image credit: jason nocito
ya know, as i look back on the last week's entries, i notice a theme emerging. i'm way early for valentine's day, but i think i am on the move in that direction. or at least something's on my mind.
i have stumbled upon this site before, and been slightly intrigued by the its agenda.
manifest love
here's a quote from one of the pages:
Spirituality and Ethics
As gay men, many of us remain simultaneously aware of our strengths in friendship and loving actions, yet distrustful of imagining any larger purpose, pattern, or lesson in the ways we live our lives.
Across time and cultures, many societies have long viewed gender-divergent men as channeling beauty, ritual and sacred wisdom into culture. In fact, our work may go far deeper.
Manifest Love explores the idea that gay men may also function to channel a kind of love into culture, a love beyond Eros to caritas, a radically transformational form of social communal relation. That is, that the values, practices, rituals, and norms of our gay male worlds are an experiment in a new kind of beloved community.
Manifest Love takes seriously the possibility that gay men are evolving a set of ethics that embody some of the values most important to society, yet which remain largely unseen or unappreciated by gay men ourselves, as by the straight world.
Is this spiritual work? Spiritual is as spiritual does. It's time to understand the deeper, culture-changing practices gay men bring societies in which we live, and to ask whether, in ways we barely see, all of us-- gay and straight-- are present at the creation of a set of transformative ethics, one we call Manifest Love.
2 comments:
A very thought provoking post, I must read more on this topic. I like the concept of Manifest Love as defined here; certainly, humankind is in need of transformative ethics. We are so adrift and lacking in any sense of communalism.
I occasionally wonder if there is a socially higher purpose for homosexuality. What is the nature of a gay man or lesbian woman? In general, I mean. Why gay? The gays and lesbians I know are some of the most wonderful people I've ever met. They have a very unique take on the world, different anyway from the typical straight view. And if our culture would quit repressing and bashing homosexuals, what kind of amazing things could the gay community accomplish in an atmosphere of acceptance and respect? These are things I think about when the forces of my life allow me to let my mind wander.
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