This morning I thought a lot about religion and our weird disconnect from anything that is actually holy. It is not just cultural. Back in the day, during the Crusades but even before then, we decapitated and dismembered our understanding of and connection with the divine and wandered around like Kali with skulls of the divine, formerly worshiped, draped from our bodies like jewels, blood running down our legs and dripping into the earth. Fertilizer.
If not fertilizer, what becomes of us?
I can't tell you that the divine is entirely a man-made construct. I don't believe it is. My faith tells me that it is the great I AM, the great LOVE, an easy explanation for how the complex life forms on our planet have evolved so perfectly. (I am not a creationist, let's just get that straight. I believe that creationism is a man-made construct devised for our control.)
Genetically we have been birthed to perpetuate the cycle of abuse toward our concept of divinity, toward our God and Goddess, or various incarnations thereof.
In our summer dance show, we veiled and wrapped the Goddess. We mummified her to symbolize our shame of her, something that is a learned behavior passed on at a cellular level, like all forms of abuse, from a time period more immense than any of us can properly comprehend. Hundreds of years. We can say "hundreds of years" but our brains do not have the ability to actually grasp that time frame.
When we came out to give her wings, but then cover her, hide her, bury her, stash her away, I had a hard time not crying. It means something to me. Deeply.
I am not against the patriarchy. It is an integral part of our sociocultural matrix and I am just fine with that. But I do realize that its prominence came to be by a cycle of abuse perpetuated continually against our divine, as manifested by our faith.
One of my students expressed that this connection with the divine is more easily observed in animals because they haven't been enculturated over the years to disconnect. I see truth in that.
I believe that we are all divine instruments if we simply open our hearts and souls.
This does not make me a slave, a servant, or obedient. It does make me a person in harmony with my perception of divinity.
My divinity, my perception of God, Goddess, I AM, LOVE... it is a physically felt knowing that there is something extracorporeal that I am connected to. I do not believe that it is something I am different from, however. It is also not existing entirely in my head. Perhaps it is simply the great cosmic consciousness, a felt knowing that everyone and everything is connected on an energetic level. I believe that completely. And when it sways one way or another, it takes on aspects of a personality; when it is easily anthropomorphized, then we are able to give it names like God and Goddess.
These days after so many years of being told that we need an authority figure to direct our connection to the divine, I believe we are paralyzed. I believe this is a direct result of hundreds of years of multi-generational trauma inflicted upon us by efforts like the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the imposition of the patriarchy as a hierarchical structure to which we must be obedient.
No loving God would tell us that we must be obedient to a person or a structure of people. Our individual uniqueness makes it clearly obvious that obedience won't work for most people and in many cases it crushes our most beautiful gifts.
Where does this leave us?
Intergenerationally traumatized from being told that what we know to be real (our personal divine connections) is a fallacy. We have been told that the divine will answer our prayers. Yet nobody tells us that if our prayers are unrealistic or too specific, they will get us nowhere without our own interventions to accomplish them. We have made the divine into a person, categorized with rules, in order to attempt some understanding of him/her. We have decided that the divine requires a gender. Requires compartmentalization.
We communicate with the divine through a carefully ordered structure. Much obedience is necessary to properly ascend to our own levels of divinity.
What a bunch of bullshit!
Yet, in a traumatized paralysis on a cellular level, is it any wonder that we seek and find comfort in the excessive, nonsensical structures of fundamentalist religion? If we have not worked to heal our relationship with our divinity, is it any wonder that we are okay with perpetuating the cycle of guilt, shame, and an obedience which implies our worthlessness?
Why do we need to ascend to heaven? Why can't we simply transcend in a multi-faceted way that allows us to experience heaven here and now?
Matter is energy, according to a much simplified version of Einstein's theory. This means that scientifically we are all connected. There is a cosmic consciousness. Our thoughts are transmitted in our brain somewhat energetically - nerve conduction works similarly to the principals of basic electricity. None of this is rocket science.
Let's heal the trauma, shall we?
And while we're at it, I'd like to address our horrific disconnect between spirituality and sex. I see them as one and the same, as intricately connected. In my spiritual world, sex is a physical manifestation of a deeper connection we all share. (This does not mean I think we should all go out and have sex with everyone we meet!) It is an intimate expression, or should be, of LOVE. Of course, as I well know, it can be simply a physical act, with about as much meaning as a handshake (gold star for anyone who can tell me which famous person I just paraphrased). But it shouldn't be. It should mean something. It should mean that the heavens and earth come together for one brief moment and infuse us with stardust. After all, sex is the ultimate act of creation, when energy translates on a physical level to mass.
I feel my connection with the divine most strongly when I feel sexy. This has nothing to do with our cultural preconceptions of what is sexy. I can be naked, covered, in public, in private; it doesn't matter because it is an internal feeling. It is not an external perception. My connection to the divine excites me on a carnal level.
I think I'm all done now. Feedback is welcome!
