Theology is insufficient for spiritual experience
because systematic theory offers no satisfactory substitute
for a hug.
I was far too young
to understand how I am different
from white patriarchal dreams
of MidWestern U.S. 1950’s vintage.
Dying family farm communities
were also too young in our North and West hemisphere dying
to understand how we had already been bitten
by the Industrial Extractive and Ballistic Revolution
that bred us
and fed us
and bled us.
I had a younger sister
who knew I loved her.
I would protect and care for her,
I would want her only to be healthy and happy,
I would never intend to harm her,
I would always want to play and work with her,
And role-play work with her
cooking
cleaning
farming
gardening
raising her baby dolls
and stuffed bears and dogs
with divine benign compassion,
to speak kindly
and to listen carefully
for this curious non-suppression
that had grown
courageously cooperative
between my sister
and me,
and thereby also within me
and within her,
individually
Good to go separately
to rejoin later
Trading stories of lesser relational cultures
and climates,
Together,
we shaped a sacred curiosity tool
for listening to love’s most compassionate
and actively incarnating possibilities,
right there
on our slowly dying extended family farm.
Years later,
when the farm was gone
and I was studying psychology
and communication theory
and theology
and ecology
in a still wildly homophobic society,
I knew to whom I could safely come out,
If this Earth provided hospitality,
sanctuary shared with any non-queer person.
When I told her
about this uninvited,
yet curiously natural, attraction
to other men,
she reassured me,
She would protect and care for me,
She would want me to be only healthy and happy,
She would never intend to harm me,
She would always want to play and work with me,
So I knew,
from her words and from long-tested experience
she loves me
most for who I am,
and not at all
for who I am not.
Spiritual theologies
and natural ecologies of love
were originally rooted in compassionate experience
Reflected upon,
noticed and appreciated,
then put into feeble left-brain words
growing abstractly transcendent universalizing theories
to monopolize explanations
for scriptured,
and scripted,
yet still enscribing personal love
experienced within Earth’s hospitality,
Wherever we can find
and feed
and water healthy co-passions.
Earth’s embodied hospitality
would protect and care for us,
would want us to become healthy and happy,
would never intend to harm,
would always want to play and work with us.
gdill52 