Thought for the week: Abigail Maxwell keeps it to herself

‘I feel kinship with all of me.’

‘Spirit is there, if I choose it.’ | Photo: by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

When I do not see God in me it is because I judge it. That cannot be God, I think. God must be better than that. The reason I do not live continually from Spirit is that I think living from Spirit must be some higher way of being, rather than simple reality. But Spirit is there, if I choose it.

In Worship on Zoom I use search engines to find half-remembered passages. Isaiah 55:9 says ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’ That can be read in two ways. First, in the false way I have read it, to say that God is higher than my normal way of being, so I must climb to some exalted state, some perfection of morality or Presence, to see God. Second, that God’s reality is much higher than my conventional morality, and that if I step outside my morality there is God’s reality waiting for me.

If I am to feel kinship with all my fellow humans, with all beings on the planet, or with the Cosmic Whole, I need to feel kinship with myself first. All of me. This is counter to the world’s way. People do not accept ourselves, or others. Gay people feel internalised homophobia. Trans people pick up the pervasive transphobia of society, and feel it ourselves, rejecting ourselves. There are parts we cannot accept.

I cannot accept my anxiety, fear and anger. I suppress them. That does not mean they cease to govern me. I want to alter 1 Corinthians 12:17: ‘If the whole body were happiness, where would sadness be? If the whole body were anger, where would disgust be?’

Muted in Zoom worship, I repeat, ‘All of me. All of me.’

Attempting Buddhist Maitrī (compassion) meditation, I skipped quickly from compassion for self to compassion for others. Compassion for self felt wrong. Then trying to feel compassion for others felt like that great effort by which I might lift myself up to God’s ways, far above my own. I thought I was doing it. Bayard Rustin, being beaten by white supremacists: had he not felt anger, he could not have resisted. Anger and anxiety could fit 1 Cor 12:23: ‘Those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour’.

I am in my body, and not everyone is. My Friend was estranged by a violent assault when she was a child. I was estranged by internalised transphobia. I despised my body. Now I luxuriate in it, in the feeling of a sandy beach or carpet beneath bare feet, or how fast I can go on a bicycle. My body is a source of delight.

I feel kinship with all of me. The elder is sorry to end such a deep Meeting, at the end of the hour. It begins to seem possible to pray continually, or to live from Spirit all the time. All I need do is accept it.

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