To build on Heather’s comments from last time, I’m thinking life force has a number of flavors–sub-categories, if one dares attach a hierarchical word to it. Like maybe one person has a strong spiritual life force, and another has a strong force of innocence or purity, and another has a remarkable well of anger or grief that is the force behind the things that they do. Maybe some have a commanding presence that begs to be heard, no matter how quietly or gently or infrequently they speak–like Galadriel in the Tolkein books. Maybe some have all of these forces at once. Or more. Maybe all of us have the potential for them but only ever realize one, or a few. Or none.

I’m interested these days in the force that’s connected with sexuality. I’m just coming out of a two-year season of pregnancy and nursing and the intensity of care required for an infant and new toddler, and a couple of months ago I finally realized, consciously, that I felt back to myself. The pre-pregnancy me, with all of her curiosity and love of learning and eagerness to create (music! painting! writing! dance!). And, as you might guess, a sexual life force.

I think sexuality is far more than “having to do with sex”. I haven’t talked or read a lot about this, so I hardly have words for what I mean (those who have, please be free to share your thoughts!). But I think those with a strong sexual force don’t always fit the stereotype of someone looking to get laid. I think they can be people that turn heads, for sure, but not necessarily because their bodies fit the images of beauty pumped out by our entertainment and clothing and cosmetics industries, or because they’re dressed scantily or have cleavage flashing fancy neon lights. I think they can be fat or too thin. I think they can be dressed as monks or nuns. I think they can be clean or truly odorous. They can be wearing clothes from distant pasts.

In other words, I think their sexual life forces can have little to do with externalities, unless by that one means only the way that what’s inside of them interplays with the bodies their life forces inhabit (or the clothing, etc). These are people you can’t help yourself but watch. They’re embodied. Radiantly. Their weight, pound for pound, weighs more than the rest of ours, if that makes sense, as though they’re more real. They laugh and smile a lot, genuinely. They miss very few jokes. If you could paint them with color alone–no lines for legs or arms or faces or waistlines–their colors would be deep, vibrant, rich, bold. Connected with the earth somehow. They’re a lot like my character’s mermaid.

Is there language I don’t know about for exactly what I’m speaking of here??

Of all of the kinds of life force, this, to me, is the one that makes life so worth living. It’s the one that makes falling in love and being in love so euphoric, and what spills into so much else about life, whether you’re in love or not. I think it might even be part of loving the earth, and the deep, tear-producing wonder that comes from watching sunsets or thunderstorms or thousands upon thousands of birds in a cloud of flight. It’s the force that makes you want to make love, or holler on a hilltop, or create some kind of masterpiece. Or burst completely wide open.

Can you tell I’m feeling it right now??

There are seasons in life, maybe lives in their entirety even, when a person cannot help but go under–under the surface above which there is all of this Life, this sexual force, to be lived and played and danced with. But oh, the glory of rising like a whale from the deep, twisting into the wind and sun and air! Taking the feel of all of it in–the scent, the sound, the sight, the sparkle–to carry one through the depths (to which surely one will again return) more gladly. That much more Alive.

(This is continuing the conversation started here and here.)

When I was a child I don’t think I ever heard about clairvoyance or other kinds of outside-of-what’s-normal-for-most-of-us psychic phenomenon. Probably the first time I heard of such things was from television, where the pseudo-documentary shows always had deep, male voices narrating, like the one that does the trailers for movies: very dramatic, intended to spook you out, or get you thinking this is the most amazing, unbelievable thing you’re ever gonna hear. I always loved seeing those shows, and loved believing with only about a tenth of myself that the stuff they were showing was real. Most of what I saw seemed staged, or at the very least over-inflated, and the reports explainable by other means than actual psychic phenomenon. I wished I could talk with someone real, who really had such experiences and wasn’t always voiced over with that dramatic morning-voice guy. Would they be able to just talk…normally with me?

Spring of 2004 I started working on the novel that I’m working on now. I knew I wanted to tell a story about human motivation, and some of the common things I think all of us carry around inside. The seed for my story was a boy who has a gift for seeing in picture form, as well as actual scenes, what’s really going on inside of people. Like in his mind’s eye. He is the catalyst for most of the story’s conflict, because what he sees so often contradicts what people actually say their motivations are.

Anyway, I was in the beginning stages of dreaming up this character and forming a story around him, and decided to have him write me letters, telling me about himself. I didn’t use the word “clairvoyant” when thinking or writing about him because I had no category for his gift. It was just a gift that I gave him, and one for which I had to work out the “rules” (like how exactly does it work? when does he see these visions? can he see inside of everyone?).

So there I was, spending lots of time getting into the mind of this kid.

One day as I was working, I began to get an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t indigestion, and it wasn’t that I was realizing I had done something wrong, or forgotten to do something I was supposed to do. It was a different flavor of uneasiness than any of these things.

I kept working, trying to ignore it, trying to swat it away, and even got up from my desk and cleaned the whole house, trying to ward the thing off. But it persisted. I couldn’t get away from the sense that it had to do with someone else, someone that wasn’t me, and that whoever it was was feeling the very feelings I was, only way, way worse. The thought seemed strange, and wasn’t one I tried to produce or puzzle out–it was just a kind of clearness that was with me, like when you’re having a dream and just know something to be true.

Finally by early evening I felt so bad that I simply had to stop and listen. If this was about someone I knew, then I figured I might as well try and figure out who; if they were feeling these feelings worse than I was, surely they were suffering.

So I sat down on the floor and tried to listen.

Instantly a dream that I had had the night before and forgotten about came to my mind. In it I had watched a friend of mine at his place of work leave with two others to deal with a fire that had started in another part of the building. My friend had told those of us in the first location to stay put, that he and these other two would deal with this and be back soon. And everyone but me did just that.

I did not want to stay put, though, and so followed after them to see what was actually going on. Would they be able to put out the fire?

Then I woke up.

So as I sat and listened, this dream popped into my mind, and another knowing feeling came, where I knew it was this friend who was suffering so badly. I also knew his suffering didn’t concern me, and wasn’t something I was in a position to do much about. So I sent out all the strength and help I could wish and pray for, and tried to continue about my day.

That night I still felt awful. I went to bed, but had only fitful, frustrated sleep. I kept getting this image in my mind of a letter, though I couldn’t ever see what it said. All through the night I saw that thing, over and over, often in dreams, sometimes in half-sleep. It was charged, somehow, and deeply connected, though I did not know how, to whatever my friend was wrestling through.

I still felt bad the next morning, but within a couple of hours of rising, something dramatically changed. I had been feeling like something was making it difficult to breathe, a pressure on my chest and a kind of metaphorical smoke, but almost instantly that feeling was replaced by the freshest, most peaceful breeze. I can’t say literally, since I was in my house with all the windows closed, but more…internally. I actually got an image in my mind of a beautiful blue sky with bright white clouds and clean air. And again, that knowing feeling, this time that my friend was fine. I knew that whatever thing he had been struggling with was through.

The experience puzzled and perplexed me. It had come unbidden, and left within the day. And it brought to mind similar experiences I had had at other times, too, but without accompanying dreams. Occasionally I would get an image in my mind of a certain location–a parking lot, a street, a home–and the distinct feeling that something bad was about to happen there. I’d usually pray, feeling helpless to know what was actually about to happen or how to prevent it. The images were fleeting, but super charged–a whole different quality from the kind of images any of us gets in a day as memories are sparked, or daydreams wander through. I never thought to call this clairvoyance.
Given I was just in the thick of developing a character with a similar sort of gift, I started feeling strange inside. Wobbly. Shaky. Like life was getting too weird all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Like I was taking on this gift that my character had…which I had thought I had only made up.

I wrote to my friend.

“You may think I’m crazy,” I said, in effect, “but…did anything difficult happen to you on such and such a day? Here’s what I was feeling then, and the things I dreamt about before and after.”

He wrote back with only confirmations. He couldn’t betray any confidences, but said that the day I had felt so bad, he had become nearly debiliated by the afternoon from a conflict that was in the works. He and two others were involved in it, and he wrote, “I felt as if the air was being squeezed from me, the forces of Death looming large.”

The next morning, though, he got a letter from one of the people involved that cleared the whole thing up. The person had had a change of heart, and a truly awful situation got completely turned around. By means of this letter.

That week I had two other dreams/feelings of the same quality, but without any clarity as to who they were about, such that by the time I visited my therapist the next week (on a normal weekly visit), I was all worked up.

“What do I do with these things?” I asked frantically. I was feeling like I was back in time, playing some of the guessing games with God that had so characterized my young adult days of Christian evangelicalism. My beliefs at that time had made every day feel like a test of my faithfulness and attentiveness, where I was supposed to do and say specific things in specific instances, but never given clear instructions as to what these things were. It was up to me to figure them out, and I never felt like I knew if I got them right. It was crazy-making, I tell you. No way to Live.

“I don’t think you have to do anything,” my therapist said. “If these things come to you, just acknowledge them, and move on.” She knew me and wisdom well enough for this to resonate right away as what I needed to hear.

As time went on, my experiences like this lessened. I was fascinated by them, though, and could not help wondering about them. Why did they come when they did? Does everyone have these experiences? My dabblings in physics and Eastern thought made me search for some kind of theory on this stuff, some way to make sense of it. The explanations I would have made earlier in my life–having to do with God, and God’s urgings and conveyings of information–didn’t seem to describe what I was experiencing, or jive with my emerging concept of God. Jean Bolen’s The Tao of Psychology and Belleruth Naparstek’s Your Sixth Sense, were helpful reads at this time–the latter a very practical, down-to-earth discussion of the ways some people have actually nurtured this kind of gift. Naparstek thinks everyone is capable of having it, though some are much more naturally wired for it. I considered trying to nurture it more in myself, but never felt right about doing so. The possibility felt charged with danger for me.

That winter I stumbled into a comment left on someone’s blog that referenced this kind of thing–a kind of clairvoyant “knowing”. I emailed the commenter, asking him more about his comment. We proceeded to have a fascinating conversation, in which he described his own clairvoyant gift, as well as the gifts of some of his family members. His father and his daughter communicate regularly, he said, telepathically. His daughter can move physical objects with her mind. For years he was involved in the darker side of these things (I’m not sure what he meant by this exactly), but as an adult became a Christian and chose to use them only when he feels led by God to do so, and within his Christian framework for understanding things. He was a warm and generous fellow, from what I could tell, and it felt wonderful, on one level, to finally talk with someone so normally about these things.

But then my own “knowings” started to return. And unlike that first experience, they weren’t accompanied by clarity as to who they were about. They’d come most often as I was trying to go to sleep at night, like when my conscious mind relaxed. And again they began raising my anxiety about what to do about them, and also that crazy sort of feeling you get when it feels as though things you take for granted–gravity, for instance, or physical distance between people–are presenting themselves more as illusion than fact. I wonder how many people we consider insane in our country are actually in touch with everything this way–in touch in a way that makes it impossible for them to function normally. We need our illusions, I think.

One night as I lay there trying to sleep, I felt as though my brain tapped into a firehose of knowings. I wasn’t trying to know anything, but there I was, getting some of the most awful images. All of them were intensely charged. I felt like they were from people in the near vicinity–maybe the apartment complex next door. I got up and shook my head and shut my mind’s door. And decided this had to stop.

Reflection and another conversation with my therapist convinced me I didn’t want to pursue this at all at this point (i.e. try to develop this gift more, or continue conversing with the guy online). I was pregnant at the time, and, for the life that was growing in me, needed to be as grounded and centered as possible. I didn’t want to pry into anyone’s business, and didn’t want to play guessing games about uninvited information. And, tangentially, of course, didn’t want to feel or become insane. So I ended my conversation with that fellow online and kept my inner door shut. And have ever since.

Occasionally I’ll get a dream that feels more charged than usual, but generally I’ve been “knowing”-free for a couple of years now. And it’s felt great.

My take-home from all of this, including the research that I’ve done, has been a deep conviction that the psychic stuff people report isn’t all hogwash (including telekinesis, ESP, precognition, etc.). Though some of it surely is, it isn’t all made up. I’m convinced we are all interconnected in some mysterious way, and that time and space are both shorthands for something that’s bigger than both, that contains them both. I’m convinced that love makes time and space between people disappear sometimes–even into the past and the future–and opens up channels of communication that otherwise exist, but don’t get tapped into. And I’m convinced that at least in this season of my life, I don’t need to try to know, firsthand, how true all of these things are.

How does all of this jive with any of your thoughts or experiences? I’d really love to hear.

I haven’t written about synchronicity yet, but this first paragraph is a good example of it. Today I got this email telling me registration is open now for winter Continuing Studies courses at Stanford. Among the courses highlighted was one on quantum physics, and more specifically quantum entanglement. All the physics I know is based on books that were only somewhat new back in 2001 and 2002, which means the research in them was even older than that. So I’m feeling totally out of the know, now, since apparently, to the uttter shock of all, I’m sure, while I haven’t been looking, new discoveries have continued getting made. Consequently, I’ve just been swimming around online in things like quantum entanglement and teleportation and Bell’s Theorum. I guess none of these are new to the last decade, but I somehow managed never to have heard of them before now, and certainly not the most recent experimentations with them. Because of them, my ideas for a next post have all been turned on their heads.

Here’s what I was going to write about this time: I was going to talk about clairvoyance, and my own experiences with it, and try to theorize how tiny particles could travel distances, instantaneously, between people. I kept getting stalled up on the whys involved in this theorized process, though, like why, for instance, would those of us who seem to recieve these theorized particles recieve them only from certain people, and not everyone, since theoretically everyone is emitting particles all the time. What would determine the “stations” that our “radios” are tuned into, so to speak? (I will say that I have on a couple of occasions felt my dial break, and signals from everyone flood into my brain, and that these have been among the most alarming and disturbing experiences of my life.)

But! Then I read about quantum teleportation, and my mind is now spinning a whole different way. I have to begin what I want to say now by telling you what I’ve just been learning of quantum teleportation. (here is where any physicists reading this blog might need to roll their eyes or make very squeemish, contorted faces and wish I would just stick to fiction writing. And here is where I guess I’d have to say that…well…maybe I am. I think fiction is more deeply true than anything else sometimes.).

So. To explain what I’ve gleaned on quantum teleportation so far, I have to start with quantum entanglement. Apparently, very tiny systems–quantum particles, we might call them–can sometimes get entangled. What entangled means is that something happens to them, some special kind of thing, such that when they get separated, the two systems aren’t distinct entities anymore. They’ve taken on one another’s characteristics so much that now they act almost entirely as one. They’re spatially separate, but not in reality, if that makes sense. I’ve known a few couples like this. And some people with their dogs.

The guy who coined the term “entanglement” says it this way:

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled. (Shrodinger, 1935)

Quantum teleportation, then, refers to the nearly simultaneous “communication” that happens between entangled systems. When something happens to one of them, it’s mirrored precisely in the other. Like the other is a copy of the first. And it doesn’t matter how far apart these systems are! Miles, inches: same dif. It’s as if space between them does not exist.

I know I’m still an embryo when it comes to understanding these things, but for the sake of having fun, and maybe actually stumbling into something true, I’m going to let my imagination fly.

What if clairvoyance is nothing more than entangled particles doing their thing? We’ve all heard stories of people knowing things about their loved ones–deaths, injuries, etc.–before they’d have any known reason to know such things. What if there simply are parts of these pairs (each pair being the person “knowing” and the person actually dying or being injured) that are quantumly entangled, so that nothing actually has to cross time or space for the two to experience whatever is being experienced? In effect, at least partially, or on a certain kind of level, the two people aren’t two people. They’re one.

These kinds of experiences seem like they’re reported most often by people who love each other. Maybe love is a quantum entangler. I wonder if love will ever become a variable in physicists’ experiments.

But here is where my mind goes next: What if everyone is quantumly entangled with everything? What if we’re all made from the same stuff, all rooted in some common seed, such that when Buddhists and sages from many traditions, and now the priests of science, no less, speak of oneness, they don’t mean only metaphorically, and they don’t mean only by cause-and-effect ripples that spread infinitely out from every act? What if they mean literally?

Einstein called the very notion of entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and didn’t want to believe it. And the individualism of the Enlightenment and of much in Christendom today wouldn’t want to believe it either. But what if it’s true? What if we are all one, and it’s only the distances we keep believing exist that actually keep us from reading each other’s minds? What if clairvoyance really is what its French roots imply: clear seeing, and this clarity of sight is awakeness to our own limbs, our own bodies, our own minds and extensions that just so happen not to be anywhere nearby?

This is disturbing stuff, at least to me, and I aim to talk more, next time, about how I’ve dealt with my own clairvoyant experiences, and the choice I made a couple years ago to turn my “radio” off.

In the meantime, I would love any book suggestions–related to physics or otherwise, religious or otherwise–that deal with this idea of oneness. I’d like to explore this some more.

Last night I went to my fifth Wild Goose Qigong class (pronounced chee-gong). Qigong is an ancient Chinese healing art, and looks a lot like the fluid, choreographed moves of Tai Chi, like you see people doing on magnificent hilltops and sunlit oceansides in the movies. I do it at night, in old sweats, in the dance studio of a junior high school down the street. But still.

For the most part, I love it. I love the slow, underwater-like movements. I love that our instructor says almost 15 times a night that you should only do what’s comfortable, that this art is not about pushing or straining or forcing, but learning to listen to your body and flow gently where it wants to flow. I love it that I showed up last week with the worst devil’s grip in my neck that I’ve ever had in my life–so bad I had gone to the doctor that afternoon thinking surely I’d have to have surgery to put something back into place, thinking how in the world will I ever make it through another day of lifting and bathing and changing and playing with a toddler when every movement hurts so bad–and left Qigong without an ounce of pain left in my neck. The prescriptions with which my doctor had sent me home were for super-charged anti-inflamatories and muscle relaxers, which she said I’d likely need to take for 2 weeks, and to this day they sit in the bucket at Walgreens, not picked up.

So I love Qigong. It’s been good to me.

Last night I showed up more tired than usual, though. I even debated not going, and stayed flopped on the couch until I knew I’d only barely make it for the first instruction after warm-up. When I showed up, as a kind of unplanned punishment, I had to traipse across the middle of the circle of classmates to get to an open spot, classmates who were all silently watching while swaying like sea kelp. I almost felt like I should walk in slow motion like them, and wave my arms back and forth at them, but that would have only made me laugh and ruin the mood.

So there I finally was, so tired that even the wood planks below me looked soft. I needed to see what they felt like on my belly, my arms, the left side of my face.

But I stayed standing.

But here’s the thing: the whole rest of the classtime, rather than flowing like kelp, or wild geese for that matter, rather than listening to the movements of my body, I had this running commentary going on in my mind.

“Oh God, she’s going to repeat that part again. She is. She is, I can tell. Oh God.

“Are you kidding me? FIVE MORE TIMES???

“Why does that guy keep getting in my way? I can’t see through you, dude. Yeah, you. Okay fine. Yes, this is me moving so I can see.

“Was that my sternum popping? Has that ever happened to me before?

“Let’s see…when I get home, I’m going to have cereal. No, fruit. No, cereal. Fruit and cereal. With yogurt. But water first. I’m so THIRSTY.”

And on and on. And the worst part was people kept farting all around me, too. That actually happens every week. There must be something about Qigong that gets the air flowing, if you know what I mean, and it is only by sheer will power that I save mine for later.

But most of the time this is fine. I actually feel about it like I feel about Elijah ripping off: great! Good for you! It seems natural, somehow, and not annoying.

But it was just too much last night. I simultaneously felt like laughing and glaring and saying, “Can everyone just tighten up a little bit??”

At one point someone asked about a move we were learning, and the instructor explained the way the movement helps energy flow up your back side, over your head, and down your front side, repeating like that in a circle. The classmate said, “Would it be a good idea to visualize that as we do the move? Would that help the energy flow better?”

The instructor paused for a second, and then said this: “The beauty of Qigong is in the way the movements themselves cause the flow of energy, and the way your body, over time, can learn to help that flow just by repeating the movements. In Western culture we tend to spend so much time in our heads that we can actually hinder the positive flow of energy by trying to force it this way or that way, or by analyzing it too much. It’s fine for you to understand why we do these movements, but probably better, when you do them, not to get stuck in your head. Just let your body move. Focus on breathing and moving with it.”

As I was just finishing deciding which book to read when I got home, I felt a little bit sheepish. And also thirsty.

But I came to this conclusion: Flowing with life–with the movements of our bodies or minds or souls–is good. Getting stuck too much in any parts of ourselves–whether focussing on our bodies all the time, or our spiritual or intellectual sides–probably means a dam is being constructed there, and the energy that wants to do it’s natural cycle is turning stagnant, getting stalled up. But–and this was the real crux of the lesson for me–flowing with anything, in a healthy way, is a lot easier to do when you’ve had enough sleep.

Qigong = good. Qigong while sleep deprived = annoying.

Maybe this formula applies to everything there is, and the first way any of us can start making the world a better place is to get to bed early tonight.

You think?

I got tagged by Christy for this meme: Five Things Feminism has Done for Me. Let’s see…

1. I grew up believing that when I grew up, I could do whatever I wanted to do. Vocationally, I mean. :) I didn’t think that because I was a girl, I was automatically excluded from anything. I had no idea that the Christian denomination I was a part of would not ordain women or allow them to be lead pastors of churches. I assumed that women were just not choosing to do these things, like being president, and that if I wanted to do them, they were open to me. I’m guessing this latter assumption had a lot to do with my parents’ views on men’s and women’s roles, and a little to do with my churches not being particularly vocal about the limitations that women had in them. Or maybe I was oblivious to the vocalizations there were? In any case, feminism helped make vocation an open field in my childhood mind.

2. Leading up to and throughout the ten years of our marriage, N and I have worked hard to be conscious of power imbalances between us, and to do whatever we can to lessen them. This has been the hardest long-term project that either of us has ever worked at. The hardest, but the most rewarding.

3. I’m a writer, giving a significant number of prime time hours (after 8am and before 6pm) to writing each week. This while also being parent to a one-year-old. And having no money for childcare. N is in school, so we’re in a unique situation in that he has a schedule that can flex for shared kid-duty. But I think feminism has made this set-up conceivable at all by helping both of us see my writing, which at this point has no dollar signs attached to it, as a real vocation, and my pursuit of it as equally important as N’s pursuit of his. (The fact that there will be dollar signs attached to his in a few years, and that his is what will enable us to pay our bills (and loans!) and eat food that we actually buy at stores makes us give a lot more hours of work-beyond-home time to him each week. But that’s a pragmatic more than philosophic choice.) The task of coordinating work-at-home time and work-away-from-home time for both of us, and being as present to Elijah and each other as we want to be, is probably the second hardest long-term project that either of us has worked at. And of course, also totally worth it.

4. Increasingly I’m able to feel–and this beyond just knowing intellectually–that the entertainment and make-up and clothing and hair-product and skin-product and teeth-product industries are bankrupt in the ways they define feminine beauty and sexuality and life force as narrowly as being 18-25 years old with smooth skin and straight, white teeth and thick, highlighted hair and large, firm breasts and designer clothing and gym memberships and curves here and not there and fingernails that look like they’ve never seen dishwater. I feel the narrowness of these definitions, the way these industries have not stripped women down in their adds to expose our true beauty, but rather stripped beauty itself down to expose the ugliness at the heart of machines that would want all of us–as many as is inhumanly possible–not liking ourselves, wanting bodies that aren’t real, funneling huge portions of our incomes into becoming ever less so.

I feel the evil of this. And I feel the beauty and life force and sexual attractiveness of people–men and women–in things far deeper and broader than any ad will ever convey.

5. Number five is a catch-all drawer: I’m happy most of the time. I don’t feel like the world is only depressing and that an oppressive God exists. I haven’t had an ulcer for a very long time. I feel gentle toward my body. I like wearing feminine clothing and don’t have dreams anymore where I’m trying to pass as a man. I take intuition seriously. I take art seriously. I don’t feel obligated to fit my spirituality or metaphors for God into patriarchical frameworks. I’m a mom, and this by choice.

None of these would be true or possible apart from the feminist thinkers and writers and artists and theologians and mentors and friends who have helped me in my work of healing and self creation/re-creation in recent years.

Okay…I tag Jen, Adam, and Trish. And Adam’s wife, Sarah. :)  Okay, and Trish’s husband Richard, too.  Jen?  Heck…and Jen’s husband Dave!

A very nice essay on shame, written by a gifted writer I met just recently, here.

I’ve been talking about bodies, and about the shame that so many of us feel in relation to them—about their size or appearance, their functions or lacks thereof, the experiences they have or haven’t had.  About how body wounds run deep.  I’ve been talking about an opening that seems necessary if we want our shame to go away, and how, unchristian that I am, I see this opening reflected in the Bible.  And I want to step away from the Bible for a minute to explain more fully what I think I’m trying to mean.  This is intuitive stuff here, in addition to stuff consciously thought, so I’m feeling my way along even as I write.

It seems to me that shame is about believing there is something inherently wrong with us, something we mostly can’t help (I say mostly because some shame circles around feeling like we should be able to help whatever it is that’s wrong with us, but just aren’t).  So helping shame fade is a matter of helping that belief in our messed-upness fade, and helping a new belief replace it.  One that’s something about us being fine, being actually good and loveable.  Not perfect, not in need of no growth or change or healing.  But fine.  Like in a fundamental way.  In a sense that envelops all of us, too—not just the clean parts or the nice parts or the parts we let other people see.  The sense I mean holds all of who we are.

So the question becomes, How does this happen?  How does the fading of this inherently-flawed belief happen, and the introduction and growth of a new and different one? 

This is where I think Love comes in.  I don’t think any of this can happen without it.  And this is where the opening I’m exploring comes in, too, because just like “fade” and “growth” imply, Love can’t zap shame instantly out of us.  At least as far as I can see.  It’s one of those laws of shame, I think:  must get undone slowly.

A few posts back I wrote about grace (here and here), and how maybe the experience of it is actually a stepping stone to realizing there isn’t any need of it, that the experience of grace is what helps us realize we actually do deserve kindness, actually do deserve love.  The experience of grace unravels in our minds the very reality of grace. 

So.  I think experiences of love are similar.  And I’m not capitalizing love here intentionally, because I’m meaning something other than Love, which to me means the most massive and unboundaried and flooring and simultaneously gentle stuff there is, whereas love means lesser versions of that, ones that are peppered with all the normal stuff of us:  gaminess, impatience, I’ll-love-you-if-you-love-me-back, limited understanding of the beloved and all they’ve been through, all they are, I’ll-love-you-if-you-stroke-my-ego-and-reassure-me-constantly-that-I’m-your-favorite-one, etc.  Experiences of love—this peppered-with-normal-human-stuff kind—are a stepping stone, I’m thinking, or at least can be one, to realizing and experiencing the reality of Love, and actually taking on more and more of It’s traits.  Love unravels love, if that makes sense.  It enlightens. Its light reveals love for what it is, which is less than Love, and in so doing, in the very same breath, reveals us for what we are.  And what I think it reveals is that we’re good.  Fundamentally so.  Fine, just exactly as we are.  And to repeat myself, I don’t mean in no need of healing, or growth, or change.  I mean fine in a fundamental sense, and therefore having nothing to be ashamed of.

So to be less heady about all of this, and more clear about what I mean by Love revealing us for what we are.  Let’s say I feel ashamed of being so tall, ashamed that this makes me so different from what I’ve got in my head is the standard of feminine beauty.  And let’s say I’m ashamed of the veins on my legs, too, that their ever-darkening, ever-multiplying-before-my-eyesness doesn’t strike me so well.  And maybe I wish I could dance better, too, and that I could jog, rather than only walk, because I have in my mind that jogging is more cool, and the back problems that keep me from doing so aren’t.  And that surgery on my toe?  It didn’t leave the nail looking so good.  And there’s a scar from where that mole got removed.  And where that baby was removed.  And maybe all my issues with my body—all the ones I might say in a note like this and beyond—spill over into issues with my personality and my education and my life experiences.  And maybe I try to downplay all of these things, all of the things I’m ashamed of, when I’m getting to know someone new.

Does any of this sound familiar?

But let’s say this person that I’m getting to know comes to love me.  Let’s say they’re not really paying much attention to these things I’m trying to hide.  Let’s say they’re noticing things they genuinely like about me, things they find charming.  And, let’s even say they may not like me so much—love me so much—if they knew my whole story.

But that’s the point:  they only love me.  They don’t Love me.  But you know what?  Their love alone, with a lower-case ‘l’, begins to heal me.  It speaks a different voice from the one(s) in my head and starts a new belief going:  maybe I’m loveable.

And maybe I’m lucky enough to find a friend who sees some of these parts I’m ashamed of, I mean truly sees them, and doesn’t turn away.  Maybe their love is actually big enough to hold some of those parts, maybe even big enough to demonstrate instinctually that no effort is actually required to love some them, because they’re fine.  Totally par for the human course.

So something starts to open up inside of me.  Some clenched up ball begins to loosen, and I start to realize that the love that felt so good at first, but that came on the condition that I don’t really show my whole self, wasn’t actually as big as this love I’m now being given.  Maybe this love has a bigger sort of ‘l’ at the front, is just a little less mixed up with all the stuff that’s less than Love.

So an opening starts to happen, where I start to recognize what Love is, and in It’s light, even if only a glimmer, I start to see that I’m loveable.  And when I start to feel loveable, I start to not have to hide so much, or at least so much of the time.  So a relaxedness starts to grow where worry used to be.  Fear of exposure and rejection starts to fray. 

When any of this happens, even just a tiny little bit, surely angels sing.

But here’s where I think we get in trouble, where this opening I’m talking about gets stalled up sometimes, and frozen uncomfortably close to closed:  when we mistake love for Love.  When we equate the two, and believe everything love has to say.  Which, at least in all my listening, isn’t altogether nice.  To put it mildly.  love is mixed up with all the things that make us real, which means things like shame and fear and lust and maybe a deep, deep need for control.  Its voices aren’t only about healing and making us whole.

I think this connects with the Bible.  I think the openings that are in it, the ones I described in that last post, that can deepen and widen our concept of Love, can be used to do the very opposite.  We can take what an opening reveals and equate what we see with Love, all the way, as though every veil has been lifted and the Whole Truth revealed.  We can say God = love, and obligate ourselves to reify some version of this, rather than look for ways that Love is being cracked open, pointing ever beyond our concepts of love.  I think we can do this with openings outside of the Bible, too.

The people I know who seem most deeply unashamed seem to be in a lifelong process of opening.  Love is always getting unveiled for them, veil off of veil, sometimes shockingly, sometimes disturbingly so.  Often in ways that shake up old categories.  This process seems to embolden and humble them at the same time.  They get more joyful and their voices more free.  It makes them looser, if you want to put it that way—less worried about being right and making sure they’re on the right side of boundaries and more concerned with living, and making safe space for others to do so, too—for all of us to live well.

love opens us up to Love, is what I’m trying to say.  Or has the potential to.  And I think it’s when we find ourselves inside Love’s reach, or at least start getting the hunch that that’s where we belong, when we discover ourselves to be inherently loveable, and therefore fundamentally good, our height and our weight and our shape and our smells and our bodily functions and the experiences we have and haven’t had; our sexual orientations and genders and (un)athleticism and (un)paired-upness with someone we love—everything that makes us such embodied creatures:  all of it starts being less and less grounds for fear and shame.  A new kind of core starts taking shape, I think, inside of us, and our wounds become that much less crippling.  They don’t define us any more.

Openings like these are becoming my guiding lights.  They’re what my body yearns for and my soul is drawn toward.  In the Bible, and anywhere else I can find them.

So about this opening.

Christian Scriptures talk a lot about God.  They talk a lot about people hearing God, worshipping God, speaking with and following God.  Tradition says these texts are inspired, too—are an authority for knowing what’s True.

And in this sense, I want to concur.  I want to stick with tradition.  And I want to talk about an opening that seems to me the heart of the Bible’s inspiration, the heart of Love, really, which is what will get us back to bodies, and what I think can help heal our shame.

Early biblical texts have God calling out a people.  Follow me, God says.  I want to bless you, and through you, everyone else too.  So Abram and Sarai start things off.  They leave everything familiar and follow.  From the very start you’ve got a Special People, and you’ve got a Holy will to bless everyone.

Time passes, and adventures do too, and pretty soon there’s wars being fought in God’s name.  Wars where the texts have God ordering them, ordering slaughter, destruction of entire groups to keep the Special People pure.  Mix with others and you never know what unholiness could happen.

Simultaneously, you’ve got provisions for the alien.  From the mouth of God.  Hospitality codes.  Honor codes.  The alien is not the enemy, God says.  In fact, the alien deserves kindness.  It’s a harsh world out there, a desert, if you want to put it that way.  Without your care they’ll die.

So there’s the Special People and there’s the plan to bless everyone and there’s the matter of racial purity and the sense that even aliens matter.  More than matter, they’re human.  In this, they’re just like you.  And you never know when you’ll need their care, too.

Time passes and the Special People get rich—the people who were slaves and wanderers early on.  They get rich and ignore the poor and take their Specialness for granted.  And the prophets come out scolding.  What do you think you’re doing? they say.  This inequity, this disregard for the vulnerable among you, this worshiping of idols—none of it’s God’s way!

So you’ve got the Special People and the will to bless everyone and the racial purity and the sense that aliens are part of us too.  You’ve got taking specialness for granted and abuse of wealth and power, and impassioned pleas (tirades) against such things.  You’ve got Special People nestled comfortably into their status, nestled at the “underlings’” expense, and voices crying out in the wilderness (or opulent abodes), “This is unholy!  This isn’t God’s way!”

Time passes and rich become poor.  “In” become “out” as the People lose temple and land.  There is much grief over what is lost, much confusion, much wishing for the good old days.  And angry words from prophets, saying This?  It’s actually your fault.  Forget Yahweh and He’ll chasten you.  Forget Him and He’ll send plagues!  He’ll take away everything you love and give what you barely can endure.  Forget Him long enough and you don’t want to know what He’ll do.  There are threats and there is blame and there is shape up or else.  And there is shape up and I’ll be wonderfully kind.  Bless you beyond measure.  A fearsome, fearsome God.

And more time and more stories pass.

And Jesus comes along.  A Special Person in every respect, but doing little by the book.  Or Book, rather, because different groups of Special People have determined an inspired set of laws, inspired interpretations of those laws, that make Jesus look, at least to many, more like Heretic than Holy, and the people he deems Special the very last, the very least of whom the People would expect.  To top his strangeness off, Jesus says, “I am the way.  No one gets to God except by me,” which by that point seems to mean no one gets to God except by widening the sphere of Special, widening the sphere of Holy and the sphere of the fall of grace, which ends up being a lot harder fall than the one from grace, because according to Jesus it’s God that does the falling this time, and it looks to a lot of People like God’s aim’s not too good.

And Jesus gets killed for this.  For his God talk.  For his politics, and his flattening of holy hierarchies.  He gets killed for being a man too many want to follow, and for the nature of that following, which doesn’t tip a tall enough hat to tradition, a tall enough hat to what’s expected of God’s People, let alone the people of Empire.

He gets killed.  Bang.  Or groan, rather, because he’s hung, up on a cross with criminals.  And he says, “Forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing,” which again is that fall of grace, is that widening sphere of Love that holds the Jews and the Gentiles and the friends who ran away, who feared for their lives and in their flight began to grieve the most horrible grief of all, which is hope dying altogether.  The death of hope.

But the stories keep coming.  Jesus is alive again, and there’s people talking about him, and people getting changed by him—still, even after he died.  And there’s churches getting formed.  Institutions getting started.  And there’s books like Galatians, where people are scolded for obsessing over rightness again, books like James, where Love is more about acting than beliefs.  You’ve got Jesus stories getting told in the very contexts, among the very boundaried groups, his words seemed meant to undo.

This—this is inspiration as I see it.  Not a book transcribed from God.  Not a book where every story told is accurate depiction of God.  But a book that documents over so much time the way things are:  The way people look to and for God.  The way we feel special or unspecial, blessed or abandoned. The ways we protect our own, fear death, abuse wealth and power, make ourselves look good, or blame someone else when we can’t.  The ways we also hear that Voice, sometimes loud, sometimes hardly past a whisper, calling us out of ourselves, or at least the parts of ourselves that are afraid and self-righteous and elitist and…ashamed.  Out of our violence, that would put our very drives, our very elitism, our very need to be special at other’s expense, into the mouth of God.  Into the heart of God, which we turn around and make our standard for how hearts should be.

But that Voice.  It keeps calling.  It keeps turning upside down who we thought God would be.  It’s called from time immemorial, and seeds the whole Book, even as other voices, many other voices, do too.  There’s an opening along the way, I think, in individual stories, but also in the Story as whole, the human Story, to a Love that undoes violence.  And to what we often do to people who talk about, let alone try to live out, such a Love.

So as I see it, in this manner, in a strange and twisted sort of way, the scope of God’s blessing, or rather, the scope that people recognize of that blessing, truly is expanding through Abraham and Sarah.  The trajectory of the stories that got told and written down of them thousands of years ago, that unfolded into the ones from the last millennium, that partnered with so much adventure through time and speak in hearts today—the direction in which they point, and even sometimes lead, is toward an opening of God’s arms. Or rather, a recognition of the infinite wideness of those arms.  Like standing in a circle marked “God’s blessed ones”, watching what we thought were walls, or fences, or boundary lines around us, dissipate like fog in ever-widening circles.

And this—this recognition—is what makes possible the unbranding of shame I think.  The process—internal, alongside dear others, and as whole groups—that I think has to happen for us to know, not intellectually, but viscerally, that there isn’t anything inherently wrong with us.  With our bodies (since that’s, after all, what I’m aiming to speak of here).  That big boobs and long dicks and smooth skin and strong libidos and curves and muscles and hair in all the right places (and none of the wrong); that lack of disease and disability and early (or ongoing) abuse; that any of the things that make models look and seem to function like they do and standards for wholeness and sexiness and desirability what we think exist inherently—that none of this has anything inherent on the broader scope of who we actually are.  Which is real. Which is not standard.  Which is aging bodies of all shapes and textures and (dis)abilities and experiences and wounds and sizes.

I’m out of time and space right now to explain adequately what I mean by all of this, by this unbranding, and by the connections I’m trying to make between the opening I see in the Bible and the opening I think is necessary for shame to go away.  I’ll try to talk more on this next time.  I didn’t realize I had so much to say.

[Inspired by conversations on some of the blogs I read about heterosexuality, homosexuality, and the Christian tradition.]

In addition to so much else, bodies are sexual things.  At least for most of us, for a majority of our lives.  And there is something about our sexualness that’s close to our core, I think, something that makes sexual wounds run deep.  Deeper than bodies, even.  To be sexualized before we’re ready, or by the wrong people, to be molested or raped, to have unfulfilled longing, to have sexual parts that don’t look or work like we’d wish, to be thought undesirable by those we want desiring us, to be called, because of our desires, less than God’s ideal, or willfully depraved:  these are wounds that hit our core.  They hit the soft, impressionable places that tell us fundamental things about ourselves, the places where marks don’t quickly fade, where words, or even looks on people’s faces, are branding irons, and the flanks of our identities, our self-appraisals, unhelpably exposed.

And shame, in one form or another, is what I think the brands all say.  And shame is such an awful, awful thing, because it keeps us hiding, and therefore lonely—hiding sometimes literally, our body or our parts, hiding sometimes figuratively, our self-thoughts, our memories, expressions of our sexual beingness.  It keeps our wounds private.  It keeps us silent when we need to talk and urges us to silence those who do.  “Don’t bring that up,” we say.  It’s too hard to think about.  Too hard to see or deal with each other’s wounds, let alone our own.

I’m not a Christian right now in the ways many might define it, but my roots are there, and so is a lot of education, and it seems like the Christian Scriptures have a lot to say about related things.  In broad strokes, the Bible is a story of opening, I think.  A story of people opening, over time, and not in any straight or orderly fashion, to fuller understandings of love.  Or Love, rather.  And it’s Love that can unbrand our shame, I think.  It’s Love that can soften that marked up place inside of us, and impress it gently, tenderly, with something new.

I want to talk about this opening. 

I have a busy next few days, but when I get a chance to think after that, I want to put more words about this here.

(Part I here)

What if each of our bodies is a word, or a paragraph (maybe more?) of an ongoing, cosmic conversation?  This makes my love and acceptance of my body feel beside the point, and therefore strangely possible.  It makes me wonder what I’m being said in response to.  It makes me wonder who will be said in response to me.