My Body as Sacred Resistance

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My body as Sacred Resistance
Feminist Scholar and activist Dorothy Soelle argued there was no distinction between a mystical internal and a political external, because no experience of the Divine can be so private as to remain the property of the initiated. For Soelle, willingly going where you become nothing is making manifest the fear of contradicting affluence; saying No! To the external world while at the same time presenting your nakedness as the moment you answer yes! To humanity. The mystical experience is about a new naming of self through experiencing the powers of being fully in our bodies. (Soelle, Dorothy, 2001, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press)
My body and the bodies of other women become an important site of resistance precisely because they have been historically subordinated into instrumental outcomes in the service of Patriarchy. Nature as body continually witnesses how life creates itself from death. My descent into the death of imprisonment in the service of humanity offered a birth passage with all kinds of possibilities for my own transformation that rippled outward into communal spaces. My arrest as a self-initiation ritual opened a portal of mysticism that I can never retreat from. I was not surrendering to the police but resisting the brutal force of empire by positioning my body as the site of resistance. I assume the position of the fool and step off the edge into an archetypal journey of my own personal labyrinth
            Sheelah na-gig is spreads her labia over the medieval churches of Europe. Sheelah is the wild and the wooly crone that both births and receives in death. She can be seen over windows of churches and castles all over Europe. Her exposed genitalia challenges the power of phallic authority. Her presence protects and preserves the place of the crone as healer and protector of the village. She stands against all the injustice and oppression of women. She stands as a witness of the grotesqueness not of her vulva, but of the burning of women’s sexuality. She says, the church cannot destroy me, for I stand at the portal or entry to your sacred institutions. I will not be silenced or unseen.
            Sheelah’s stone imagery sits above the entryway and laughs at patriarchal, stifling, medieval Christianity. She presents the sacred and powerful cunt of the Madonna and the whore as the source of wisdom and life. Sheelah mocks the measuring of justice and mercy under the pomposity of the patria. Her message is one of coming before and enduring after. Sheelah’s spirituality is immanent, raw, and messy. She laughs at religion trying to transcend the body.
            Sheelah-na-gig becomes the seat of my soul – the crone within. I feel like I am meeting myself at the gateway to the wisdom of the underworld as a shadowy, mother-hag-crone. This portal of mothering, birth, and death is a portal to deeper mysteries. Sheelah’s message is “Open UP!” It’s like the blindfold of justice trying to balance the scales of above and below…within and without. It means seeing, weighing, entering, and becoming that bridges and unites the mysteries of paradox:
The whore in the virgin
The cunt in the crone
The courage in the vulnerable
The beauty in the grotesque
The sacred in the silly
The saint in the witch
Sheelah is my red tent where I meet and am protected by my sacred prostitute. She is both my offering and my service. I want to enter her menstrual tent and find balance in my being… the sacred cunt of my spiritual being. For me this means a radical love of humanity, standing up as I kneel, being what I do, and immersing myself in the whole of humanity without dividedness. Immanence becomes the action that opens self-body to the spirituality of participation. For me authenticity meant taking my body-power back by giving it away in an act of witnessing on behalf of the powerless. Putting my privilege on the altar, as an intimacy of body became a communion with the women I shared a night with in jail.
This is where I met myself
I love here, now
Today in this moment
I hurt because others hurt
I fear because others fear
Love stings and greets me every day
Love asks how will I change?

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