My good friend Don in Dallas sent in the following quotation from Anthony De Mello this morning, to the Matureman2 E-Mail List:

Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence. You know ~ all mystics…are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.

So true. I had a good friend who was a great thinker. He lectured on six continents to enthusiastic audiences. I once went through a class of his in Switzerland. He taught that there are truths, what he called "the eternal verities of being," whizzing past us like shooting stars every moment of our lives, but most people never see them "because they are asleep from the neck up." This means alive in body, but dead in spirit.

This is so much in evidence in our world today. In this country, the United States, the most vocal of the so-called "spiritual" leadership is at distinct odds with the "eternal verities of being."

We, as gay people, develop a sensitivity to these verities by the nature of our being set apart by the masses who do not understand love between those of the same sex. We know that when they preach love and practice hate, they are asleep to what to us is obvious, and thus, we know them for what they are - spiritually dead, despite their protests that we are the offender, and not they.

In every culture, this kind of man or woman needs someone or something to hate. Denigration of others exalts their own sense of themselves as superior and justifies, to them, their "punishment" of "inferiors."

I have just completed a re-viewing, on video, of "Schindler's List," a film of such intense impact on the emotions that the viewer clearly perceives the nightmare perpetrated when the spiritually dead capture power and use it as a weapon against all tolerance bred of enlightenment. They may be sleepwalkers, but they are dangerous.

We have no choice as one of the groups singled out for scorn and, if the sleepwalkers have their way, much worse than that...we have no choice but to be alert, awake, aware to every gain the sleepwalkers make and to fight back to stem the tide that now flows in their direction.

We do have, however, a powerful weapon which the evildoers, to their folly, deny exists. We are a naturally occurring phenomenon. We cannot be swept away by the terrible tide. We are present in their genes - until the findings of honorable scientists are monstrously perverted by their Dr. Frankensteins to pre-birth "selections" tantamount to those in "Schindler's List."

We have some protection there, as well, for the evildoers' own catechisms of religious doctrine will turn on them and preserve the sanctity of our births into their ranks, where our presence may someday, if they ever wake up, be welcomed for its lesson of loving one another and making an end to hate.

My impossible dream.