A Touch of Light in the Dark of Wisdom (for Nona)

The charismatic journey teacher paints

A Caravaggio in every room, light and shadow

To be sensed, seen, sown. And mourned,

Grieving, witnessed aloud. For a

Crazy wisdom does speak in the life of light

That yearns to be shared. In questions

Trust and intimacy, awakening and sleep,

Agency and doubt abound.

There is more than one way to skin a cat,

We say, when we neglect or hide the pain of it.

Are you drawn to the light? Dream

Into the shadow, learn the blood, sweat

And tears of all the worlds’ pains.

Does the darkness tear at your heart?

Allow it to break open yourself, for only

Love of a heart revealed can see

Light in the chaotic holy dark.

There are many ways to skin a community,

We say, when one and all: to protect innards,

To give shade from the glare of the piercing sun

To create a container that can hold and

Behold, know and be known, love

Like a geyser within one and for all.

First Fruits -- a draft

The charismatic journey teacher paints

A Caravaggio in every room, light and shadow

To be sensed, seen, and sown. And

Mourned, grieved, witnessed aloud.

A crazy wisdom speaks in the life

of light that yearns to be shared, though

Questions of trust and intimacy,

Awakening and sleep, agency 

And doubt abound.

There is more than one way to skin a cat,

We say, when we neglect or hide the pain of it.

Are you drawn to the light?

Dream into the shadow and learn the blood

Sweat and tears of the pain.

Does the darkness tear at your heart?

Allow it to be broken yourself, for only the love

Of a heart revealed can see light in the dark.

There are many ways to skin a community,

After all--to protect all our innards, give us shade

From the glare of the sun, to create a container

That can nourish and be nourished, know

And be known, love and be loved. For all.

A touch of light in the dark of wisdom itself.

Coming Home to an Unknown Land

I feel a bit as if I’m finding a new family I didn’t know I had. 

In preparation for a week’s R&R and a bit of post-semester, professional development, I downloaded Susan Gubar’s edited compilation of essays entitled True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) into the Kindle I rarely use. Except when travelling, when it becomes a portable library of companionable authors. I knew of Susan Gubar’s work because of a recent New York Times Book Review that caught my eye, but this volume drew me in with the proposition of listening in to women professor’s autobiographical musings about their lives before, during and after careers in higher education. I recognized several names in the Table of Contents, but not very many, truth be told. I became a feminist myself mostly out of self-defense in my years of theological education. While sympathetic, even a quiet advocate and servant of women, I’ve not been well-versed in the literatures of feminism. I was therefore completely unprepared for the overwhelming resonance and recognitions of myself, events in my life, directions in my work as a poet-scholar in higher education. I devoured essay after essay on the plane-ride, amazed at “coming home” to an unknown land in the lives of women I’ve never met. And now I have so much correspondence and nesting to do!

Shirley Geok-lin Lim gave me words I’ve yearned to say myself. She calls herself “a mongrel academic-creative writer, between and in between the two institutionally-differentiated identities of scholar and poet.” I need to look up the etymology of “mongrel” now. She describes a guiding force in her life--and in my life right now--which is “other forms of community…peers, older women who offer an alternative and new form of gyno-love (a woman-based, woman-centric homosociability separate from lesbian love).” Was she in my head or just connected in that web of interdependence we all talk about but so often forget?

The essay by Patricia Yeager, “Labial Politics,” reflected on the first time her mother taught her to use a tampon and gasped, “Oh, they’re so big, so…you’ll have no trouble having babies.” She stared, Yaeger observes, finding herself then in a paroxysm of insecurity: what was the matter? Was I malformed? I was myself returned to something my mother observed to me, probably in 8^th grade or so, when I bemoaned how large I was and how dainty other girls seemd to be, including my own sister. She said to me, “Lisa, you’re so lucky: you have child-bearing hips.” The irony of that observation hit me today with full-force. What is a woman not interested or called to child-bearing to do with “child-bearing hips”?

Nancy Chodorow’s essay, “The Psychoanalysit, the Sociologist, and the Femnist: a Retrospect,” drew me into some wonderings for the learning of the week as well. She confirms her established sense that “meaning comes from within as much as from without,” in contradistinction to much of the sociology of knowledge that was prevalent in her early scholarly formation. She mused on being “accused of writing like a man,” which reminded me of a church member once attempting to encourage me by saying, “Someday, you’ll preach like a man.” 

But in her The Power of Feelings, which I’ve not read, Chodorow shares her more recent thinking about the centrality of the mother-daughter relationship for a woman’s sense of her female self and femininity. She evolves her earlier work to re-focus (if I’m understanding correctly) renewed attention on the “internal and external relation to the mother” as developmentally central for this sense of self and sense of femininity. The distinction here being the internalized self-in-relation as well as the actual or external relation to one’s mother. She then reclaims something she had earlier rejected. In her earlier work, she observes that she’d historically given “the body quite short shrift” in her theorizing. “In my more recent thinking,” she writes, “I reclaim the reproductive body and drives. Even if these are not biologically enacted in an actual pregnancy, I suggest that this biology demands psychic representation.” A wave of curiosity and energy...but what does that mean?

I’ve not thought about the relationship with my mother in any critical or re-listening sense in years. In my late twenties, during my own clinical training, the reclamation of my femininity paralleled a re-engagement of reflection on the quiet or implicit relationship I seemed to have with my mother, in contrast to the quite overt and intense relationship I had with my father and two of his brothers. It was a lively time for both Mom and me, I think, as she grew surprised at my interest in her early life and I grew more and more insistent that these years were important to me, even if they didn’t seem to be for her. 

As I read Chodorow’s words, I was also startled to remember something a rather wounded woman said to me two years ago. She’s a psychotherapist with whom I worked for two separate and brief periods of time—the first to explore the potentially destructive energies around childbearing (or not) I was having, the second (ultimately) to complete that narrative with a “thank-you” reflective-session or two. The last visit with this therapist did not end well, when I came in to express my thanksgiving and be intentional about closure. She responded with a systematic attack on any areas of insecurity she had perceived in me, concluding with some barb about the relationship with my mother. “You’ve never addressed the serious work you need to do on the relationship with your mother,” or some such quip. I had been steeping in lectures on nonviolent communication, so I (deftly, when I think about it now) eased my way out of the door with minimal retaliation or offense. I processed her violation of her oath to me to “do no harm,” implicit in her professional ethic. A professional colleague and a circle of healthy friends affirmed my sense of violation and injustice. I considered sending the drafted letter to the psychological association ethics board, but did not. In this instance, I don’t believe she saw something for me to work on that I did not see, though perhaps something spoke through her for me to hear in the future. Her words struck me as a last-ditch attempt to get me to stay in a dependent relationship with her as a therapist. Perhaps she’s got work to do about motherhood and abandonment?

Upon the memory surfacing today, I do wonder whether there will be a richness of life ahead were I to reconsider the depth and breadth of my relationship to Mom, a reclamation of my own reproductive body and drives, a psychic representation of this reproductive body which appears never to actualize in a biological pregnancy. It seems probable, as I am preparing to steep in teachings with a Jungian “cantadora” whose recent work professes devotion to Holy Mother. The gathering conference participants seem to be largely (and some quite large!) women who do seem this speaker's niche of audience or market. How interesting to be in a center devoted to Divine Light, surrounded by more and more women, anticipating listening to Dr. E who many call “Mother Clarissa.”

Coming home to an unknown land, indeed. Blessed be.

Running Sacred

It was a season of running.

One year into a new life with new jobs, a new home in the Midwest, a seasoned but young marriage, many decisions of life pending. The retreat center close to home offered as good a running trail as any, complete with paved and woodland trails. I was running more and longer, almost as if I were afraid of something behind me, within me. Whatever it was, it was so close I could not seem to get away. The more deeply I felt it, the longer and faster I ran, not unlike a horse increasingly frightened by a riderless wagon hitched behind him. I entered the grotto near the end of a looped run, dappled by sun and shade. A Marian figurine towered above, whitened but for specks of outside toil. Two faded turquoise kneelers rested at the grotto’s base. Without anymore straight-aways to run, I slowed to a cantor, then to a trot, then to a walk. Exhausted, I lowered my body onto the faded pads of a kneeler. It felt strange to me, a running Protestant reined in close to a blessed Mother.

I looked up at her, of professed blessed status unknown to me. I heard myself ask what it was like for her, What was it like to offer your own body for inconceivably sacred purpose? A question of lengthy sacred trajectory, when I thought about it. “This is my body, given for you,” I heard. How does one offer one’s own body to another? To a stranger, to a beloved, for what purpose? Something in me stopped running. I could not outrun this, nor could I continue to try. I loved my husband. I yearned for him, but my body was being drawn to Her.

We set a time on the phone to meet at her house the next morning, but her husband had the flu. “Let’s meet at the Grotto,” she said. I put the old Celtic ring on my right index finger, to remember who I was, the beloved of a gentling Irish soul. It was old and familiar but now felt new, fragile, scarcely breathing. Her car was there when I arrived. We walked through the arbor and sat on a bench, in the gaze of the Marian figure. An autumn breeze picked up, rustling the leaves, making shadows dance on the brick tiles at our feet.

“I’m not sure how to begin,” I began. “At the very least, we cannot bathe as sacred that which is not.” Her eyes softened. She smiled. “I was thinking about you the other day,” she said. “I realized something remarkable.” An impish tone entered into her voice, a gentle strength with expansive warmth. “It feels like we’re married already somehow. Is not that wonderful?” She touched my hand, gently, covering it with her own.

All of me felt it at once—a sensate warmth, a tectonic shift, an easing of weight, an expansiveness beyond anything I’d ever known. Early childhood returned. There was no Shame. None. What had been was no more. Its clammy hold had released. Its deadening weight, its opaque veil, lifted. A light holy breath rushed into every dark space I had known. Even if it were to be for just that moment, I realized I would know for the rest of my life: the old, dusty language of my parents’ youth had a feeling. Sanctification could be sensed.  Its reality blossomed within my very bones. When offered, in the touch of her hand, a guilt-ridden body can be transfigured. The fragrance of erotic love overpowers all shame.

Today I smile, celebrating over a decade of marriage to my Irish beloved, the man who taught me of such anam cara loves, holy friendships between persons in most unexpected pairings. I smile today because what our over-culture decries as an abomination—an erotic love between women—was precisely what sanctified my body, cleansed my spirit, emboldened my soul, freed my mind. A stone rejected by the builders is the chief cornerstone of my life, the unruly, sensate lifeline to my Beloved in whom I know all the loves of my life. 

I smile today because the wonderful, terrifying thing is that this was not the first, nor the last run. This charging steed of life keeps finding me, others, running sacred within all those committed to love, overwhelmingly abundant only within bounds. “This is religion!” we say, in union with one and all.

Yearning's Calendar

I miss him, though I smile in confusion at just who or what I miss, precisely. Is it the man or the connection, the sensations or the sense of purpose? I felt myself missing her yesterday too, which was new. Is it the woman or the connection, the sensations or the sense of purpose? And then, of course, a deep awareness of missing them, which cycles more regularly these last couple years. Who do we miss when life moves us into new paths and relationships, when those who have been our companions are moved onto their new paths or are living their lives in their own directions, as we all must? What of them was ever “lent” to us in the first place? What did we feel we had been given that is now no longer “ours,” instigating this deep sense of loss or yearning?

I’ve been reading some old writing pieces, one out of necessity, the others out of curiosity. One brought me back three years, into an early phase of a new spiritual friendship. A book was sent and received as a gift. A teaching collaboration began. Resonance and learning for transformation grew and a healthy but unruly love was borne. It awakened me in public, grew my spirit to imagine previously inconceivable offerings, challenges, possibilities. It shaped my own relationship with God at a fundamental level, growing faith where there had been knowledge, compassion where there had been duty, abundance where there had been sufficient provision. I wince today at the vulnerability and passion of prose that flowed out of me, some directly to him, some offered in faith to the path. I know the grief of relinquishing him in faith. And I yearn for him or the intensity of connection or whatever the yearning is about this time.

Another writing brought me back even further to another awakening into spiritual friendship. The new pastors had arrived and bought a home close to their new jobs. One of them was man-handled by a “gentleman” in the congregation. The other fell silent for years, his rage quelled in the face of small-town privilege, provinciality, financial captivity. Two months later, two women sat on a bench in a holy grotto as they became one heart to be shared. Holy desire, sanctified and sanctifying, nourished them both, for a time. A way of covenant was published. A new path of spiritual direction was birthed. An interfaith marriage was transformed and new communities found new leaders. Then neither friend could sustain presence with the other, for some reason. Grasping at fidelity to what had been, each was required to relinquish the other into the arms of the community, unknowing why or for what reason the friendship had completed.

Yearning appears to have its own calendar, I guess. It has holidays and ordinary times in a rhythmic cycle. Except one cannot hang this one on the wall, to anticipate what comes or the mundane days that make up a life. No, yearning’s calendar creates itself amongst people and uncontrollable connections. 

When I trace this life I know by yearning, I am surprised to see my calendar beginning as early as grade school--third grade, to be specific--with my schoolteacher, Miss Donley. I remember her telling the class that she would be leaving school that summer to get married to a young man named (for us) Mr. Smith. (It occurs to me now to wonder if that really was his name.) Regardless, that afternoon, getting home from school, I sat on the pilled green circle-chair, pushing myself round and round on its swivel. The yearning hurt. Her departure made a little girl cry, going round and round to nowhere in her living room. No matter that the next year I would have been in another grade, with another teacher. No matter that my own growth meant I was leaving her too. Connection and separation, relinquishment and yearning.

Then I become aware of this same energy again and again—or better, my body remembers these sensations again—across distance and years: a high-school chemistry teacher, a college RA, an atheist uncle, an assistant soccer coach, a roommate’s brother, a head of school, a pastor-scholar, a naming uncle, a professor of theology, a professor of transformation, a mentor and her partner, an organist and choral director, an impish Sister of Charity, a Quaker of nurture and compassionate anger, a crusty-wise Hospice patient, and more. Each of these persons in my mind today recalls a yearning energy into my body, my awareness. I have felt ashamed sometimes, when remembering them in my life, even as I mark them as the most significant presences in my life. Like it was shameful to feel so deeply, such intense connection to persons I should not love like that. Whatever “like that” meant in each case to me, or them. Whatever “should not” means. At root, these relationships are the ones that have made me who I am, these are the ones who have shaped my life’s work, have directed my path, have touched and transformed my spirit unto its delight, resilience, and gifting.

And they continue to do the same today. Remembering this, seeing this line of companions, strengthens a sense of intention or purpose, regularly questioned amidst any relinquishment. Remembering them, describing them even this briefly, reminds me there is work to do and fruit to offer a world increasingly lonely in its everpresent connection but lack of intimacy and provision. The blessings of such connection—so many connections over the years—are newly received when seen in such a line over time.  How could I be so gifted with intense connection to so many different persons, of such remarkable gifts and passions they were willing to share with me?

The amazing thing is that what we've been given, truly given in faith over embodied time, has been etched in the historical record of living bodies. I remember the gut-wrenching fear when my husband travelled to Israel/Palestine for a period of three weeks when we would have little to no contact with each other. Separation, we knew. Daily news media of violence and threat, I knew. And then my body remembered and taught:  any companionship of Spirit never dies, in the end, as it is always a part of one’s embodied life written into form by the Infinite. What Spirit gives is never eradicated, especially if one relinquishes it in faith. I knew that if something happened to my husband, it would be awful for me in loss and grief. But I also knew that everything we had had together would always be a part of me, even if I couldn’t remember all I wanted to remember of it. The sanctity of the body, perhaps, or its gift to us, daily.

Yearning’s calendar and practice require a longitudinal view, it turns out, if one is to sustain the yearning in faith, in fidelity to all those who have made us who we are, and are becoming. It doesn’t soften the sensation of it all, the joy that stings, but it does remind me to receive the day as it is with a smile. And to offer a prayer for all those who have shared their path with me. I am so very thankful for each and every one of you, even if we are now about other things. I wouldn't miss you if it hadn't been significant, formative, Real.

Salt-Water and Oaks

The waves of pleasure rolled over her little form, hidden in the dark.

She was seven and alone, completely unprepared.

No one had shared with her “the talk.”

No one knew it was time, that it would be past time,

Then it was. Past time.

Yearnings that grew originated and overwhelmed at night.

She’d never seen the ocean, been led to its shallows,

Been allowed to play in the eddies that gently romped and rolled.

Yet her little body remembered the beach, the waters, the rhythms.

The yearnings had come, their dark seed an acorn tossed onto sandy shores.

So of course, an oak tree grew, with strongly gnarled bark.

Its roots moved the sand to dig deep into fertile humus, dark soil required of life,

Its branches left the salts and stretched beyond ken toward gentling sunlight.

Now its buds come every season, breaking blossoms into winter flowers, whose

Bountiful leaves with thick-veined waters offer shade and solace.

Imagine her surprise when she finds herself rooted, planted, blossoming,

Grafted into another. His roots, blossoms, and gnarled bark?

Stunning, for she sees strength and safety of iron-bark mirrored, redemptive, gracious.

They intertwine roots, share branches and blossoms, committed as two into one.

How strange for salt-water and oaks to find voice here and now.

One of them spoke with a smile, you see,

Reframing all darkness and shame with surprise and delight:

“My wife is orgasmically-gifted. How cool is that? Really? Second grade?”

The Art of Separation in Conscious Love

What if separation did not ultimately mean loss, good-bye, or rupture of relationship?  Traditional associations with separation cover the gamut from abrupt departures (after an argument), bereaved departures (after a betrayal or a broken trust) all the way to those of apathy or indifference (after neglect or simple divergence of connection). I have grown interested in this question of late, grafted as I seem to have been into a path of erotic-chaste loves as contemplative practice, each of which, in its time, enters into an act of separation. An act whose necessity is only intuited but which signifies commitment, not departure; fidelity, not rupture; love, not anger or indifference. What in the world...?

For my purposes, this musing-matter does not refer to a marital commitment, which has an internal and external, intimate and social logic all its own, interpreted in sacred scriptures of many kinds and in faith communities of varying persuasion and rhetorical finesse in today's secular spaces. I continue to learn within my own marital commitment, but it has a singularity in my spirit-life-and-loves, an integrity set apart from what I reflect on here. Here, in contrast or in some distance, I'm musing on what I will call companionships of Spirit, though not all companions in my life would be comfortable with that language. It has been a path of erotic-chaste loves as contemplative practice, engaged with those whose life opened to such possibility at the same time mine did. Almost without agency but with receptivity and a sacred curiosity all the same. A path of erotic-chaste loves...

Loves, plural? Yes, plural. It’s difficult to speak or write clearly of this path, immersed in a sex-saturated media-American cultural soup as we are. It sounds salacious, seductive, even adulterous. Something around which to gather and point fingers, whisper to one’s friends behind cupped hands. The language around agape or platonic loves suffocates the reality of this way—the latter funding life with a bit of intellectual remove and the former tinging life with religious asceticism and self-sacrificing kindness. Platonic brings old philosophers and dusty intellectuals to mind. Agape brings suggestion of saints and martyrs—St. Francis, Rabbi Akiva, Mother Teresa. What I mean by multiple loves as a contemplative practice, in contrast, trucks in the world of the earthly, the socially disruptive, the impassioned yearnings ‘allowed’ mostly for artists, eccentrics, mystics.

And erotic-chaste? The sensation of which I speak has deep roots in embodied wisdom, unruly energies through which unpredictable-uncontrollable life erupts into awareness.  A bit less sensational prose (pun intended) comes under the title of devotion, but that brings to mind the associations of “morning devotions,” at least for this Christian only one generation from Baptist/Brethren scriptural-literalists. Such acts of piety are about the furthest thing I can think of in the context of what I mean by the word. No, this path erupts into one’s awareness from within the dan tien, the root chakra, the generative source of human sexual and sensual energies—a place of abiding presence and abundant joy, sensate pleasure and the yearning that aches. Satiating the desire only deepens the yearning, which means ego strategies of response and negotiation are useless. Connection births deeper connection which births deeper awareness again and again of how much deeper one can go. It hurts to yearn like this, but life grows vibrant beyond belief. Literally. (As an aside, I’m beginning to wonder whether this is what Teresa of Avila meant by her ‘prayer of pain,’ a manner of connection increasingly painful but so enlivening that one desires it more and more, in search of its Source. Not masochism but participation in Love greater than any mortal frame can possibly withstand).

Any companionship of Spirit in this fashion, to reach its transformative depth, requires a commitment and fidelity tinged with ultimacy. Whether such things are articulated with intention may depend upon circumstance and character, but there has to be a sense of long-lasting connection for either or both participants to allow the other into such intimate space, such shared passion. In one instance, the nature of covenant was articulate in written prose. In another, the commitment was lived into time over distance and cost shared fairly equally by both. Without the commitment, without the enacted covenant, no container shapes to hold the passions shared. Inevitably, though, if each participant is growing in discipline and devotion, both will chafe against the perceived container. What served its purpose to channel or hold shared energies inevitably becomes a box or worse, an unintentional prison for one or both. As in any spiritual practice, the reality is grow or die, which means growth pushes its seeds beyond previous bounds of ground. When this time comes, what preserves and deepens the erotic-chaste love of connection and service of all?

An act of separation, ironically enough.

Contemplative Cynthia Bourgeault observes the “art of separation” as an essential practice for those called into what she calls the Fifth Way, relationship as spiritual practice. In her words: “The art of separation is essential to conscious love.” When I first read this in her The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, I thought I knew what it meant. I interpreted it against the familiar backdrop of a spiritual friendship that reached its completion a long while back. Hearing it again this past week (Holy Week or time spent in anticipation of Pesach), I learned something different but consistent.

I learned that the separation I had feared was loss or rupture of relationship is not that at all. Recognizing release from the container does not mean conclusion of the relationship, alive and breathing. It means a renewed, pregnant life, outside of control of any and all. It means relinquishing attachment to a beloved in order to release that energy into practiced awareness of connection amongst us all. The language of container or covenant speaks a scaffolding into existence, necessary for the mark of infinity to be impressed upon flesh and hearts. That mark can never be taken away. It will never be erased. Yet spirits healthy and growing always move into new air, new food, grafted life. Soil must always be aerated. Winter must come if spring is to birth new life. Sound and silence create each other, with quiet deepening presence, creating new capacity for presence.

Doing this well requires practice in the art of separation—perhaps a poem signaling a conclusion steeped in the “I do” of fidelity--all without knowing whether it will be understood. In the first instance of my learning, it was the shared community of faith that emerged to hold the conscious love without and beyond its ‘container’ of covenant. In the second instance now, it was an intuition or instinct that surprised me as it unfolded within a familiar liturgy. Perhaps a call from an old and new Beloved, a rabbinic Ancient of Days, perhaps not. Regardless, I recognized the pattern, the invitation. I was reminded that the many loves given into my path each bring their spark of divinity. Each spark can only be tended if relinquished to flicker freely, nourished and unattached. The path is to learn being immaculately safe in the stewardship of erotic-chastity, a conjugal path of devotion offered to those willing, within and beyond their other covenants of commitment.

What would our world be like if one fell in love with everyone one met, living into that love without ego-feeding on its energies but instead, ego-relinquishing such energies for the good of the earth and us all? What would our world be like if we could receive, intimately, what is of God in each of us, however lost or grieved, and just as faithfully release such beauty beyond our grasping it back into the world?