Tuesday, July 14, 2009 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico
I originally wrote this piece for a May 2005 issue of my then e-newsletter. But with so many people facing so many doubts about so many things in these so-turbulent times, it felt time to offer this reminder of the fundamental truth of our infinite potential and innate greatness.
May 16, 2005 ~ Victor, New York
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
~ traditional hymn
There's an old hymn you might know titled How Great Thou Art. I discovered it about a decade ago on a country gospel compilation
Then as I strolled among the emergent greens of an Eastern spring, something shifted and suddenly I got it.
All those church-goers through the hymn's century-long history who assumed they were singing to someone else, to the God-on-high that's outside of themselves, were missing the deeper truth behind the words.
All this time, they and I have been singing to ourselves!
How Great Thou Art is a declaration addressed not to some white-bearded deity, but to the singer. To me and to you: How great thou art.
For you are the God That You Are. And how great thou art!
The God That You Are is mighty. The God That You Are is strong. The God That You Are is fearless. The God That You Are knows only effortless, easy abundance.
The God That You Are is love.
We hear variations of this so often: You are love...God is love...Love is everything...Love is all that is...Love is all there is...
All these are true, even if they have been tritened in the over- and superficial use of those phrases.
But the basic truth is that the energy of love suffuses all. The energy of love fills all. And the energy of love is all there is.
And if that's so, then you are that energy. You are love.
How can something that is love be less than? How can something that is love be not good enough? How can something that is love be not valuable?
You are all these things. And from that place, it's time to step into an appreciation, acceptance and embrace of what you are.
For once you recognize, truly and viscerally, that there is nothing but love and that that's what you are, you can no longer hold yourself down. You can no longer diminish and demean who and what you are.
All you can do is acknowledge how great thou art. How great thou art. 
There is a God Presence within and around you that in this moment is expressing itself in human form. It has the eyes the allow you read this. It has the ears that allow you to hear this. More than anything else, it has the heart that allows you to know this.
So stop for a moment. Take a deep breath. Take a deep breath and breathe in the truth. And that truth is the underlying greatness of the love that defines who and what you are.
Yes, the word the love has been cheapened through misuse. But in our human language that we now share as a means of communication, love really is the only word we have.
It's time to reclaim. It's time to re-energize it. It's time to open to the truth of it, which is that love is more than a romantic, red-trimmed valentine that makes you feel good on February 14. 
Love is an energy.
It's the energy that created the Universe. It's the energy that created you. It's what holds you together in this body. It's what stitches the Universe together. It's what holds the stars together in their constellations. It's what creates the healthy, healing and whole-making patterns of our lives.
It's a frequency and vibration that sets no conditions for its expression, its giving or its receiving. It simply is. Ever-present, it always surrounds you in its embrace.
Take a moment to feel yourself embraced by that energy.
Close your eyes and think back to a time and place, where you felt fully nurtured, loved, embraced, present and in remembrance of all that you are. And if you cannot now recall such a moment, simply allow these words to create one for you, as you remember how great thou art.
Wherever you do not feel love in your life, wherever you do not feel that nurturing, nourishing, all-embracing, all-accepting energy of creation, breathe it in. Allow your breath, your connection with the Divine Being that you are, to embrace you, to nourish you, to nurture you...to love you
You are the God That You Are, and that God, all triteness aside, is love...the infinite and ultimate expression of love.
There is much baggage around the word God. Yet it is simply a three-letter word we have chosen to describe an energy that our minds cannot, at this time, comprehend.
How can your mind comprehend the infinite nature of all that is? How can your mind comprehend love as that infinite expression?
So we create words like God -- or Universal Spirit, Great Spirit, Goddess or All That Is. The words aren't important. What's important is that you attune yourself to what that energy represents, an energy that is beyond your mind's grasp.
Your mind is an important part of you. But it is only one part of you. Honor your mind and the roles it plays in your life. Don't allow your mind to be your life.
Your life is the energy represented by the concept of God. Your life is the energy represented by the concept of love. Your life is the frequency of your highest potential, a potential that your mind cannot begin to grasp.
So step out of your own way and into the God That You Are. Or better put: Get out of your own way and allow the God That You Are the freedom to step into your life.
Many evangelical Christian religions talk about accepting Jesus, which can sometimes, in some situations, be off-putting.
Yet if we take that call as a metaphor for opening your heart to let the love that Christ represents flow through you, then we're essentially talking about the same thing.
We're talking about opening our hearts to allow the highest energy to express itself through us, not only in Sunday church, not only in meditation, not only in the midst of some other experience of touching the Divine.
We're talking about being that Christ Light. It's being the Jesus within you, the Mother Mary within you, the Buddha within you, the Moses within you, the Allah within you, the Great Spirit within you. It's in being those energies in every moment.
Too easily and too often, we disempower ourselves by seeing those God energies as separate from ourselves. We sing How Great Thou Art to the outer God.
We do that, in part, because our minds cannot grasp that these energies reside within us and are part of us. We also do it because our minds, or some fearful parts of our beingness, cannot accept that we are that love, that we are that greatness.
So your assignment for this moment is to surrender to the concept that you are great, that you are love, that you are God.
Your assignment is to read or sing the words how great thou art and apply them to you. Your assignment is to see every expression of the word God as an extension of who you are.
The Divine God of your beingness is you. Not your human body or personality mind but the God That You Are, which encompasses everything -- all that is, was or ever could be -- and brings it together in a greatness that longs to express itself through you.
So open your heart, mind and soul to the greatness that you are, to the God That You Are. And in doing that make the choices for that higher resonance. In every moment. 
When you stand at the crossroads of any choice, notice which fork in the road carries the higher resonance, which choice is the God choice.
Do your best in that moment to take that path, the God path, the Jesus path, the Allah path. Take that path as the Divine-in-human form that you are, and move forward in that energy, spreading the love and greatness that you are through each word, thought and action, in each moment.
You are the God That You Are. Repeat that:
I am the God That I Am.
I choose the God That I Am.
I surrender to the God That I Am, and I allow that highest potential, that highest presence, that highest expression of who I am, to live through me, to love through me, to act through me, to speak through me, to breathe through me.
I am the God That I Am.
I am the God That I Am.
I am the God That I Am.
Bless yourself with that energy in every moment of doubt, uncertainty or fear: I am the God That I Am. 
The word namaste means I greet the divine in you, I greet the God in you, I greet the God That You Are.
And so I complete this by blessing you, by honoring you and by acknowledging how great thou art, by acknowledging the God That You Are.
I know who you are. I know the Divine Presence and God Potential you are. I know the miracles you are capable of. I know the love that you are. I know how great thou art. And I believe in you.
Namaste.
Photos by Mark David Gerson: #1 Albuquerque sky; #2 Yucca in bloom, Sandia Mountains; #3 "Bridge to Your Potential," Albuquerque sunset; #4 "Rough Crossing," Brookfield, WI; #5 Stone cairn, Meditation Mount, Ojai, CA
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
How Great Thou Art
Monday, January 19, 2009
Our Inauguration Day
Monday, January 19 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico
Tuesday at noon ET, when Barack Obama is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States of America, it will not only be his inauguration but ours. It will be an inauguration for each of us willing to step into a new world with him.
If only 10 percent of us -- in this country and around the world -- leap across the threshold today into that new beginning saying "Yes, I can. Yes, we can," and if we not only believe it but act on it and live it, this country and this planet will be changed forever.
Are you part of that 10 percent? Are you ready to turn your back on fear? Are you ready to embrace all parts of you and of each other in love and respect? Are you ready to embrace possibility, hope and potential?
What can you do in your life today -- right now -- to anchor this new beginning? How can you embody your possibility and your potential?
Share it here. Then be it. Now.
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Coming Out (Again) for Christmas
Friday, January 2 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico
It's December 14 and I'm at the New Mexico Gay Men's Chorus's "Come Out for Christmas" concert with my friend Kathleen. It's our second year attending this event together and although this year's show is not nearly as good as last year's, there's something about being here this time that feels inexplicably right.
After the concert, Kathleen and I are chatting about this and that at a nearby Starbucks when I ask her, "Have I ever told you my 'gay story'?"
If you've been following this blog for a few years, you'll have read various versions of the story. What I told Kathleen was this:
For the first 20 years of my adult life, I lived as a gay man. Yet, as I awakened to my spirituality, I felt called to stop identifying myself as gay -- or straight. Rather, I began to see myself as a sexual being open to all possibilities. Still, I was somewhat surprised when, a few years later in Sedona, AZ, I fell in love with a woman.
When I told my gay friends that I was getting married (a sort of reverse coming-out), I explained that I had fallen in love with a wonderful spirit who just happened to occupy a female physique. From that place of love and passion, I said, gender and orientation were irrelevant and anything was possible. And it was.
Yet as profound, intimate and wonderful as our relationship was, it ended six and half years later, for reasons unrelated to sexuality.
In the four years since, I've often revisited the sexual orientation question. "Am I gay again?" I would ask in meditation. The answer was always, "Nothing has changed. Don't label yourself. Be open to all possibilities." Even though my primary physical attraction remained toward men, I honored that counsel and refused to categorize myself.
Something changed when I returned to Albuquerque in November after 40 days on the road. It was as though after 15 years of traveling in the spiritual realms, I had crash-landed back on earth and was reconnecting with the 38-year-old I had been before my spiritual awakening.
Suddenly, people from my past resurfaced, as did work opportunities disturbingly similar to those I hadn't pursued in 16 years. And at the very physical (read "earthly") job my financial situation pushed me into last month, I have been "Mark." Only friends and family from years back know me as Mark. To most everyone else I'm "Mark David."
I was starting to believe that I was living my own version of the infamous dream season of the 1980s Dallas TV series and that I would wake up and discover that nothing of the past decade and a half had really occurred.
Of course it all did, and I have a beautiful nine-year-old daughter (and all of you) as proof. What I have been experiencing, rather, is a giant turn of the spiral I wrote about in Everything Old Is New Again, a "full circle" far more comprehensive than any I remember having lived.
In spiritual terms, it's time to take all I have experienced on my spiritual journey and bring it down to earth -- into the practical, into the physical...to reconnect who I was with who I am now.
"Perhaps," as I wrote so presciently in The MoonQuest, "it is time...to allow the boy I was to touch the man I have become..."
When I leave Starbucks that Sunday evening, having shared my story with Kathleen, I feel the same kind of rush I felt 24 years earlier when I began coming out as a gay man to straight friends. I feel as though a tremendous burden has been lifted from me. I feel lighter.
Four days later, I go to see Milk, the film story of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the US, who was assassinated in 1978 by a fellow San Francisco city supervisor.
The movie is brilliant, compelling and moving (as is Sean Penn's portrayal of the title role) and I find myself wiping away tears at frequent intervals. 
It's compelling for another, more personal reason: the film's time frame covers the period of my coming out, and the gay activism it portrays is a bolder version of my activism in the Montreal of the mid- to late '70s. It's like watching my own life play out before me.
I leave the theater in an altered state and when I got into the car, I begin to sob uncontrollably. I sit there -- crying, heaving, releasing -- for 20 minutes. And when the tears stop I see that I have come full circle, that I have allowed the Mark I was to touch the Mark David I have become, that as open as I remain to the infinite realm of possibilities in life, I am a gay man. Again.
Even as I share this story with close friends in the days that follow, I'm not sure what to do with this realization. Is it appropriate to come out a third time? Is it necessary to be as openly gay at 54 as I was at 24 and 34? Does it even matter anymore to anyone but me?
This morning, in the midst of an interview with Joan Sotkin on her Prosperity Place radio show, I realize that it does matter. And I realize why.
During the show, Joan shares her spiritual coming out story and reveals how difficult it had been to let her spirituality have a place in her coaching work. And I note how vulnerable I felt putting out my most recent blog post, All That Matters Is That I'm Writing.
As we're talking, I remember how important it is to be vulnerable, how healing it is to share our truth and our stories out into the world. I remember, too, how much of my work is about helping give people permission to do those very things by doing them myself.
That's largely what this blog has been about. That's largely what Harvey Milk's message was about. He insisted that we must be who we are out in the world, and it's a message that's as valid today as it was 30 years ago -- whoever we are, whatever our orientation.
I realize, too, this morning that like Joan we all have many parts to ourselves and that each of these is more potent and transformational when operating as part of a oneness. When we fragment ourselves -- being spiritual only with our spiritual friends, gay only with our gay friends, Jewish only with our Jewish friends, vegetarian only with our vegetarian friends, Democrats only with our Democrat friends -- we cheat the world and ourselves of the strength, power and paradox of the human soul.
Each of us is a unit within which lives unparalleled diversity. Only when we can be at peace with that diversity within ourselves will we be at peace with that same diversity in others. And only then will we see peace in the world.
That peace begins in me. That peace begins in you. And it begins with me honoring all of who I am by integrating all of who I am into all that I do. One of the ways I achieve that integration is by being open and vulnerable with you, by letting you see more of me than I might always prefer you to see in the hopes that you will be inspired to share all of you with others. 
Tikkun olam is a phrase in the Jewish tradition that translates from the Hebrew as "healing the world." That healing begins when I open my heart to myself so that I can see who I am. It grows when I open my heart to you and let you see who I am. It grows further when you do the same.
Won't you open your heart and share your light -- all of it -- with a world so desperate for healing? Won't you come out of hiding and be?
What parts of yourself are you hiding from yourself?
What parts of yourself have you hidden from the world?
Where can you integrate more of who you are into what you do?
Where can you be more open to others' diversity?
Where can you be more open to your own?
Won't you share some of who you are here?
Photos: #1 Gay Santa from The Austin Chronicle; #2 me and my daughter, Guinevere; #3 Book cover for The MoonQuest, designed by Angela Farley; #3 Poster for the movie Milk, starring Sean Penn; #4 Hebrew lettering for "tikkun olam"
