  ISBN 978-0-595-49405-7
Reviewed by Toby Johnson

What the Christian, long-anticipated “Second Coming of Christ” really refers to is not a return of a bodily Jesus descending through the clouds as portrayed in the myth, but rather the awakening of the soul in all of humanity so humankind realizes and experiences the “Christ within,” that is, that we are all incarnations of God.  This is, indeed, one of the central themes in contemporary, post-Christian, post-mythological, and (in the very best sense) New Age spiritual thought.

“You are God. The container you’ve chosen has chosen one fragmentary aspect of God to experience, one speck in the cosmos, one cell in the universe… allowing God to experience itself in its infinite complexity.”
This is how this wisdom is expressed by the Archangel Gabriel, speaking through a trance channel, in Joel D. Anastasi’s fascinating and thought-provoking The Second Coming: The Archangel Gabriel Proclaims a New Age.

Anastasi is a trained journalist, news reporter and former magazine editor who applied his professional skills to interview the entity that is channeled by Reiki Master, counselor and healing practitioner Robert Baker. Baker has a website about his practice at ChildrenOfLight.com.

Part of the experience of reading the book is understanding just what channeling is and how its productions are to be evaluated. Certainly what is now called “trance channeling” is a parallel phenomenon to what in Biblical times was called “prophecy” and in Christian and Muslim tradition is called “revelation.” Through a human being—especially a human being who has trained him or herself in meditation practice to allow personal ego to quiet and a deeper voice from within to speak—trans-human wisdom and information is articulated as though it were coming from an external personal entity.

Since the central theme mentioned above holds that God is within each person, then the entity that speaks from within is always that God. So contemporary New Age spirituality naturally honors this particular literary genre of channeled revelation as a manifestation of the human/divinity unity. Neale Donald Walsch’s Conversations with God series, Jane Roberts’ Seth Speaks and Esther and Jerry Hicks’ Abraham books, and in a slightly different way A Course in Miracles are other examples.

Beyond the actual content of the revelation, what is probably most important about the phenomenon is the meditation training in quieting personal ego. And reading the productions and revelations of trance channels are more important for how they train the reader in such practice than in details they purport to reveal. That is to say, at least in the understanding of this reviewer, the medium itself is more important than the content. It’s the medium, the idea of channeling itself, that reveals and demonstrates the central wisdom that all human beings are “fragmentary aspects of God.”

Anastasi began studying with Robert Baker in 2002. He found the experience of listening so profound and fascinating that he decided to write it down and to organize and present the wisdom in the literary genre of modern journalism: the interview. The style makes the material easier to understand and less “ooo goo boo goo” mystical and more realistic and down-to-earth. Indeed, since the interviews began in 2002, the terrorist attack of 9/11 was still very vivid and so Gabriel naturally comments on this watershed event in human history. As it happens, Gabriel espouses the conspiracy theory that the World Trade towers were imploded from within. That may or may not be actually so. My proposition that the medium is more important than the content holds that the value of the revelation is not dependent on the factuality of what’s revealed. The Truth that Gabriel manifests through Robert Baker wouldn’t be disproved by the evidence that there were no explosives in the WTC any more than the mythological significance for Christianity of the Resurrection would be invalidated by the discovery of Jesus’s bones. The mythical, transcendent Truth stands beyond the metaphors that are used to express it.

In The Second Coming that Truth is that God is within us all. Reading the book is a fascinating reminder that each of us should listen to our deepest selves.

I’m not sure what I think about 9/11 Conspiracy Theory, though what it certainly true is that contemporary human consciousness is permeated with conspiracy theories, and these, at least, point to the reality of collective, planetary consciousness. We all think something is going on beyond what we all see; there’s a hidden dimension to human life.

Anastasi, an openly gay man who occasionally mentions his partner and questions Gabriel about gay issues, ends his introduction: “I began this journey as a skeptic. The intuitive truth and rightness of Gabriel’s teachings have found their way into my ‘deepest heart,’ my ‘deepest being.’ It is my wish that Gabriel’s teachings find that place in you and that all mankind may one day join in peace, love, and unity in this new two-thousand-year age.”

In recommending this book to readers, I am echoing that sentiment. We really are at the start of a “new age”; a new religion, a new consciousness of what “God” means is being born in our time. This book is a wonderful demonstration of that—and evidence, I think, of how gay people are part of its unfolding.

Toby Johnson is a former publisher of White Crane and a contributing editor to the magazine. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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Posted by Editors at 10:55 AM in Books, Reviews, Toby Johnson, WC81 20th Anniversary | Permalink | Comments (0)

WC80 - Review of Ed Madden's Signals

RVU_Madden Signals By Ed Madden
The University of South Carolina Press
69 pages, $14.95
ISBN: 1570037507

Reviewed by Dan Vera

Ed Madden teaches English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of South Carolina.  He’s also a hell of a poet.  The publication of a book like Signals heralds great things for lovers of honest poetry that captures the lyrical beauty of life.  I spent a few hours reading this book, contempling the words and images.  I found them populating my mind.  I found a deep resonance to the questions I hold in my heart as a Gay man in the world and one deeply in love and partnered.

Along with his academic bona fides Madden serves as writer in residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Gardens in Columbia, South Carolina.  One sees evidence of this connection to the natural world in Madden’s work.  In poems like “Cabin Near Caesar’s Head” there is a gorgeous attention to the botanical splendor of the countryside.  Again and again one is — I don’t know what other word to use but — blessed by a precise litany of names — the luscious names of trees and flowers.  There is such great attention here and such care taken in creating miniature pictures in the mind.  I have to add that this collection is of importance for those grown thirsty for poems about the love of men, for Madden breaks the drought throughout this book. What’s most refreshing is the exercise doesn’t seem forced or premeditated.  Madden is writing plainly but with intention.
Signals has a number of poems that speak to the peculiar nature of the South’s ever-present racial history.  Others have done this.   But Madden is writing from his perspective as a gay man partnered with another.  This happens best in the poem “Confederates,” a poetic account of a day marching against South Carolina’s confederate-laced flag.  When a woman asks what the two white Gay men are doing at the march, the question has an immediate percussive ring that lays bare the joint allegiances Gay men and people of color should hold at this point in history.  It’s startling and affirming at the same time.  I can’t recall another poet writing of these things so effectively and convincingly.

Last October, after many years of being an admirer of his work, I had the good fortune to read with him at the Atlanta Queer Literary Festival.  Hearing him read from these poems is a memory I will long treasure.

Signals is the resulting book from Madden’s winning the 2008 South Carolina Poetry Book Prize.  It is the greatest gift South Carolina has given me.  The gift is yours for the taking.

Dan Vera is White Crane’s managing editor and a poet living in Washington, DC.

For more White Crane, become a fan on Facebook and join us on Yahoogroups.

Subscribe today and keep the conversation going!  Consider giving a gift subscription to your friends who could use some wisdom!  If there's an article listed above that was not excerpted online, copies of this issue are available for purchase.  Contact us at editors@gaywisdom.org


Posted by Editors at 12:13 AM in Books, Dan Vera, Poetry, Reviews, WC80 Music & Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)

WC74 - Review of Wisdom for the Soul

Rvu_chang Book Review

Wisdom for the Soul:
Five Millennia of Prescriptions
for Spiritual Healing

Compiled & edited by Larry Chang
Gnosophia Publishers, 824 pages, Hardcover, $49.95

Reviewed by Toby Johnson

The final quotation cited in this enormous tome of brief quotes of wisdom is from a man named Philip G. Hamerton 1834-1894, who wrote: “Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted than when we read it in the original author?”

Indeed, this book is founded on that fact. And a very impressive edifice is constructed upon it. Wisdom for the Soul is a sort of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations squared! But unlike Bartlett’s it is all focused on wise sayings, not just famous ones, and organized by themes rather than by author (a 47 page biographical index of the 2500 some authors is appended).

Larry Chang, the creator of this impressive collection is described as a student of Religious Science and the Dharma, with a grounding in metaphysics, spirituality, pastoral counseling and public speaking. He is also described as an exile from Jamaica who was granted asylum in the U.S. based on sexual orientation. So he’s a Gay man.

Chang demonstrates one of those functions of Gay men as keepers of the past and keepers of wisdom that White Crane has come to champion.

This, of course, isn’t a “Gay book” as such, though there’s wisdom from Gay writers scattered throughout. A cursory examination of the author index shows such names as James Broughton, Arthur C. Clarke, Quentin Crisp, Harvey Fierstein, John Fortunato, Michel Foucault, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Gomes, Paul Goodman, Langston Hughes, William James, Audre Lorde, Bill T. Jones, Somerset Maugham, Stephen Sondheim, Annie Sprinkle, Lily Tomlin, Gore Vidal, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Marguerite Yourcenar, etc.
What an exercise in history, literature and culture it is just looking at the names.

And I’m happy to say my name is among them. I was pleased to see that Larry Chang outed himself in his back cover flap biography, explaining his asylum in the U.S. for sexual orientation. And I am proud to report that I myself get outed in the book every time I’m quoted (in twelve places) because my book titles contain the word “Gay.”

As that quote from Philip Hamerton points out wisdom is often most easily absorbed and remembered in short aphorisms. Larry Chang gives us a plethora of aphorisms. And, now he is working on a book of wisdom sayings for the soul of Black Folk and another for the soul of Queer Folk. I’m keeping my copy of Wisdom for the Soul next to my meditation cushion. It makes a great source of affirmations and inspirations.

The wisdom runs from funny to profound, just as it should. This is marvelous collection.

This is just an excerpt from this issue of White Crane.   We are a reader-supported journaland need you to subscribe to keep this conversation going.  So to read more from this wonderful issue SUBSCRIBE to White Crane. Thanks!

Selections from the book are also available on individual cards
for use as an oracle or for posting on the fridge. Check out www.wisdomforthesoul.org

Posted by Editors at 09:54 AM in Books, Toby Johnson, WC74 - Lovers | Permalink | Comments (0)

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