Bodies of Knowledge – Bodies of Wisdom

In a recent conversation with a Spiritual Counseling client, I made reference to the ancient and yet startling Jewish blessing for the internal functions of the body – all our internal plumbing – a blessing that traditionally is recited after going to the bathroom. The blessing begins with the words

Blessed are You, God, who created the human being in wisdom.

My client (this one happened to be literate in Hebrew) pointed out that the original text could legitimately be translated quite differently.

Blessed are You, God, who created the human being from wisdom.

I think what blew me away was the simplicity and the obvious rightness of his reading.

Not only can we perceive a wisdom in the structure of the body, but we can mine wisdom from the very tissues and fibers of it. The medium – the clay, if you will – from which we are sculpted is wisdom. We connect to that wisdom through what our bodies experience and feel. That experiential wisdom may be something we can translate into words, or it may remain inexpressible. Truth can get lost in translation. The sensation of a caress, a squeeze, an ache, or an orgasm can communicate a wisdom to our souls that no words can contain.

This reminded me of a healing session I experienced once with my friend and teacher Joe Weston. During a spiritual body work session shortly after my father died, Joe found places on my torso that were painful to the touch. I said, “Make the pain go away.” Joe replied, “You don't want the pain to go away, you want it to tell you what it knows.”

Bodies are made of wisdom. It's an obvious truth, yet it is a very Queer truth.

The acknowledgement of an authority competitive to the mind is Queer.

Recognizing the sensations and experience of the body as wisdom – that is so Queer!!!

To hold as a religious truth that the erotic body can teach the mind through its sensations is Queer.

The conforming* approach has been that the crude and ignorant body must only be lectured to and made wise by the mind. Queer God, Queer faith, Queer experience tell us different.

May we bless the Queer God who creates us from wisdom and in wisdom, and teaches us not to judge the ways in which we are wise.

* I have begun to adopt the term “conforming” in place of “straight” when describing the contrasting condition to Queer. From now on I will try to use “straight” only to mean opposite-gender attracted, which by no means precludes Queerness. In this context “conforming” means conforming to the illusion that only straightness is healthy or holy.

Update on Tuesday, August 14, 2012 at 02:39AM by Queer Spiritual Counseling

In dem wogenden Schwall, 		In the billowing  torrent,
in dem tönenden Schall,                      in the resonating sound,
in des Welt-Atems wehendem             All in the wafting Universe of the World-Breath		
ertrinken,                                             drown,
versinken ---                                         be engulfed ---
unbewußt ---                                        unconscious --- 
höchste Lust!                                        supreme delight!

         Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde  (trans. by Barbara Pothen) 

WHY God is so happy to be Queer

One of the advantages of thinking Queerly about God, is to know more about God than we, or anyone else. were ever taught. We know there are more stories to tell about God because we know about all of our stories that weren't told for thousands of years. By keeping us off the page, straight-religious authorities have kept lots of God off the page, too.

As Queer folk we know that every statement about God has a possible alternative meaning. Think about it. That's not only for our own good as LGBTQ folks, that's something good for the whole world! Everyone on the planet can use another angle, another way of looking at God, and God, when you think about it, must be thrilled to know that we aren't limiting God to inflexible two-dimensionality. God gets to be creative, playful, inventive, instinctive. Queer. Think of the next breeze that blows as God heaving a Divine sigh of relief at being allowed to stretch out and be infinitely fabulous.

Update on Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 02:43PM by Queer Spiritual Counseling

"Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?
Making life means making trouble."

                                     ~ George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

With God on our side

I was fortunate to be part of an historic occasion last month, the screening at the Castro theatre of a new documentary film, Call Me Kuchu, part of the Frameline film festival. The film (http://callmekuchu.com/) depicts through personal stories the on-going life-and-death struggle for LGBTQ rights in Uganda. The Ugandan parliament continues to consider the implementation of laws that will effectively make being Queer, or supporting those who are Queer, a capital offense. The situation in Uganda is terrifying, and the film tragically ends with the homophobic murder of activist David Kato.

The film screened to a packed house and was attended by the directors and two of the main activists featured in the film. Call Me Kuchu received the longest standing ovation in the history of the Frameline LGBTQ film festival.

What made the event historic is the degree to which it created activists of the more than 1000 people who saw it. The audience that may not have arrived aware of the need for solidarity among LGBTQI people everywhere; but the film inspired a need for global commitment and awareness. We as a community, alongside our allies, have responsibilities not only to ourselves but to our family, our tribe, worldwide.

What sets the Ugandan struggle for Queer rights apart from our fights for justice elsewhere is that it is passionately religious from both sides. It is not hetero-Christianity against secular Queer struggles. Both sides fight from a deeply held Christian faith. As much as the Queer figures in the story are fighting for the right to live out their true identities, they are fighting for the right to pray and worship as Queer folk. One of the leaders of the movement is Bishop Christopher Senyonjo a straight Episcopal bishop – experiencing strong censure and exclusion from the Archbishop of his church – who sees this as a struggle for Divine Justice.

Witnessing the film is transformative, and I urge people to seek it out and to become activists on behalf of our people everywhere. (Contribute money to the cause in Uganda through www.ajws.org, among other channels.) See the film, though, for the unfamiliar experience of religious fervor strengthening, not just oppressing, the LGBTQ fight for justice. See it to witness the warrior-like certainty that God has created us to be exactly who we are.

Update on Friday, July 6, 2012 at 09:05PM by Queer Spiritual Counseling

A Luta Continua!  The struggle continues!

The phrase appeared on T-shirts worn by LGBT rights activists at the funeral of David Kato in Uganda in 2011.

How to live with desire!! Sacre bleu!! A Queer mixture of very potent sacred sources....

Picking up the thread from my last posting, I want to finish the conversation on how we maintain our spiritual safety while moving through the world in a state of erotic awareness. How do we acknowledge the inspiration of desire and yet not get lost in the process?

I draw on two somewhat (ahem!) contrasting texts.

First, I find guidance (in a surprisingly literal way) through a verse from Torah (Hebrew scripture) that is part of the customary liturgy. Numbers 15:39.

Do not stray after your heart or your eyes to whore after them.

I love this verse for its astringent clarity and the palpable physicality of the text. It's all about the life of the spirit, expressed in terms of the body.

Regarding that powerful verb “whore,” I don't read this text as sex-negative. Rather, I see it as sex-respecting and heart-protective. The text teaches us about the limits of our heart and eyes, what we can expect of them or ask of them, and why we need to be careful. In my reading, the text doesn't upbraid sex workers (because I emphatically do not), but it does critique the abusive ways in which they often are treated.

Our hearts and eyes have the power to lead us forward, they are organs of desire. They have a taste for delight that does not conveniently diminish at the right moment. They don't always know when to say enough and leave the table or quit the chase. Which means they can treat the rest of the self roughly, abusively – to use the Biblical word – like a whore, like a body we've hired but don't necessarily respect. 

Consistent with my general pattern of thinking anyway, AND because I need to step back at least momentarily from that challenging verb, “whore,” I turn now to a second source of eternal wisdom, Warner Bros. cartoons.

Yup, this is how a contemporary spiritual life works. At least mine. Embrace the truth wherever we find it, Torah or television.

Maybe you have to be at TV-watcher of a certain age, but remember Pépé LePew, the perpetually romantic French skunk? In the Warner Bros. cartoons, Pépé never falls for another skunk; it's always some unfortunate feline whom he mistakes for his skunkly soulmate. (Usually she accidentally has had a white stripe painted down her back by some careless painter and consequently looks like a skunk. Poor thing.) When suddenly enamored, Pépé's eyes stretch forward out of their sockets, his heart beats visibly out of his chest.

That's us!! That's how our hearts and minds physically behave when they feel attraction or desire. They're vulnerable to what they like, what they appreciate, and even when tired (especially when tired!) they want and they wander. They lead us relentlessly forward but don't notice when the rest of us doesn't follow. Our hearts and eyes do not know when to stop. I find myself physically being dragged by my eyes, unable to locate my heart within my own chest.

It has become a meditative practice for me to bring my heart and eyes back, to reset them in their proper place within me, rather than allowing them to roam unchecked, dragging me behind them.

Try this the next time you have a sudden rush or an exhausting marathon of love, lust, desire, or craving for someone or something. Stop. Physically stop moving, wherever you are. Close your eyes. Breathe. As you breathe gently in and out, pull your eyes back inside your head. Set your heart high but enclosed within your ribcage. I mean those instructions literally. Pull them back inside with the internal musculature of your body in your head and chest. Bring them home. Then place one hand over your heart, another over your eyes. Breathe and feel grounded again.

We can love, look around, desire, and feel it safely. We can use the energy in our day, without being dragged disrespectfully by our hearts or eyes, without having all the self-control of a cartoon skunk (Charming zo he may be, chérie!). We maintain loving awareness of our hearts and eyes; we certainly couldn't go through life without them. But we know their capacity to run us ragged, and we lovingly say no to that. We breathe, and reassemble ourselves.

I don't know if the Biblical author meant the verse as technically as I read it, but I stand by my recommendation, because, mon dieu, it works! It's that simple. (I can't resist this...sorry!) Th-th-that's all, folks.

Blessings!

Update on Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 01:37AM by Queer Spiritual Counseling

Our desires can be challenging, but "challenging" is far from "bad."

Of course there are challenges in linking human love to love of God. Human love and desire energize us and inspire us. Conversely, though, they can completely knock us off track and make us do really stupid, if not hurtful, things.

This is a universal concern to which I want to apply some very Jewish wisdom.

The rabbis of the Talmud identified the double-edged blessing of eros as the yetzer hara the evil impulse that causes chaos in our lives, but "without the yetzer hara, a human being would never marry, beget children, build a house, or engage in trade" (Genesis Rabbah 9:7) I think they got it totally right. The same impulse propels us to achieve and to run amok.

How should be proceed in response? Once we acknowledge that danger, how do we protect ourselves as we move forward?

Traditionally, the risks of an erotic life are addressed morally – “How do we do only what is good?” “How do we avoid being bad?”

This, I am certain, is one big mistake, one very big mistake.

Those aren’t irrelevant questions, but asking those questions first sets us up for a lifetime supply of pain and oppression. Especially for Queer folk, members of erotic minorities in a straight-dominated world, venturing out into the world in perpetual fear of being bad (everybody go “Wooooo!”) stunts our spiritual growth and injures us in ways that make right relationship with others and with God even more of a challenge than they would be anyway. None of this part of life is easy; haunting ourselves with a fear of being bad makes everything harder unnecessarily.

I believe the challenge of the yetzer hara -- the challenge of using the power of desire productively and constructively -- should be met technically, not morally. Don’t start by asking Is this impulse good or bad? Start by responding to the impulse technically.

And that technique, please stay tuned, will be the focus of the next blog posting.

Update on Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 05:58PM by Queer Spiritual Counseling

"It is all a mystery. So much a mystery. And we have no choice but to bear it. And the whole difference lies in the how."
The Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier by Hugo von Hofmannstahl