When a Teacher of God Takes Off His Clothes

I learned something about God this past weekend. I was part of a photography retreat at Easton Mountain. On Sunday morning a facilitator from another group, Bob Pileggi, agreed to pose for us. I thought we would do portraits, maybe head and bare chest. I was delighted when first his jeans came off, then his shorts.

Bob on the deck of The Temple

I’ve known Bob for several years and know that he’s studied A Course in Miracles. I don’t know if he thought of the passage in the Course that defines a teacher of God as someone who “has made a deliberate choice in which he did not see his interests as apart from someone else’s”  - but that is exactly what he did.

I realized that when I undress another man and allow him to undress me – as I have in workshops and private sessions in erotic spirituality and as I will at the Edward Carpenter Community’s Gay Men’s Week this September (The Dance Between Power and Intimacy) – we are creating the sacred space in which we can use erotic energy to transcend ego and come into a new relationship with Spirit.

The other men of the retreat may not have realized that we were in sacred space, but the message of the Course was present: “God’s Son is guiltless, and in his innocence is his salvation.” In any moment when we connect with our innocence we connect with the Divine, and that’s what happened on the deck of the Temple at Easton Mountain.