An interview with Father Basil Pennington

“Could the Virgin Mary have just as easily given birth to a female Savior?” I remember the moment it first occurred to me to ask this question. It was at the end of a rather frustrating conversation with a very conservative Orthodox Christian Father who kept insisting that in his tradition, despite all evidence to the contrary, there are no differences between men and women. The monks in their monasteries and the nuns in their convents, he explained, keep identical hours, do identical work, and say identical prayers. “So, you see?” he challenged me. “Everything is the same!”

I could feel the conviction and the truth in his words and, upon hearing them, I thought I’d perhaps understood the significance of the Apostle Paul’s declaration that “in Christ there is neither male nor female.” So was it simply a coincidence, then, that “God the Father” was male, that Christ and his twelve apostles were male, and that in most traditional Christian denominations the priests, bishops, deacons, etc., were still exclusively male? What did this historical preponderance of maleness mean, if, as I had been assured, “everything is the same”? More importantly, what was the significance of gender on the Christian path? What were the implications of Christ’s divinity, or enlightenment, for his own relationship to the very human facts of maleness and femaleness? As the confident words of this Orthodox elder swirled in my mind, it became increasingly clear that we had to speak with someone who could bring real depth and open-mindedness to these challenging questions.

I immediately thought of Father Basil Pennington, the man who had initially referred me to this passionate spokesman for the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Himself a Catholic priest, Father Pennington has the distinction of having traveled widely to visit the great Spiritual Fathers and Mothers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He describes his pilgrimages in his anthology, In Search of True Wisdom, coauthored with Sergius Bolshakoff. An important contribution to the Catholic ecumenical movement, the book is a moving account of contemporary efforts to rediscover the riches of the Christian mystical and contemplative tradition. According to Father Pennington, these powerful Eastern Orthodox masters represent the last remaining link in an unbroken lineage directly traceable to the early Fathers who helped to shape the Church’s views on gender centuries before the allegiances of the Christian world came to be divided between East and West, Constantinople and Rome.

Father Pennington had first come to our attention as someone with firsthand experience of Mount Athos, the fabled Aegean island of Orthodox monasteries on which, for fifteen centuries, no woman has set foot. Legend has it that not even female animals are allowed there. As we began our investigation into Christian views on gender, the “Holy Mountain” represented yet another metaphor for patriarchal Christianity: male God, male Savior, male priesthood—why not a male island? We wanted to ask Father Pennington: Why was the “Holy Mountain” wholly male? He wasted no time in informing me, during one of our initial telephone conversations, that there are Orthodox convents of equal renown throughout the world—though, he admitted, no all-female islands—and that Mount Athos, like the rest of our planet, abounds in fauna of both sexes. Given his obvious appreciation for the dimension of living transcendence embodied in Eastern Orthodox practice, we wondered what Father Pennington would have to say about some of the subtle questions our investigation was beginning to raise.

The three-dimensional, larger-than-life Basil Pennington who greeted us at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, was rather different from the soft-spoken priest his voice on the telephone had led me to imagine. A huge bear of a man attired in the traditional Cistercian monk’s habit—white robe, black tunic and a brown leather belt—he had the snowy hair and full white beard of the archetypal patriarchs he’d met in his travels, and his clear blue eyes radiated dignity, humor and a timeless and palpable peace.

Father Pennington had recently returned to St. Joseph’s after seven years in residency at a Cistercian monastery in Lantao, China, during which, as has been his custom for the past three decades, he’d also traveled extensively to lead retreats and workshops on the contemplative practice known as Centering Prayer. Along with Father Thomas Keating, he has become one of the world’s best-loved teachers and exemplars of the Western revival of this ancient Orthodox practice. Father Pennington is also, like fellow Cistercian the late Thomas Merton, a prolific writer, with over fifty books to his credit, many of which describe his own direct experience of—and his profound appreciation for—the teachers and teachings of traditions other than his own.

We fully expected that a man of Father Pennington’s renowned erudition and open-mindedness would have much to say about the relevance of gender and sexual orientation to the pursuit of true spiritual freedom, and we weren’t disappointed. It was obvious from the start that his responses were animated by an infinite reverence for the revelation and example of the historical Christ, as well as an earnest conviction that God had introduced Jesus into humanity’s midst when He did, and as He did, for very specific reasons. But this only made Father Pennington’s independence of thought, and the consistency with which his views reflected his own deeply considered personal experience, all the more striking. Throughout our talk, he demonstrated a breadth of perspective and a flexibility in his approach to this most challenging of subjects that clearly stretched (and sometimes strained against) the limits of his tradition. “These are wonderful questions!” he exclaimed. “Looks like you’re going to have a very interesting issue!” How right he was.

interview

WIE: It seems to be the case for most of us that our identification with being men or women is quite primary. Freud went so far as to assert that gender distinctions constitute the core of the individual personality and the basis of our civilization collectively—that our ideas about gender form the very foundation of who we believe ourselves to be and are the very source of the way our civilization is put together. In your view, does this fundamental identification with our gender ultimately inhibit or support the realization of our full potential as spiritual beings?



Fr. Basil Pennington:Theoretically, I’d say it would inhibit it, in the sense that any kind of box we put ourselves in inhibits our growth. We are an expression of the Divine and are open to full divinization, and so anything that tries to define us is going to fall short and has the danger of inhibiting our full blossoming. I would certainly say that if a person is too conscious of his maleness or her femaleness, and if that’s become something of the agenda of their life, then it definitely would inhibit their spiritual development. It can become part of that project of building up the false self. In my own experience, I don’t believe I personally think of myself as a man, or as gender-specific, and I don’t know if I ever did. But just looking at today’s advertising, I think you can see that there’s a lot of playing at what it means to be a “real” man or a “real” woman, and that’s all usually fairly superficial. So obviously, if you’re putting a lot of energy and intentionality on that, then the spiritual dimension is going to be lost.



WIE: You said that you may actually never have thought of yourself specifically as a man?



BP: Well, I don’t think I meant that exactly, but that I’ve tended to give primacy to my being. And yes, perhaps I have thought of myself specifically as a man at times, but that’s only to say that at times I celebrate my maleness and feel very happy that I have a male body. And it’s not just physical, either; I think there’s a whole attitude toward life that comes with that. But my point is that it’s more a matter of just being who I am. And I must say that I don’t like categorizing at all—you know, “These are female characteristics; those are male characteristics.”



WIE: In contemporary society, though, these ideas about what it means to be a “good” or “real” man, or a “good” or “real” woman, tend to exert a very powerful influence on most of us. And we generally experience a lot of insecurity about whether or not we measure up to our gender ideal, and tend to put a lot of energy into trying to live up to it. Spiritual liberation teachings, by contrast, have perennially stressed that we have to be willing to give up all of our preconceived ideas and live in a state of perpetual “unknowing,” a condition of genuine openness to the discovery of what is. One of the things we’re exploring in this issue is what this kind of “unknowing” would mean in relation to our gender identity. Would it be possible, for example, for an individual to come to a point in their spiritual development where they’re completely free from any fixation on gender differences, superficial or otherwise, while at the same time feeling no need to avoid or deny whatever real differences may actually exist?



BP: Yes, and I think that’s where the real challenge lies. If we rise to a sufficient level of humanness, or Christification, we realize that there is essentially neither male nor female. But at the same time we find that this somehow gives us a larger perspective on our body’s reality—the reality of our maleness or femaleness—and the particular emotions and sensitivities that go along with it. Here at the monastery, for example, we live in a male community rather than a mixed community, and I’d say that as a result, the men here are largely free from any need to prove that they’re “real” men or that they’re “masculine.” But the other side of that is that in having so little contact with women, this whole perception of the differences between male and female can get a bit distorted. We’re having much more contact with our nuns now than we did in the past, and it turns out that most of the men are finding that very enriching. In fact, just this past Sunday morning one of the monks was talking about the three large group meetings we’ve had here this past year—three occasions where monks and nuns came together—and how these meetings had given him a much stronger and clearer grasp of his true identity as a monk. Being with the nuns, he said, had helped to bring him into a fullness of self-understanding that was truly beyond male and female. We were just doing various things together—discussing basic problems, concerns, challenges and so on—but it freed the monks from some of their lingering presuppositions about the differences between men and women because we were meeting in a fuller human and divine realm. And so all those ideas just got left behind, that was all—they just got left behind! At the same time, I think we were probably more conscious in the end about some of the real differences. I mean the nuns—well, nuns do things differently from monks, you know!



WIE: For example?



BP: Well, I don’t know if we stopped to think about it all that much, but there’s definitely something . . . a greater delicacy about things, I guess. They challenged the monks to be a little more spruce, a little more careful, not so rough in their expressions—and to behave a little bit more like gentlemen than we usually do. And while, again, I don’t like to generalize, having listened to their discussions, I’d also say that the nuns have certain insights, or have generally more of a feel precisely for the things that are felt, while the men tend to be a little more intellectual. Anyway, the point is that while there was a growing experience that in the things that really mattered there wasn’t a difference, at the same time there was also an enrichment. And that enrichment was due to an appreciation of our tendencies to come at things somewhat differently, and to the challenge, through recognizing those differences, of coming to see our reality more integrally.



WIE: In many mystical or contemplative teachings, spiritual liberation is described as the transcendence of opposites. Because we’re talking about being in a spiritual environment in which all kinds of opposites are recognized and gone beyond, I’d be interested to hear about your own experience of what transcendence means in relationship to gender. What does it actually mean for an individual to transcend gender differences while still inhabiting a male body or a female body?

BP: Well, again, these kinds of differences are a part of the journey, but they mean different things at different points. I would say, for example, that when you’re starting out, they’re quite apparent, and that you’re also pretty conscious of being male or female. I was a model before I entered the monastery, so I was very conscious of my body and my appearance and things of that sort, and especially before I wore the habit I’m sure I tended to stand out as a very present male in some ways. But the habit takes a little bit of that away from you; it’s kind of like you don’t know what’s under there, and in letting go of that male image you take on a new image. You’re much less concerned about the body, and in fact the purpose of many of the monastic disciplines is to put the body down, in a sense—the fasting and the not getting as much sleep and so on. And in the early days, when I first entered the monastery, we were still very much in a more primitive tradition of monasticism where cleanliness was not considered next to godliness by any means. You just didn’t bother with it; you’d take a shower and change your clothes once every couple of weeks, as was the practice of the poor. We did a lot of hard manual labor too—building this monastery, for one thing. We really worked very hard.


So the idea, you see, was to subdue the whole physical side, and I think the gender side went with that a good bit, too. We just didn’t think about it; we were on a spiritual quest, looking at and moving into transcendence. But it seems to me that, after years of becoming more and more spiritually attuned and more in touch with the divine reality, as your spiritual consciousness and your awareness of the Divine in everybody and everything grows, at some point you come back to an appreciation of your body and what you could call your “maleness.” And while a lot of that is socially or culturally defined and is certainly quite open to and in the process of evolution, it’s still, as I said, a part of that reality that you’ve become more aware of. And because you’re more in touch with it, you can more easily distinguish the essential from the superficial.

WIE: You seem to be saying that at a certain point you start to have a more direct experience of gender rather than one that’s filtered through all of your ideas about it.

BP: Yes, exactly. Because the reality of the situation is that God did make men and women. And I am a man and this is what He made me, and so I celebrate this—who I am, physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually.



WIE: It’s been very interesting for us, in exploring with various people this question of going beyond gender identification, to find out how many different ideas there are about what this kind of attainment might look like. Some believe, for example, that what it would ideally lead to is a condition in which sex and gender aren’t really an issue anymore at all—that if you were to encounter someone who truly embodied freedom in relation to gender, you would find yourself face to face with an individual who had no maleness or femaleness to speak of, no particular sexual characteristics, or perhaps a kind of perfect blend of the two.



BP: Yes, well, I wonder if I’m really comfortable with that because, as I was saying, as you grow spiritually, you begin to realize the divineness in your maleness or femaleness, and I don’t think you’d want to lose that. If you’re a man, it’s because you were called to be male. That being said, you wouldn’t want to go along with any of the superficial stuff that people say is “male” and “female” but, at the same time, you wouldn’t want your freedom from those ideas to in any way inhibit you from celebrating the fullness of the true maleness in a man and the true femaleness in a woman. So the point, I think, is that if you’re a man or if you’re a woman, then you’re still a man or a woman when you come into your fullness, and so you celebrate that. God likes variety, you know, and hopefully there always will be variety. I personally believe that we want the full richness of the human person there, which is ultimately still male or female because that’s the way we’re made—and that’s good, and that’s complementary, and I think that in some way it offers another vehicle for the Divine to express the fullness of the Divine. There is something precious about the differences between men and women in that they uniquely express something of the Divine, and, rather than wanting to lose that, I think you want to get more and more in touch with it! Why? Because that’s when you become so aware of how much everything you’ve thought or said or heard about “male” and “female” is really not it. It’s superficial stuff, it’s cultural stuff, and you just don’t want to get caught by any of that.


But it’s very hard, you see, because we are so culturally conditioned. It’s very hard for us to find any articulation that really touches that realization, or to find any kind of expression of it that really satisfies us, especially when we’re trying to talk about what’s beyond the physical. The spiritual dimensions of my being that are coordinated with the fact that I have a male body, with the fact that my wholeness is male in form, are very hard to articulate without getting caught up in that cultural conditioning, and I don’t want to get caught there.



WIE: Early Christian interpretations of Genesis seem to support the notion of a disparity between the capacities of men and women for spiritual attainment. For example, in I Corinthians the Apostle Paul states, “For man was not made from woman but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman but woman for man.” And religious historian Elaine Pagels writes that according to Paul, like Eve before them, “women, being naturally gullible, are unfit for any role but raising children and keeping house.” And some of the writings of the early Church Fathers state that man alone, and not woman, was created in the image of God. What is your understanding of the significance of the Genesis story?



BP: The other day I was writing a letter on the computer, and you know how the keys get away from you every once in a while? Well, I suddenly realized I had the date up there as “19999,” and I just stopped for a second and thought about that. You know, that year is going to come, and people are going to look back and think we belonged to the primitive Church in the year 2000. I mean, what’s 2000? It puts a lot of things in perspective if you just sit with that a little bit. Yes, we’ve seen a good bit of evolution of human consciousness since the time of the primitive revelation or the development of the Hebrew/Christian scriptures. And while we can be grateful that we’ve got all those centuries behind us, we should also remember that we may still be a lot more primitive than we think we are.


Now in the writings of Saint Paul, which have had an enormous impact on Christian thinking, he affirms very simply that in Christ there’s neither male nor female, and that the primary goal is becoming this divinized person that is Christ. But then, secondarily, much of what he says is directed to the prevailing social climate of his time—”How do you handle this situation?” and so on—in the context of that social climate. That’s why he’d tell slaves how to behave, and masters how to behave, and lay all sorts of strictures on the way men and women were supposed to function in the Roman household or the Hebrew household that are very difficult for us to hear in such a vastly different cultural context. But if we accept all this from the point of view that God meets people where they are, and that the divine dimension in us is always growing, then suddenly the challenge becomes: Are we really hearing the divine consciousness as it’s coming forth in our time? I mean, that’s not easy either—we’ve all had acculturation, too. I think the greatest challenge for the human race now is to fully accept the equality of men and women and the fullness of humanity and divinization that we share. I think that is what the divine consciousness is calling us to at this point in our evolution.



WIE: I’m sure many people would agree that is what has to happen, but some would no doubt also assert that a critically important part of that process involves addressing the repercussions of these kinds of sexist ideas having been propagated for so many centuries. For example, feminists such as Mary Daly cite the traditional notion of “God the Father” as quintessential proof that Christianity is really the source of an oppressive global patriarchy. They publicly revile the Church—and particularly the Catholic Church because it has so much power—as a universal oppressor of women. Now, some people say, “Well, that’s too extreme, and it’s not really productive to focus on all that in such a negative way.” Yet, when I asked your friend Father Panteleimon, a charismatic elder in the Greek Orthodox Church, whether the Virgin Mary could just as easily have given birth to a female Savior as a male one, he dismissed that notion as impossible, unnatural and absurd, citing the doctrine of one of the early Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, that since Eve’s fall from grace, woman’s reproductive role has rendered her constitutionally unfit for spiritual leadership.



BP: Well, I certainly would not agree with that. Father Panteleimon and Christian Orthodoxy as a whole—though again I probably shouldn’t generalize—say that everything stopped with the Seventh Council. What he’s saying there is much more in line with the early Patristic outlook.


But at the same time, as I said, we still have an awful lot of cultural conditioning that’s holding us back enormously, and just to fill that out a little, the truth of the matter is that most of us men still wouldn’t exactly want a woman to be our boss. So I often say that the first thing women have to do is to help men to grow up so that men are able to be equals. The reason we men try to keep women down is that in reality we’re scared to death of them—because when they are truly empowered, and we’re not, well, what’s going to happen?


Of course I certainly don’t think that the physiological differences, as you just quoted there from Father Panteleimon, pose any kind of problem. And what may come out of those differences isn’t, in the integral person, a problem either. As I said before, I think they’re a complementarity and an enrichment. And I certainly don’t think that they dictate any kind of hierarchy, either. But one of the great challenges that the Catholic Church has, precisely because it’s Catholic, or “universal”—unlike, say, the Episcopal Church, in which the national church in the United States could do one thing and the one in Indonesia could do another—is that there is a universal teaching authority and a kind of moving together. Now if you’ve traveled around the world as I have, you’re especially aware that this whole evolution of consciousness with regard to the equality of men and women is at very different places in different countries. In some countries, they’re just not ready for it at all. And so the Catholic Church is like a good teacher who meets the students where they are and only takes them to the next step they can master because the teacher knows that if they’re too far out in front of their students, they’ll lose them. And when you’re talking about a class that is universal, or even just one parish for that matter, you just have to try to get a sense of what the next step is for the group as a whole. I was talking to a parish priest yesterday and he was telling me that when you get up in the pulpit, and you’ve got people in that parish from one end of the spectrum to the other, somebody’s going to damn just about anything you say.


You know, the Catholic Church took quite a leap at the Second Vatican Council and changed a lot of things for the first time in four hundred years, and that really has stretched and strained a lot of people. So moving ahead with the women’s thing has been a matter of doing it gently. Women have moved into the sanctuary and are taking new roles as lectors, ministers of the eucharist, parish counsels, officers of the diocese and so on, so gradually people are getting used to that. But we’re in a country where this evolution is perhaps the most advanced and yet, even here, we still see all the drag that’s around! And when you go to a country that’s been cut off, like China, say, it’s quite clear that they have a long, long way to go.

WIE: Is it conceivable to you that Christ could have been a woman?

BP: In his time and place? No. I mean, look, he had a hard enough time as a man! Could he today? Well, yes, if God had chosen this as the time and place for the Incarnation, I think it could have been possible—though I still suspect he probably would have chosen to be male because the contemporary world is still far from being a place where a female Incarnation would be universally accepted. You know, we’ve seen women in different countries rise to the highest position, but that’s often because they’ve stepped into a male expectation, or what would be called a “male” way of looking at things. And I think the great thing will be when women, as women, can really lead and help society to move ahead. But we’re still a good way from that as far as I can see, in this country and probably every other country in the world.



WIE: Sociological considerations aside, though, is there anything to Panteleimon’s insistence that there is some inherent limitation on a woman manifesting an attainment equal to Christ’s?



BP: No. And our Lord used the feminine image when he could—like a mother hen gathering her chicks to her breast and so on. He was very comfortable with men and women. He wasn’t afraid to have John resting at his bosom, and at the same time, he wasn’t afraid of letting Mary Magdalene anoint his feet and kiss them—which was an enormously sensuous and exciting experience! But he had to work in the time and place he chose to come to, which was a very pivotal place inhabited by a Semitic culture, which, because of a certain simplicity and earthiness that it had, made it possible for his message to be absorbed into every other world culture and philosophy. That’s where and when he chose to come, and in that situation I don’t think there would have been much hope, as a woman, of his fulfilling the mission that he’d set for himself.



WIE: Is it your impression that, as a woman, Christ would have been a different sort of Savior?



BP: I would say yes. Because Christ expressed himself in a very complete way, and so because he was a man, there was a maleness about that expression that, if he’d been a woman, probably would have been different. Even though he tried to use feminine images, I think that, being a man of his time and place, he was probably more comfortable with male images. And so he says, for example, “What father among you would give his child a serpent when he asked for a fish?” If he had been a woman, I think he might well have said, “What mother among you would do that?” He was more comfortable with praying, “Our Father.” In fact he almost always spoke of God as “Father”—and if he’d been a woman, he might well have spoken much more of God as “Mother” and used more womanly images. Not that he didn’t use them; I mean, he complemented the story of the good shepherd immediately with that of the housewife who’d lost a coin, or the story of the farmer selling the seed with that of the woman selling the leaven. So he tried as much as he could, given his people and their situation, to bring out both sides. But he was obviously a man and probably would not have chosen twelve men as his key group, with the women just kind of serving in the background, if he had been a woman.



WIE: In my talk with Father Panteleimon, he went on to assert that this seemingly discriminatory aspect of the Christian tradition—the Twelve Apostles and the priests all being male—is in fact inspired and sanctioned by God “Himself,” and that allowing the tradition to be toyed with by misguided reformers who want to ordain women can only have disastrous consequences. But some liberal voices within the Catholic Church, such as yours, insist that traditional Christianity’s attitude toward women is not sanctioned by God but has its roots in the patriarchal ambience of the Church’s early history and now can be modified to suit our more socially enlightened times.



BP: You know, our present Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, is a very sharp person, and I wonder if he wasn’t sending that very message to the Church and his people when he spoke on this a couple of years ago. According to Catholic belief, you know, he has the power to speak infallibly, but very rarely has it ever been invoked. And when people have tried to push him to speak infallibly about this particular subject, as well as about other things, he’s always refused—so that’s already a message. But it was even more significant to me that two weeks after his very sweet apology for the way his predecessors had treated Galileo, in which he said publicly that they had failed because they’d taken the scriptures too literally, he spoke out against this question of ordaining women, himself explicitly arguing, just as Father Panteleimon does—from a very literal interpretation of scripture—that this male-only priesthood is simply the way it’s always been and always will be. Now, again, he’s a sharp man and I don’t think he was missing that. I think he was sending a message that said, in effect, “Just as they were too sure about Galileo back then, we’re a little too sure about this thing now. Just wait around, boys, and you’ll see.” In other words, I think that by using the very same arguments he himself had said were wrong in the Galileo case, he was saying to us, “Hey, this could change, too!” And not only that it could change but that it will!



WIE: I wanted to ask you about some other models for the kind of freedom we’ve been speaking about in relationship to gender because there are different approaches to this. For example, there are many spiritual practitioners who see the differences between men and women as being solely the expression of cultural conditioning, and believe that any gender-based conditioning must, like all forms of conditioning, be transcended if we’re to become truly free. Certain religious traditions, on the other hand, adhere to a kind of “tantric” model in which there are strictly defined spheres and roles said to be divinely ordained for men and for women. In Orthodox Judaism, for example, the men devote themselves to study and prayer and the women find their spiritual fulfillment in bearing children and maintaining the sanctity of the home. And, according to this paradigm, it’s only by each sex giving themselves wholeheartedly to the fulfillment of their respective roles, and then coming together in their differences, that divine union can be achieved and God’s will can become manifest on earth. Similarly, in more eclectic or secular circles, a number of contemporary thinkers and practitioners have asserted that women are generically suited to pursue a path of immanence that involves, as in the Jewish model, deeply connecting to their bodies and to the cycles of nature and finding the sacred in the ordinary events of daily life, while men tend to seek for the transcendence of all that is worldly and to look beyond themselves for the sacred mystery that lies at the source of all existence. Do you feel that this notion of distinct paths for men and women holds true in practice?



BP: Some of those distinctions are certainly true. I mean, a woman will find holiness in bearing a child, while a man will never find holiness in carrying a child in his womb for nine months. So there are some things that are just realities, and they will remain. Others—like study or prayer, for example—well, I don’t see how you could put them specifically in a male or female category. But the point, I suppose, is that even if we were to go beyond all social conditioning, there is still some difference that remains, as I was trying to say before, and what that difference is isn’t always as easy to understand as the physiological capacity to bear a child. The way men pass on life and the way women pass on life are different, and because that is a tremendous expression of divine energy going through us, it certainly is a part of our innate holiness, and the significance of that difference is easy to see. And when you come to things like immanence and transcendence, there may ultimately be some difference there, too—something that reflects itself in the physiological way we each pass on life. But having said all that, I’d still want to be very cautious because I think that our socialization, our acculturation, would tend to see concepts like transcendence and immanence too imaginatively—or too physiologically based—and also because I think that transcendence and immanence ultimately come together. There may be more naturalness to a woman moving through the immanent and into the transcendent, or to a man moving out of the transcendent and into the immanent—that may be so. And that may not be just sociological, either. But when people make these sorts of generalizations, the tendency is so to debase these things—if that’s not too strong a word—that I would be very cautious in saying anything like that. I’d want to put a lot of signs around it that say, “Be careful here,” because certainly the indwelling Divine, once a man really goes on the spiritual path, is as strong in him as it is in a woman, even though physiologically he functions differently. And at the same time, women can certainly be as transcendent and ecstatic as any man. So I would be hesitant to make too much of that.



WIE: Continuing in this vein, in our time there are also many people who view their own experience of gender or sexual preference as the very basis of their spiritual path. For example, there are women who worship the Goddess; there are men who champion a distinctly male spirituality; and there are many gays and lesbians who regard their sexual orientation as requiring unique forms of practice and worship. In fact, some advocates of a distinctly “gay spirituality” have even suggested that because the male and female polarities are theoretically more fully integrated and balanced in homosexuals, theirs is an inherently superior form of spiritual practice. For all of these individuals, gender and sexuality are seen as central to the path and as giving rise to fundamentally different paths for men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals. What do you see as the advantages and limitations of a view that focuses on gender identification or sexual orientation as a path in itself to spiritual freedom?



BP: I would say that the differences are not that fundamental. What’s much more fundamental is that we are all in some way expressions of the Divine Being and Life. Of course it’s a reality that we come out male or female, but once again, those are secondary. They’re a part of reality, such that when you come into the fullness of who you are in God, and the expression of God that you are, they’ll still be there. But sexual orientation is even farther down the road and also a little more problematic than gender, because even though we pride ourselves on having learned and understood so much about sex, I don’t think there’s anybody who can tell you what the basis of sexual orientation really is. And I think that ultimately we’re all bisexual anyway, which makes me even more hesitant to speak about sexual orientation as being a fundamental part of one’s spirituality. So while I have no doubt, as I said, that the male/female distinction is an essential though not a fundamental part of becoming fully, integrally divinized, I’d be much more hesitant to say that in order to be that full expression you’re going to be gay or straight. And, as I said, ultimately I think that a person who’s really free knows that they’re bisexual—that we all have the capacity to relate to our sexuality in these different ways.

WIE: What do you mean, exactly, when you say that “we’re all bisexual”?



BP: It was established by the Kinsey Report, I think, that virtually nobody is right in the middle of that spectrum, or totally at one end or the other, but that it’s a question of dominance. But most men are so afraid of their homosexual side that they totally ignore it or repress it if they can. And I think that many gay men and women have been so hurt by homophobia that they repress their heterosexual side—though probably not as strongly as many heterosexuals tend to repress their homosexual side. All I’m really trying to say, though, is that both elements are there in everyone to varying degrees.



WIE: So in terms of a person who’s liberated realizing that they’re “bisexual,” what that would mean is not necessarily that they would practice bisexuality, only that they would be fully aware of the potential within themselves to be both heterosexual and homosexual?



BP: Yes. I think that someone who’s really free knows that they can relate with others in whatever way is appropriate and that they’re not bound by a particular orientation that would make it impossible to relate with others in one way or the other.



WIE: And what about the notion, prevalent in some gay spiritual circles, that being homosexual makes one more predisposed to the Divine, or more open in some way to direct contact with the Divine?



BP: Well, if you’re speaking about the human race as a whole, many people would probably accept the generalization that women are more disposed to spiritual or contemplative life and, based on that generalization, it could seem that those men who are more comfortable with their so-called “feminine side” would be more disposed to spiritual life than those who aren’t. But again, I think that’s all still kind of superficial because how much of that is sociological acculturation is difficult to say. To the extent that gay men tend to be more gentle and maternal and all those sorts of things, they might be more disposed to spirituality. But you see, we’ve labeled those characteristics as “feminine” without knowing whether, in their nature, they really are.



WIE: In the Christian mystical tradition, how is Christ himself thought to be a model for true spiritual freedom in relation to gender?



BP: Some people would respond to that, I suppose, by saying that Christ was obviously very comfortable with both men and women and had no problems there, but to me that’s also kind of a superficial answer. Obviously it’s true and obviously he’s modeling something that we should try to follow. But I think there’s also something deeper there, because we know Christ not only through the scriptures and the tradition, but also through our own personal experience. And through one’s personal experience, one can discover for oneself what a total reverence Christ has for the person, and for what it is that is the quintessence of the human person, which is the power to love and the power of free choice. This is an expression, in a way, of the humility of God. He makes his creature and then lets his creature decide what he’s going to do; he can tell God to go to Hell if he wants to, and God will let him! So in Christ there is a profound reverence for the person, and that is absolutely equal for every person, male or female, and God expresses himself in this essence of all-embracing love as much in men as in women. It’s only a limitation in our way of seeing or listening that makes us think it could be different for one than it is for the other—although there’s also something in the male and female expression of the Divine that is different. And God uses that difference. So Christ would have been totally respectful of that as well. He chose to be male, for example—and I think he celebrated his maleness—but then he created a specific role for Mary, who was female. He could have just come to earth in a human body, but he chose a woman and did the greatest thing that he could with that woman, which was to let her be, in the fullest possible sense of the word, his “mother.” So in these ways, and through these differences, I think that he was trying to express something—a reality so full, so beyond words, that our language cannot begin to describe it. And this is why scripture is written so much in parables and stories and mythology, because the message it’s conveying is far beyond the words. But at the same time, given that there is an equal capacity in male and female for full and authentic expression of the Divine, I think that feminists, and women in general, may have a real beef against God in the fact that he did choose to come as a man. I mean, they could always say, “Well, why didn’t God do it the other way? Why didn’t he come as a female and have a father or something?” Well, that’s true, but—God’s free! He can do anything he wants to do! In the end, I think you’ve got to say that, too. I mean, God is God, you know? But I can certainly see their point.