This was my column for The Spectrum on 6/12/12.
Victor Frankl, a German psychiatrist who survived the World War II Nazi death camps, wrote powerfully in “Man’s Search for Meaning” about the spiritual lessons he learned. As one reviewer noted, Frankl reminded us of “the responsibility each of us owes in valuing the community of our humanity.”
Frankl asserted that a core drive for humans is our search for meaning. He wrote from the perspective of life in the death camps. We also find meaning in the antithesis of the horrors of the death camps, in those precious moments when we experience spiritual love.
All of this came to mind as I thought about one of those spiritual moments that occurred three years ago while hiking in a beautiful Kayenta wash with my wife. We had gone deep into the wash and stopped to rest and listen to the quiet amongst huge boulders that had fallen many millennia ago. Cherie was sitting across from me with the sun reflecting off the rocks giving her face a subtle red glow while the early afternoon sun highlighted her beautiful blond hair. In a scene that could only be described adequately by a poet, which I am not, she was, at that moment, the center of my world and my existence. The love that I felt for this woman after 25 years of marriage was indescribable. The moment passed and we began our walk back to the world, while I continued in the afterglow of my experience.
As we walked I recalled the letter to the editor I had written a few days earlier trying to address the sources of our sexual orientation. I asserted that sexual orientation is not a behavioral issue but it is rooted in our human experience of love. My letter drew the predictable responses online by some unable or uninterested in understanding my argument.
The memory of those responses brought me back to another moment I experienced in 1994 while working as a mental health counselor at an agency in Atlanta, Georgia. We provided services to predominantly young gay men and their families as they struggled with the prospect of premature death from complications related to AIDS. At the time there were no effective medications to counter the effects of this disease.
During an emotionally intense counseling session with a young man we were exploring aspects of our lives and our mutual experiences of romantic love. At one point he looked at me and said: “George, can you understand that the love that I feel for my partner is not different than that that you feel for your wife?” In that moment of genuine human intimacy and meaning, the student became the teacher. Reflecting later, I came to understand that in that moment I was confronting the last vestiges of my own homophobia and this man who sat across from me in this quiet room facing his own death had invited me into the “community of our humanity.”
Comments