Eve's Sermon: Suddenly...My Body

Eve Ensler gave a sermon recently, for us and the world, through her body. Unexpected, to say the least, to have the word "sermon" paired up with “Eve Ensler,” the tenacious poet-artist responsible for The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, a now global network working adamantly to end violence against women. But Ensler spoke with the refrain-rhythms of the best of Baptist preachers. You can listen to it here, if you’d like, about 13 minutes long.

It wasn’t a sermon in the disciplinary or religious sense, unless religious here refers to that which convicts, informs, enlightens, and demands something of you. The best religious sermons do all that. But rare is the male or homiletical-professor-preacher who will hear a sermon in what Ensler says so eloquently, with her "too-muchness" of wise passion we so need today. I heard: Our bodies are our intimate link with everything around us, within us, beyond us. Our bodies can awaken us to the interdependence of everything. They can awaken within us a strength beyond imagining, even if that strength comes at times of greatest physical weakness, even near death.

All this was serendipitous for me this past week, which often urges me to pay attention, to listen. I had spoken with a bodywise woman a couple days ago. We were lamenting together the abilities—sometimes the need—of women to dissociate from their bodies, to live a life of the mind with little reference to or awareness of the body. Many have much greater cause for this mind-body split than I—those facing rape, molestation, negotiating cultural demands for emaciated ‘beauty’ and more.  Nonetheless, I too had had a need to dissociate body from mind, my biological-fact from awareness. 

Earlier than anyone was prepared, awareness arrived in my young body of heightened emotional-intensities and sensate knowledge way “too much” for my family culture or school-town environments. This “too-muchness” was corralled in various socializing and religious fashion, hemmed into the darkest spots of shame and embarrassment available to a creative, young girl such as myself. During my junior year of high school, I was finally strong enough to vow suppression of it all forever. Live as if my body did not exist, except in moments of shaming weakness. I even ritualized the vow with words and action, just like any feminist would have shown me, had I known one “out of the closet.” (I realize I knew several—strong women who implicitly shaped my strength to respond to my needs like this—but none would ever name themselves in such fashion.)

Growing up in small-town life is reason enough for any girl to dissociate from her body, though my own home-life exceeded idyllic. I had all I needed, and more, except that which girlhood requires for healthy expression, acceptance, life. Communities under a (couple) twenty thousand population need all the skill-resourcing and shared labor they can muster. Families choose more often to live in closer proximity and things like women’s-equality or feminism have little entrance in places in which I grew up. Town sociability is strong, of course, but most women make their peace early with the inequalities, the sexual innuendoes, the body-slights from the old-boys. Sociable comfort requires swallowing a lot that seems unnecessary—was unnecessary—to most women of the town. So for nearly thirty years, or at least the twelve years of early womanhood from adolescence into age thirty, I lived solely in my head. I achieved in intellectual pursuits, through a terminal degree and a tenured professorship. And I love what I do, the way in which it provides both resources and spaciousness for me to explore life at large. But suddenly, I have a body…or better, it has me.

This is where Ensler got to me. Ensler’s sermon begins there. She became aware that when she was growing up, even through her mid-40’s, she “had no reference point for her body” at all. “For a long time,” her sermon begins, “there was me and my body.” … “Me was a floating head. For years I actually only wore hats. It was a way of keeping my head attached. It was a way of locating myself. If I took my hat off, I wouldn’t be here anymore.” What an apt description! Speaking now as a Protestant, as a Presbyterian Christian who loves her tradition, I can say with a sad smile we live as floating heads. Presbyterian heads in the South also wear hats to church. I’ll never see them going to church without Ensler’s words in my head. My head.

Then Ensler became aware of her body, before and after her creation/performances of The Vagina Monologues. Her body became a thing, an object, something to be conquered, “like the earth itself,” she observes. She now had a new commodity to use for entertainment, for work, for others. She notes that she did learn to take care of it—becoming vegetarian, staying sober, not smoking—but this was not unlike an abusive parent showing moments of kindness. “My father was kind to me on my 16^th birthday, for example,” she says. The man who beat and molested her for most of her young life had a kind moment, from time to time.

Then the cancer arrived. “Or I found out I had cancer”…“It was like a speeding bird, smashing into a windowpane. Suddenly, I had a body.” It was one to be poked with needles, burned from the inside-out with chemicals, weakened and threatened in its very life. But here’s the climax, so to speak. Here’s the turning point in her proclamation. “Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection,” she confides. “I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was happening in the world, and it wasn’t happening later. It was happening now.” Her greatest threat became her most startling awakening and call to action for the world. What had had no reference point at all became the opening life of passion, connection, interrelationship. Her rhythmic passions, now in prose: “Suddenly my cancer was the cancer that was everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed…the cancer of buried trauma. The cancer of caged chickens and polluted fish. … The cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.” She quotes author Phillip Shepherd: “If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you rather than the living continuum to which you belong.” Ensler’s body is now Eve’s reference point of connection to all others, to the suffering of all, to the gifts and graces of all. Her body—selflessly, without reciprocity—offers her now belonging to the wide swath of creation, to everything that is.

Ensler concludes in classic "black-preaching" form, though I'll leave that for now. Words in prose fail to communicate it anyway. For my purposes, and in quieted tone, I note simply that I got a whiff of Ensler's proclamation last night as I walked quietly, slowly, in the dusky light, filled somehow with the harmonies of crickets and cicadas. I crafted a space of mindfulness-in-motion, attending to open-bellied posture and breaths that went all the way to my knees. And I knew something I don’t know how to articulate. It knocked against my mind in funny insights—that houses and yards actually smell differently from one another; that as many times as we forget the breath we can always be returned to it, remembering; that a strange oneness and wonder is always on the cusp of the next step. Perhaps Eve’s sermon had simply created its spaciousness in a body over-weary from under-bodied-ness in intellectual employment. Perhaps Eve’s passions blossomed through my bodied-self, pushing up into my awareness at just the right time, having germinating for recent hours.

Or perhaps this Eve is offering me a newly harvested fruit, with her wizened and impish smile of welcome. This time, she says to me, this time the fruit redeems, invites, reconnects. You and your body. All of our bodies—male and female and all those in between—with the world. Women giving new life to anyone who can receive it, like we do.

Not-Much 'Tradition' for Life's Too-Muchness

The authority of ‘tradition’ may not be much these days, but I’m beginning to think it may be all we have. Each of the words in that sentence is specific to the musing-task I have in mind this morning: authority, tradition, much, these days, beginning, think, may be, all, we, have.

 Recently, I asked (in another context) how one authorizes the teachers in life, by which I mean “teachers for a path of spiritual maturity and integrity.” How do we decide that someone’s word or teaching is better than another’s? When do we—and are we aware of it at the time—“pledge our troth,” so to speak, to such a teaching, to such a person’s contribution to our learning?  Today, however, I’m drawn to the power, the compelling authority, that traditions of faith/practice have for some of us, and clearly not for others of us, in this (un)conscious discernment and decision-making for a such a path.

Sometimes this is asked within the lens of certification: how does one get certified as a leader or teacher within a tradition of faith/practice (recognizing that in some traditions, a leader and a teacher may be different roles)? What is the process, duration, cost, and endpoint for being a leader/teacher of a tradition? 

Other times it is approached through definitions of tradition. My favorite of these is also a most abstract one (go figure). Alasdair MacIntyre, a moral ethicist/philosopher from Notre Dame, described a tradition as “a living argument.”[1] In this sense, a tradition is a long-standing way of being in human community, structured by practices (a definition we will leave for posterity’s sake) with both goods and observable ends, which are continually enacted and evolving such that disagreement and discernment fund a living ‘argument’ about who and how and what it means to be within this community, as participant and as collective. See what I mean? Abstract. But this ‘buys’ a way of thinking about ‘tradition’ unhinged from religious identities, which I find compelling. In his terms, you can stand within a tradition of scientific discipline, tennis, golf, religious belief, ethnicity, etc. Personally, I think it’s good for religious people to be de-stabilized enough to see that what they do, while having ultimate significance for them, can be likened to what others do with vastly different nuances of ‘ultimate.’ [Neither is humbling religious folks a bad thing, I’ve found. Our path of maturity often requires it and staid notions of ‘tradition’ can prevent it, so along with an accurate sense of oneself (limited, humble, etc.), learning, growth, delight, and more may never occur.]

This topic of musing is also complicated by the fact that many of us find ourselves in a tradition that we did not consciously choose. We belong to a ‘living argument’ we didn’t start, in other words, but one we feel compelled to finish, for some reason. Good conversation partners in my life have pushed me here, in their desire to lessen the significance of ‘tradition.’ “Since there are so many different religions,” they would say, “none could be the only one. So how is it logical to commit to one ultimate, when you can’t prove that it’s the ultimate one? Furthermore, your unchosen social and biological location—i.e. family of origin—determines your belief structure, your tradition. How can that be true for you, therefore?” Often the tone here suggests such determination is a bad thing, something to be resisted. Without delving into the many religions/one religion quagmire—a tradition unto itself, by now—we do need to note that each of us does find him/herself in a pre-existing tradition, or at least, a governing narrative about tradition(s). Sometimes it’s one of adherence to an existing tradition, at all internal and external costs. Other times, it’s rejection of a tradition, with different internal and external costs. ‘Tradition’ is a living argument, even in its constitution and understanding. Before you ever get to its practices, its wisdom of the years.

So why bother? you may ask. Why learn a particular tradition (when there are so many of them to choose from) or why seek teachers within particular, more narrowly-defined traditions (when one could commit to teachers in any and all of them)? Why is certification within a tradition of practice worthwhile or valuable? How do you know if the tradition in which you find yourself is the one that will be true for your path?

The cool thing about these questions is that our answers are near-infinite. Those of us in the ‘business’ of teaching/learning within historically rooted traditions (in my case, Christianity) come into this work as our path from incredibly diverse origins, with incredibly diverse ends. Hence, living argument. This also means that the reasons to learn a tradition or seek teachers within a tradition become inarticulate for our purposes here. Simply too many of them. I can speak of my own path, however, my own reasoning.

I stand and live within a particular, historically rooted tradition because of the “too-muchness” of life for my own mind, body, spirit, personhood. Sometimes this “too-muchness” overflows my “me” with celebration, delight, ecstacy, pleasure, laughter and more. In those times, not only do I want to share it with those who live and work outside my communities, but I want to share it with those who have had similar experiences, sensations, histories. I want to be with those who speak a similar language and have been shaped in similar settings of community life, practice, steps on the path.  Other times, this “too-muchness” demands more of me than I can withstand on my own. It overwhelms what resources and ways of thinking I have, such that I am pushed to lean on “wisdom that works.” Well-defined traditions with long-standing records of response to such situations offer such a wisdom. Not band-aids I’ve found along the side of the road on my particular pathway, for this particular pain or that particular scrape, but coherent and longstanding wisdom(s) of surgery and medicine within which band-aids may be an element. The best way to proceed in the delicate demands of “surgery” and medicine, I’ve found, is to surrender to one’s own doctor or species of care. In pain, it’s better to be able to trust oneself to familiar doctors and read the medicine boxes in one’s own language, wouldn’t you agree? So, the “too-muchness” of life, in both pleasure and pain, pushes me to commit to a particular, historically rooted tradition, though I am well aware of the value in all such traditions.

I bother with learning/teaching within a particular tradition, therefore, as a steward of gifts and wisdom given to me, ways of becoming fully human that have shaped my own mind-body-spirit and that I have found, do find, valuable, trustworthy, worth stewarding. I don’t know the ‘grand scheme’ of a world of multiple traditions, but I can guess that each has particular gifts to offer an enriching life possible in an ever-evolving world—biologically-, psychologically-, socially-, culturally-configured. And just because I have found myself in a particular tradition doesn't mean that it's more or less true for wisdom within my experience. Does it guide me toward growth, disruptive transformation, nurture in the broadest sense? Does it offer a language and life in my path? Then it's a living tradition in which truth can speak. If I don't experience newness, growth, disruption, transformation, change...? Well, then I'm not living a tradition anyway, so the question is moot. 

“These days” offer additional and necessary “refining fire” for our understandings of and engagement with ‘tradition’(s). Popular conception of ‘tradition’ seems to lead to sectarian violence, tribalism, us/them polarizations driven by fear, loss, grief. Ways of recognizing traditions of life, aimed toward life-giving wisdom, appear necessary in imagination, articulation, modeling, and teaching. A new beginning, logically, begins there. Here. So how to proceed, committing to a particular—so as to value it ultimately—while growing into recognition of the many—so as to value persons, ‘others’ of oft-conflicting habits/practices/wisdom?

At the very least, such beginning will entail new conceptions of “we” amidst longstanding practices of “thinking together.” How big can our “we” get before it gets lost? will be important listening to engage. A tentativeness, lived with particular and tenacious commitment, also seems necessary. Some of us call these “humble absolutes.” Others a movement from convicted knowing into unknowing, perhaps ‘back again,’ returning as if for the first time.

We may resist it, in liberal habits of mind and fear of tribalistic traditions, but the “wisdom that works” across traditions of all kinds puts all the individual words in the second sentence into a coherent plausibility. ‘Tradiition’ recognized for its life-giving offerings does author new life. It gains an authority of years in personal experience and narrative, across generations. It forces a collective to come into being, a “we” that needs to think together about how we/it is a community and what it means to practice in such a communal fashion. I know no other vehicle for facing the “too-muchness” of life, though there are certainly multiple expressions of ‘tradition’ that provide proven-and-yet-diverse ways for facing such “too-muchness.” And “these days,” ‘tradition’ is a locus of old-birthing-the-new, a focal point of argument for how to live wisdom forward. Traditional folks don’t always get it right, but we do know that getting it wrong is part of the human pathway to living wisdom forward. As Richard Rohr says in his new book, "We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right." (Falling Upward, xxii). 

I may not like to admit it, with as much frustration and with as much failure as I observe in my own particular religious ‘traditioning,’ but it’s increasingly difficult to deny that 'tradition' for new life and a new sense of being human together is unavoidable. It may not be 'tradition' as 'we' think of it together today, but the living and ever expanding argument that is human beings, in particular and together as a people, will inevitably remain a 'tradition.' Such is all a we can have, in the end. 

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[1] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 289?

Path Companions -- 2

To whom do you grant authority in your life? Religious folks may respond, almost immediately, “God,” with all the implicit and explicit difficulties/delights that entails. Secularists may think immediately “Reason or Logic,” with similar difficulties/delights but vastly different expressions. I want to have the question move into our relationships of teaching/learning and spiritual maturity within (or outside of) traditions/philosophies. How do you authorize those who are teaching you, will teach you? Those whom you grant particular voice in your thinking? How do you decide their voice is the one of hundreds today that deserves attention and value?

Authority is a slippery thing, you see. I remember a student asked me (and the class) at a seminary on the East Coast, “When do I have or get authority as a pastor?” I don’t remember precisely what I said. I probably evaded the question first, broadening it outward for class response. My recollection goes something like this, for what came out of my mouth, “Authority is a funny thing in congregations, for pastors. As soon as you grab it, you’ve lost it. As soon as you believe you’ve lost it, you may find it’s been given.” There’s something deep at play with authority, in my mind. It’s a primarily relational phenomenon—it must be given, not grasped. But there are behaviors and characteristics of a person to whom congregations will give authority, (which I will define summarily as) a responsibility and voice accorded to those who lead or teach, who ultimately encourage the authoring of others’ lives in love, knowledge, and contribution.

One of the figures in my own path whom I have granted inordinate authority is Julia Cameron, whom I’ve never met. She is author, artist, mother, playwright, composer, and more. Her Artist’s Way: a Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity has become a classic in the art/self-help world, confirmed in the variety of spin-off products the market can get persons hungry for more of her work to buy. As one who usually evades what I call “market tchotchke”—items or books that sit on one’s shelf and collect dust?—I’ve even purchased more Cameron products than I care to admit. What she has contributed to my life holds great authority for me, for my work, for my life.

When I was floundering in doctoral training, in search of “a creative dissertation proposal,” I found her book in the bookstore section subtitled, “creativity.” Yes, a type-A person would go to a bookstore to find a book under the label “creativity” to learn how to do it for a dissertation. [Little did I know then that creative proposals are rarely desired in higher education. Large thinking, which is necessarily more inarticulate and less analytically precise, is supposed to come afterwards!] I was finally out of a relationship that had been a whole lot of work and very little fun. I was completing another unit of some pastoral training as a Hospice chaplain. I was completing, had completed, my comprehensive exams at great personal-mental cost to me and those around me. I was reconnecting with an old college friend, who was to become my fiancé now husband, but neither of us had any remote intention in that direction yet. The Artist’s Way practices began, for work-product: morning pages, artist dates, magazine collages, fairy-tale writing, and more. A world of serendipity—what Presbyterians might call ‘providence’—unfolded before my very eyes (and ears, nose, fingers, mouth, even my mind). An awakening was underway from which I (and my life), thank God, would never recover.

One year later, I had my successful dissertation proposal. More importantly, I had a vibrant life of curiosity, new love, self-confidence (or at least self-commitment), and good work to do. My path within Cameron’s vision, work, and proscribed practices has waxed and waned as I’ve learned more about who I am as an artist, how I become attached to practices as the point, not a path. But anything Cameron will catch my attention with a special authority. “Listen!” I seem to hear in my mind when her work appears in my view-finder, my search-engine box, my Amazon “recommendations.”

So imagine my surprise when I read her autobiography on a plane-ride toward vacation-time with my husband in the San Juan Islands, and I learned I did not like Julia Cameron. The book showed me a woman who has lived a life of audacity, yes, but also privilege and traditionally baby-boomer values. Connections to a well-monied family in NYC, jet-setting life between New Mexico and the Upper West Side, NYC. Pursuit of her artistic path in locations across the globe, so detached from anything I know as real or connected to community life in my own path. All of a sudden, her mantra for my life, “Leap and the net will appear,” became empty. “Isn’t it easy to leap when you have your child’s grandparents’ money buffering a fall, assuring a net?” I thought to myself. How does such a life of at least two homes, various locations, accord with resources enough for all? And where is the life of the community, the common good in this path?

Such questions, such judgments—as that is what they are—are not really fair, of course. It’s never easy to leap into what is one’s calling, and others’ money may or may not be the net it seems to be from the outside. As a matter of fact, the judgment of family-others may make the leap even harder. And none of us in North American abundance can throw the first stone at any other of us. I live an extraordinary life of privilege myself, with more than I need to do what I still struggle to do. The resistance I have to baby-boomers is my own generational-learning-curve—how do I honor the contributions of the previous generation when boomers are the ones against whom I must differentiate myself, to work for the world within institutions they have deconstructed for all of us?

Such content of my awareness is not nearly as important or interesting as the fact that the awareness arose. A teacher in whom I had placed extraordinary authority for my path had become more of the frail and real person she actually is. Instead of this authority figure with an aura, of a sort, she became a human being, just like the rest of us. Liking her or not does not really matter in the end. All of the negativity that arose could even arguably be seen as liberating, the next necessary step on the path to seeing my own pattern of authorizing, a next step toward learning to trust my own voice and intuition as it is. Not transferred onto someone else, but as something holy and mysterious that arises at odd moments from within my own being, body, spirit. Cameron contributed an extraordinary wisdom to my own path, not only because of her ability to “leap” and “articulate for others,” but also because something in me authorized her to teach me, to lead my actions. She has had authority in my life because I gave it to her. Something in me surrendered to something she had to say, wisdom she was to offer for the good of all, including me.

I don’t know why we seem to need authority figures to discover our own voices, our own teachings (mishna, some friends would say) that we are to offer the world. I don’t know when the moment was that I decided her voice and pathway was to be so significant for my own. I do know that authority is something that Cameron earned in her audacious and fully human offerings. She has walked the walk more than most teachers I have had. I do know that authority was something that I needed to give her were I ever to mature enough in my own self to begin to trust my voice, my gifts to offer the world. I will always be grateful to her, though I doubt I will ever meet her face to face. (She’s an introvert, after all, and struggles with public contact. Learned in the autobiography!) I am speechlessly grateful to have had my illusions broken open here too. But this has taught me that authorizing another can be risky, painful, even hurtful for the one(s) we authorize. Perhaps that is simply how it always is. Growth requires deep connection and then the pain of departure or recognition of frail humanity which is never ‘enough’ in sacred desire.

It seems to come down to the rather staid cliché that no one is ever an island, or each of us needs others—at least an other—if we are to learn most deeply who we are, what we have to offer. Only by the act of surrender to this other do we gain the life we are to live. And that’s the tricky thing…being wise about that “other” is such a crucial decision. Julia Cameron was a safe bet, and I recommend her to you as teacher, as companion for the path. But more importantly, I encourage you to consider what your pattern is of authorizing others whose voices you value, will listen to. It’s an intimate decision. It requires an act of risk, to trust. But it’s one of those choiceless choices. You will not grow in the ways that matter without it.