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Contact Us Table of Contents Search Site Google listing of all pages on this website Site Map Toby Johnson's Facebook page Toby Johnson's YouTube channel Toby Johnson on Wikipedia Toby Johnson Amazon Author Page  Secure site at https://tobyjohnson.com  Also on this website: As an Amazon Associate
I earn from qualifying purchases. Toby Johnson's books: Toby's books are available as ebooks from smashwords.com, the Apple iBookstore, etc. FINDING
YOUR OWN TRUE MYTH: What I Learned
from Joseph Campbell: The
Myth
of the
Great Secret
III GAY SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of Human Consciousness
GAY PERSPECTIVE: Things Our Homosexuality Tells Us about the Nature of God and the Universe
SECRET MATTER, a sci-fi novel with wonderful "aliens" with an Afterword by Mark Jordan
GETTING
LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE:
A
Fantastical Gay Romance set in two different time periods
THE FOURTH QUILL, a novel about attitudinal healing and the problem of evil  TWO SPIRITS: A Story of Life with the Navajo, a collaboration with Walter L. Williams  CHARMED LIVES: Spinning Straw into Gold: GaySpirit in Storytelling, a collaboration with Steve Berman and some 30 other writers
THE MYTH OF THE GREAT SECRET: An Appreciation of Joseph Campbell
IN SEARCH OF GOD IN THE SEXUAL UNDERWORLD: A Mystical Journey
Books on Gay Spirituality: White Crane Gay Spirituality Series
Articles and Excerpts:
Review of Samuel Avery's The Dimensional Structure of Consciousness Funny Coincidence: "Aliens Settle in San Francisco" About Liberty Books, the Lesbian/Gay Bookstore for Austin, 1986-1996 The Simple Answer to the Gay Marriage Debate A Bifurcation of Gay Spirituality Why gay people should NOT Marry The Scriptural Basis for Same Sex Marriage
Gay ConsciousnessQ&A about Jungian ideas in gay consciousness What Jesus said about Gay Rights Common Experiences Unique to Gay Men Is there a "uniquely gay perspective"? Interview on the Nature of Homosexuality What the Bible Says about Homosexuality Mesosexual Ideal for Straight Men Waves of Gay Liberation Activity Wouldn’t You Like to Be Uranian? The Reincarnation of Edward Carpenter Why Gay Spirituality: Spirituality as Artistic Medium Easton Mountain Retreat Center Andrew Harvey & Spiritual Activism The Mysticism of Andrew Harvey
Enlightenment
Joseph Campbell's description of Avalokiteshvara You're Not A WaveJoseph Campbell Talks about Aging What is Enlightenment? What is reincarnation? How many lifetimes in an ego? Emptiness & Religious Ideas Experiencing experiencing experiencing Going into the Light Meditations for a Funeral Meditation Practice The way to get to heaven Buddha's father was right What Anatman means Advice to Travelers to India & Nepal The Danda Nata & goddess Kalika Nate Berkus is a bodhisattva John Boswell was Immanuel Kant Cutting edge realization The Myth of the Wanderer Change: Source of Suffering & of Bliss World Navel What the Vows Really Mean Manifesting from the Subtle Realms The Three-layer Cake & the Multiverse The est Training and Personal Intention Effective Dreaming in Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven Gay
Spirituality
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Review: Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-emergence in the Modern Church by Charlene Spretnak Palgrave Macmillan, PB, 280 pages, $18.00 1403970408 September 2005 Reviewed by Toby Johnson 
In the four decades since the Second Vatican Council, the
Roman
Catholic Church has undergone tremendous change: the Mass in English,
no more “fish on Friday,” more collegiality and democracy among the
hierarchy, less mystery and magic, more attention to Scripture.
Included in these changes —surreptitiously and in grave error,
according to Charlene Spretnak in Missing
Mary—
was a diminution of the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Catholic
devotion. In the interests of ecumenism—and making Catholic
devotionality more palatable to Protestants—the elaborate and rich
(and, certainly, sometimes superstitious-looking) veneration offered to
the B.V.M. has been played down. Reverence to Mary, who was previously
the “Queen of Heaven” and Maternal-matrix of the universe, has now been
reduced to pious respect for the Nazarene woman who was the birthmother
of Jesus. Charlene Spretnak is a modern, progressive eco-feminist and spiritual/cultural commentator. She is author of such books as Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, and (with new paradigm scientist Fritjof Capra, author of the classic Tao of Physics) Green Politics. She is currently a professor of philosophy and religion at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. Spretnak says herself that it seems a little surprising that she’d have become an advocate for old-time Catholicity. And, of course, she hasn’t. (Full disclosure: Charlene Spretnak and I were in the same Honors Reading class at St Louis University during which we all discovered Joseph Campbell; I graduated in 1978 from the CIIS where she is now teaching. And I loved her book STATES OF GRACE; it changed my life a little. This review appeared originally in 2005 in White Crane Journal, of which I was Editor. ) Such doctrines as the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, the Virgin Birth (which is really about Jesus, of course, and only indirectly about his mother), and Mary’s role as conduit of prayer are still tenets of the Catholic faith, but they are being pushed into secondary status, looked on as holdovers from a more credulous past. In the name of demythologization and adherence to Scripture, Mary is reduced to the minor character mentioned only a few times in the New Testament and with virtually no role in the institution the Apostles founded. But the faithful aren’t taking it. Even as the official hierarchy suppresses Marian doctrine, an artistic movement and popular devotion to such local incarnations of Mary as Our Lady of Guadalupe are revealing that Catholics liked having a “Goddess” in their religious pantheon, a expression of Divinity as maternal, loving, and helping (not just all-powerful, demanding and rule-giving). As Henry Adams observed in the famous 1904 essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin”—comparing the culture changing devotion to Our Lady which motivated the construction of the great cathedrals of Europe (palaces of the Queen of Heaven) with the electric dynamo displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition—Mary has been a creative force in Christian culture just as vital and meaning-giving as the promise of technology. Missing Mary is an interesting and readable blending of current, incisive religio-cultural commentary, historical analysis, personal spiritual autobiography, and even occasional discussions of new paradigm physics. The heart of the matter is how religious and spiritual vision explain and give meaning to life. And central to life is the spiritual, mystical experience of the universe and material existence as maternal. (Notice the word “material” comes from the same root as “maternal.”) We are born human because we come forth from the creative body of a human woman. A Law-giving Father-God may be mythologized as the abstract Creator of all things, but it’s a mother who actually brings things into existence as flesh and blood matter. One of the strengths of Roman Catholicism historically has been its incorporation of the maternal principle into God in the character of Our Lady. Creation itself is a feminine power. Mary as both virgin and mother reconciles the dualities of male, patriarchal thinking. For some disgruntled Catholics who want to return to the truly superstitious Catholicism of their youth with Latin Masses and lots of churchy hocus pocus, devotion to the B.V.M. is equivalent to dismissal of modern consciousness. For Spretnak, just the opposite, reclaiming Mary is bringing Catholicism into the psychologically-sophisticated, mythologically-aware, modern world. Spretnak keeps coming back to the cosmological dimension of Mary as signified by that title Queen of Heaven. It is in reclaiming Marian devotion as it manifests the deep layers of human consciousness (and universal cosmology) rather than as a nostalgic remnant of the old pre-Vatican II Church that Spretnak reveals her truly progressive and mystical vision. That’s how a student of Marija Gimbutas, an advocate of nonpatriarchal culture, an eco-feminist can have become a devotee of Mary, Queen of Heaven. Interspersed within discussions of medieval theology, Lutheran objections to papism, Marian apparitions, peasant art, the history of the Rosary, the meaning of the Mysteries, etc, Charlene Spretnak tells of her own upbringing as a Catholic and her attraction to Mary as a sign of the place for women in religion. She recounts two specific, near-mystical experiences that are moving and memorable. When she first visited the Cathedral at Chartres, she tells, she experienced herself drawn into the presence of Mary in an intensely palpable way, merging with the pilgrims who for 800 years have make pilgrimages to the shrine of the Black Madonna. The Epilogue of the book tells how serendipitously she was offered the role of the Blessed Virgin Mother in a sort of living crèche and pageant scheduled for Epiphany at a Catholic Church near her home. She jumped at the chance; she was writing a book about Mary, how perfect to play Mary. In the month that passed between the invitation and the actual event, her grown-up daughter suffered a major health crisis. Charlene sat by her daughter’s bed in the hospital all through that holiday season, praying for healing, of course, but also experiencing being a mother watching her child suffer. Mary as Maternal matrix of the cosmos signifies the embrace and endurance, beyond the dualities, of the suffering of the world. She herself became the Mother of Sorrows. And so when she returned home, her daughter successfully convalescing, and put on the costume for the pageant, she was far more than just a performer. She was, as she says, “being Mary.” This is what mythological awareness reveals to us about the great myths and traditions of religion. Their truth isn’t so much in historical events or Churchly declarations. As this reviewer’s own teacher, the comparative religions scholar Joseph Campbell, observed, their truth is in you, how you come to experience yourself as the current embodiment of consciousness, how you live a decent, rich human life. Missing Mary is a lovely book that reminds us—Catholic and non-Catholic—of the profundity of myth to give meaning to our individual lives and to assist us all in placing ourselves in the context of the conscious cosmos. I came away from the book with a new appreciation for the feminine aspect of Divinity as it can be expressed mythologically. Recognition of Mary, Queen of Heaven, is progressive and modern. This title is available from Amazon.com: Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence in the Modern Church  |
Toby Johnson, PhD is author of nine books: three non-fiction books that apply the wisdom of his teacher and "wise old man," Joseph Campbell to modern-day social and religious problems, four gay genre novels that dramatize spiritual issues at the heart of gay identity, and two books on gay men's spiritualities and the mystical experience of homosexuality and editor of a collection of "myths" of gay men's consciousness.
Johnson's book
GAY
SPIRITUALITY: The Role of Gay Identity in the Transformation of
Human Consciousness won a Lambda Literary Award in 2000.
His GAY
PERSPECTIVE: Things Our [Homo]sexuality Tells Us about the Nature
of God and the Universe was nominated for a Lammy in 2003. They
remain
in
print.
Two
Spirits is available as an
audiobook narrated by Arthur Raymond. 