While Sunday morning usually serves as a segregated day where each separate creed and culture retreats to their own houses of belief, Bodhi Spiritual Center aims to serve as a "hip, real and deep non-religious spiritual community" welcoming everybody into its sanctuary. This month Bodhi Spiritual Center, 2746 N. Magnolia Ave., celebrates its 10th anniversary.
"Bodhi is breaking that mold," said Rev. Mark Anthony Lord, Bodhi Spiritual Center's founder and spiritual director. "You look out at our community and Bodhi is so mixed. I would say we're here to awaken people to their divinity. We help people wake up to their magnificence."
Lord caught the vision for Bodhi while living with his partner of 17 years, Patrick, in Los Angeles. After graduating from his training in seminary, he had a clear inspiration while in meditation to open the center in an old church that they would rehab. The couple loaded up their truck and relocated to Chicago in July 2003.
"It was this trippy thing where I just saw the whole series like a slide show in my mind and it's just sort of been unfolding," said Lord. "I have a love affair with Chicago. It has my heart."
The group gatherings started out in his home. Then in November 2003, the venue changed as Transitions Bookstore housed the gatherings. Lord and his partner loaded and unloaded their Honda Element with boxes of the programs, decorations, candles and brochures, which he playfully referred to as "church in a box."
"I'd been a part of a lot of different spiritual communities, but this was about creating a community that was different," said Lord. "I knew when we were coming here that people were going to come together to create a new vibration, a new something where people could really feel loved and included—heal their guilt, shame, overcome fear and get in touch with the love that's already inside of them. We honor the Christian path, the Buddhist path, the Muslim path, the Wickens, we really love who we are. We honor the 12-step recovery path."
Bodhi Executive Director Lola Wright came to the spiritual center nine years ago looking for a Sunday ritual for her family to take part in that was more than just getting ice cream. In December 2012, Wright became Bodhi's director of youth and family to help develop an extended experience for families.
"What I am so grateful for is that we celebrate the unique expression that each individual is and how amazing for my kids to see—at 16, 13, 4 and 1—that all of it is beautiful, all of it is great," said Wright. "We celebrate all of it."
Wright grew up in a home with two mothers for much of her childhood. Attending a Catholic school and having her mother come out in the early '90s causing a controversial stir, Wright's personal platform was to be a spokesperson for LGBT families. She selected spiritual centers based on where her mom would be fully accepted. Her mom also attends Bodhi.
"We throw the old idea of what God is on its side," said Wright. "Often times we're raised with this Santa Claus idea of God or a man in a throne in the sky, we disassemble that getting clear that divinity resides right where you are. The impact the community has in healing the individual relationship to this idea called God and to be able to celebrate in a way that doesn't conflict with any ideology, or dogma, or doctrine really is so freeing for people."
Bodhi, which means enlightenment, is composed of a diverse body of congregants from all over Chicago, and some from Indiana, ranging in sexual orientation, race, socioeconomics and religion. The focus is to help people discover their inherent goodness, whatever that means to them. Bodhi has eight staff members, 27 licensed spiritual counselors and over 400 people regularly participating in programs such as Sunday services, classes and other events.
One group in particular caters to the LGBT community in which members meet once a month to share and do spiritual practice together. Lord is passionate about helping the LGBT community spiritually grow because he himself was religiously abused during his childhood. Raised Catholic, he recalls feeling great fear and shame for being gay. Lord remembered being a 7-year-old boy, looking at the gory images of Jesus bleeding on the cross, and feeling that he was flawed and going to hell after death.
Even today, although he accepts himself, he admits the internal homophobia can still be activated at times because of the constant coming out he has to do with people he meets.
"I think there's a huge opportunity within the LGBT world to really help people love and heal themselves and I think a lot of the abuse came from religion," said Lord, not pointing at any one religion. "That's a personal mission of mine … to heal homophobia within the LGBT world."
Lord and Wright said they are thrilled to celebrate Bodhi's 10-year milestone in the same month as the passing of the Marriage Equality Bill. Wright explained the organization has a desire to stand as a spiritual community appealing to LGBT families, nurturing and raising kids as fully honored and celebrated.
"We are very excited marriage equality would occur the month of our 10 year anniversary," said Wright. "The first 10 years of our existence have been insular. We've held in prayer and meditation the transformation of our systems of government, our systems of social structures and now we are mature enough and have enough established, we can become more engaged and active in the larger community and we fully intend on doing more and more of that."
Lord said the facility is ready to throw its doors open to husbands and husbands and wives and wives and their children and their families.
"People can get married here," said Lord. "It's no longer just a symbol for some and a legal experience and symbol for others. It's the same thing. I'm really interested in creating something really powerful where couples come together and will really have a spiritual experience, but a celebration to marry people."
For more information, visit www.bodhispiritualcenter.org .
