Solstice.
The sun stands still today.
Fields of brown, and something barren
Everywhere you look.
As above, so below.
Cloaked in darkness now,
Can you enter in?
This is a holy day.
For weeks, and months we have been preparing
Our hearts.
34 years, I have visited this day.
Yet this is the first one I understand.
A holy day,
The final surrender.
Tomorrow, the light will begin to grow again.
– Whitney Logan, 12.21.17
Tonight, I told my daughter that God is alive
In her body.
No one ever said that to me.
Instead, people told me all about the Commandments,
Ten of them.
Also, Seven –
deadly sins.
Some handful of Beatitudes
And what a fuck-up Eve could be.
God breathed God’s breath into the human body,
in order to make a living being.
Genesis says so.
It’s the first written words about human beings
in my own tradition.
This gorgeous scene.
A man and a woman, made from dust.
Through their nostrils, they are filled
With God’s breath.
And when the breath of God leaves
them,
and each of us,
we are returned again
to dust.
But what of the time between?
While God’s breath is breathing Itself in us,
how holy can we be?
You’ve heard it said, “mercies are new each morning”,
but I tell you,
New mercies ride in on each breath.
God’s breath,
In each of us.
No one knows what to do next.
Me neither.
But, I told my daughter what I wish
someone had told me.
Listen for God in your body, sighing softly.
Sometimes rattling.
Feel God, too.
That rhythm, the movement in and out,
filling up and letting go.
Rupture and repair.
Expansion and contraction.
Life, Death,
Re-birth.
Every cell and atom in the universe is dancing like this.
Later, I will tell her even more subversive things.
I once heard Marie Howe say
that being present
hurts
a little bit.
Some people call her
a religious poet.
She says she isn’t sure
that fits.
I do think,
however,
Only a religious person could admit
any of this.
Religion,
That word.
It means to re-ligament.
Or, to reconnect
what was once adjoined.
Now separate.
It’s in the body,
That gap,
And also the way back
Together.
She’s right,
you know.
Being present hurts a little bit.
You have to say you’re sorry
every time.
For having ever left
And forgive,
and forgive,
and forgive
And come back.
Right here,
Right now,
Re-ligament.
I’m sorry,
you say.
And then you let go
Of
Getting caught up
in all your separateness.
Shame,
or blame
My excuses are limitless.
These human traps,
sticky,
and seductive, and so real
when we feel it.
But not true.
Have you ever seen a pebble shame itself?
Or a raindrop cast around blame?
The lilies of the field don’t worry about their clothes.
What did Rumi say?
“I’ve gotten free of that ignorant fist
that was pinching and twisting”
me into an illusion
of separateness.
So we forgive,
but we don’t forget
It’s very hard to stay.
Right here,
Right now.
I’m sorry, you say.
Followed by, “it’s okay”.
And then, come back, come back,
come back.
Re-ligament.
Of course, that hurts a little bit.
Nevertheless,
it’s all still here for each
and every one
of us
Right after forgiveness.
To be a woman in the church,
No matter the age.
Ah, that is a great source of shame.
Were you, like me, given the story of Eve
to blame?
That first woman, tempted by the power of knowledge,
Not smart enough to know her place.
And poor, innocent Adam,
So trusting of the woman,
Now defiled
After her tango with the snake.
Taking serpent’s words, and God’s fruit into her body
now changed.
Now naked and ashamed.
Man’s first words in his own defense,
“She tricked me!”.
What a witch.
Well, here’s another trick.
Blame.
Scapegoat a gender, get every last one of them.
Meanwhile, stripping God of any feminine traits.
If God is male, then male is god.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost?
That which cannot be named.
Only felt.
In our bodies.
This knowledge of God.
Who among us knew it first?
Eve.
And of course, she was afraid.
How does a fragile human body withstand the knowledge of God
Once consumed?
For me, it’s always some tender blend
of grief and grace –
Mixed.
Like Eve,
I cannot keep it to myself.
And, yet I too am rendered a bit naked
And ashamed.
But shame, beloveds, is not the toxic terror you’ve been told.
Just the stripping back of one or two dead layers,
Much like the snake.
Nearly every woman on earth would now pay
For the peeling
Of old skin,
Unearthing something new.
But this is not a surface peel.
The encounter with God we’ve been offered
By the snake.
When we eat the fruit, we risk becoming
A graveyard
For all the people we thought we were.
Scales falling from the eyes of Saul,
A new name, a new life, and here we have
Paul.
Not my favorite apostle.
Some thorn is his side about women still.
But,
Then I suppose we all have to drag our own humanity
Along
with us,
Long after consuming what’s been given
by Grace.
The day Moses met God, he asked,
“What is your name?”,
“I have no name”, comes the reply,
From a Source now unnamed.
All alone atop that Holy Mountain,
Moses worries after those waiting down below.
“Without a name”, he pleads, “How will my people come to know
You from all the other gods
Belonging to these poor, lost, wandering men?”
Was it courageous, or cowardice to stand there in that place,
And so boldly ask God for the Grace –
To become small enough for them?
“This, not that” was the first and only Law given
By God to those two humans in the Garden.
An instruction for an era lost,
The Garden now invisible,
And yet –
Just like Moses and his people, most of us here
Are still believing “this, not that” will save us
From the pain of our uncertainty.
Shaped by years of wandering through deserts
Of our own,
Are we not guilty of thirsting after the image
Of arriving –
Somewhere, each one of us a beggar.
“This, not that, black or white, Please Lord, make it simple”.
Moses could have said that.
I hear it in his question.
Yet, God, unchanged and ever changing, always sets the tone –
A riddle for an answer.
Or perhaps, an Answer for minds too riddled to hear it:
“I AM”.
Do you ever wonder what that sound was like in the ears of the man who heard it first?
Could it have been pronounced “A-UM”?
I’ve heard that sound fall from the mouths of people
Perched atop holy mountains of their own.
Spandex on their bodies,
Twenty dollars for enlightenment.
Do they know the Holy mountain upon which they are standing?
They’ve at least removed their shoes.
“OM”, it is written, but as it moves from breath, to throat, to tongue, to lips
It sounds
More like this:
“Ahhhhhhhhhh—Ummmmmmm”.
The Beginning and The End.
The Alpha and The Omega.
The Atman and The Brahman.
Or can we say, The Ego and The Soul?
That which can perceive That which Is.
It’s strange and clear and merciful –
Each ancient tradition tells a story
Of this sound.
Do you recognize it yet?
It’s unclear whether Moses or his people could,
And most days it seems the same for you, and for me –
Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he bothered once again
To tell us,
“I AM”.
The way, the truth, and the light.
I think we needed someone to show us,
In the flesh.
I AM.
“Stick your finger in my side”, he says,
To his dear doubting friend.
But that’s not what I was taught.
Were you?
Instead, instructed over and over to literalize,
To flatten it down.
But, didn’t God warn Moses?
Oh wait, I mean,
I AM.
Jesus may have been the flesh and bone and blood encounter
With a God
We can’t nail down.
Genesis tells us of Creation from No thing.
Science claims the heart begins as a null-point,
A Zero at the center.
No thing.
Then a twist, and a spin, and suddenly a beat:
I AM.
And while our riddled minds are grasping yet again
After a Name
For the magic happening here,
The temple curtain gets torn straight down the middle,
From top to bottom, falling away in two –
Pieces.
Holy of Holies now unveiled,
Each one of us bracing to be blinded
By a glimpse
Of what’s inside.
Yet, those among us brave or crazy enough
To look
And see –
Will find
No thing is there.
No name.
No nails.
No thing.
Only
I AM.
Did not Siddhartha while sitting under the Bodhi tree
Find
No thing too?
Once named, then unnamed, and renamed:
Awakened one.
One who sees.
Would you look for yourself?
Try Within.
Each one of us already knows this Place,
It’s Only human
Beings who could mistake that inner space
For alienation.
Instead of what it truly is –
Our own Holy ordination.
— Whitney Logan, 5.8.17
Healing My Religion 