Not a Clue

It's beyond me to comprehend fully what was happening while I lay on a futon for two blissed-out hours Sunday afternoon. If you're lucky enough--actually, make that blessed enough--to know a really gifted masseur, you'll have some idea of what I'm going to try to express.

I could try to tell you about the unholy mass of tension in my neck and back that I brought with me to the session, or to describe how it gradually melted away during the generous hour I spent face down, before George invited me to roll over.  I could try to assemble some kind of connected narrative description out of the raw material of my experience. But  the words would just disappear into the gulf between language and the body's deep wisdom.

Have you ever received touch that itself awakens you to how deeply you needed it? Has gratitude ever welled up directly out of the knot in your shoulder, bypassing your head more or less entirely? Have you ever lost track of how the arm that's being gently extended is connected to the hip that is also somehow, in the same moment, being  encouraged into repose by firm contact with another body?

Have you ever found yourself wondering, how can he possibly be doing this, and that, at the same time? Is he kneeling at my head right now? Or at my left side? Or standing over me with his legs astride my hips? Is that his hand on my sacrum, or his foot? His thumb applying pressure, or his elbow? And have you finally said, to hell with trying to figure it out: it just is?

Breathing deeply, eyes closed, the body isn't so much a unified whole as it is a field of possibilities. The body of your masseur isn't so much an object of attention as a mystery that inspires wonder and thankfulness. Especially if you both turn off the flow of words more or less completely.

How much is that briefly non-verbal state like a return to what we knew as infants--or for most all of us, more accurately, to an idealized version of what we wish it had been like for us as infants?  Those hours on the table or the mat are still informed by all that we didn't get in those first months of life, as by all that we've become in the long years since we first looked in a mirror as young children and misrecognized our unified, all-in-one-piece reflections as ourselves. What we experience isn't so much a return, then, as a reparation.

At the end of two hours, I found a hand laid to my chest , an arm slid gently, easily, surely around my shoulders--no state-accredited, licensed and certified experience, this--and a voice repeating softly in my ear, "I've got you. I've got you."

What if we took such experiences as a parable in the quest to understand our encounters with God--not as the object of our thought, but as the One whose touch mysteriously loosens what's blocked within us and in the world, unpredictably delights what hungers for loving attention, and unwaveringly cradles what thirsts for reassurance?

Angels Ascending and Descending

I didn't make it to Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, nor to a service on Christmas morning. The weather, my energy level, the crush of social obligations all factored in.

But the day after Christmas, I accompanied a friend to the chapel at the long-term care facility where she lives. She's a remarkable woman--a member of a well-known and very wealthy English family who as a young woman immigrated to Canada to work as a nurse,  founded a non-profit organization in support of children living with HIV/AIDS and their families, and came out as a lesbian in her late fifties after the collapse of her marriage. Two and a half years ago, a brain bleed left her incapable of walking or stringing together more than a sentence or two, on a good day.

At the service, I was the only congregant out of fifteen who didn't arrive in a wheelchair. It wasn't the Christmas Mass I might have bargained on. But it was a remarkable lesson in what it really means to believe that we find God in our flesh. The celebrant kept an eye on people who were drifting off, gently encouraging them to focus on the service, helping them to find their place in the hymn book.

In Genesis 28, when Jacob has his vision of God's angels on a ladder, they ascend and descend, not the other way around. They go from earth up to heaven before they descend from heaven to earth.

It's the ground-level, utterly physical conditions of our lives that enable and nurture our spiritual awareness. Angels don't start by coming down the ladder from heaven to meet us. They begin by ascending the ladder from earth to heaven.  We meet the Divine in and through our bodies. Our bodies aren't a distraction from the search for God, or God's search for us. They're the ladder without which angels go nowhere.

We experience the Sacred in the only bodies we have. We often need a reminder, like the one I received last Friday, that this is true amidst weakness, infirmity, sickness. But I'm not so sure we don't need to hear that message amidst strength, vigor, and health, as well. Legs that run, arms that lift, eyes with clear vision, rib cages that expand and contract with our breath, hearts that pump reliably: it's easy not to notice them, easy not to practice mindfulness. It's gratitude that reveals them as ongoing miracles.

If that's true of limbs and lungs and hearts, it's true as well of the possibilities of pleasure: as men, experiencing our life in and through male bodies--the only bodies we have--our erotic desire is a powerful bridge between flesh and spirit, a uniquely intense locus of our embodiment, the place where we experience that, as Tony Kushner put it in Angels in America, "the body is the garden of the soul."

It's gratitude that turns eros into prayer, a gateway through which we pass to become the angels of Jacob's vision, ascending the ladder from earth to heaven,  if only we allow pleasure to open our hearts rather than close them off. This is true when you're alone, falling into the miracle of the pleasure you're capable of giving yourself. It's true when you're with a partner or partners, becoming for another the angel who in your ascent extends a hand to draw him up from below, becoming the one who takes a hand offered from above , for the healing of yours souls. And then descending more deeply into the world of all flesh, which longs for and stands in desperate need of repair.