I am a Sacred Place

Photo: Coming Home by Samantha Reuter https://www.srueterart.com/

If God is everywhere then there are no profane places; all places and spaces are sacred and holy. Our work as Christ followers, Holy Spirit inhabitors, is to unveil the divine mystery hidden in all things, to uncover the sacredness of all of creation. Which includes our very bodies.

As I write this, I realize that the discovering of ourselves as sacred spaces is not a one-off, it too is part of the human journey.  A process requiring the re-ordering of our very own hearts to the true reality that always is, that we are sacred. And it is a process, a process of re-membering “who and whose we are.” Too often though, this development is arrested and stalled often by the Church that claims it is the bearer of our salvation.

For many years… many, many years, I truly believed I was evil. Inherently bad, cursed, flawed and irredeemable. This inner knowing persisted as a result of my fundamentalist evangelical Christian formation in the church, at home, at school and in the community. I remember being on a youth retreat one winter and the speaker talking about how “God doesn’t make junk.” Trying to help us experience ourselves as lovingly created by God. But when you are reminded the other 98% of the time that you are inherently sinful and in dire need of redemption and this message never changes even though you’ve said the sinner’s prayer to fix the problem, your opinion of yourself as junk is unlikely to change.

And if I wasn’t quite sure of my evilness, being female, ensured that I would always be reminded of just how evil and profane I was. It was this body, this configuration of female parts that was one of the biggest problems. This body, this thing I was born into, was shameful and thoroughly irreligious.

Sitting in church one Sunday as a young teenager, I remember the pastor speaking about a passage in the Bible that said, “Our sins,” he quoted, “are like filthy rags.” And the look on his face and tone of his voice spoke with as much volume as his words. These filthy rags referred to menstrual cloths. They were dirty, ergo, I was dirty because I was the source of their filth. Of course, I had no one to talk to about this because I understood menstruation to be shameful. It was a curse after all, the pain I had to suffer for my part in the “fall of humankind.” That’s right. I deserved the monthly bleeding, cramping, sore body parts, hormonal fluctuations because my predecessor, Eve, brought it upon us all. How in anyone’s right mind could this female body, this thing, be holy, let alone not be junk?

People say I take things too personally. I say that about myself too. They, and I say, to that I am overly sensitive. However, I am trying to see myself more like the canary in the proverbial coal mine. I am intuitive. I sense when things are not right, and now I understand that this is because of my inherent goodness. What was I supposed to do with this intuition? I didn’t know that I didn’t have to feel this way, that there were other ways of thinking about menstruation, the female body and the female experience. I was too embarrassed and ashamed of my own physical self to speak about such intimate disgraceful things.

I bore the shame of my being a female alone, within myself. How could believing that Jesus loved me and “took my sins away” ever solve the problem of my own female existence? Just because I “asked Jesus into my heart” didn’t stop me from being a sinful female.  I never had enough “faith,” I could never “believe” enough to stop me from being female.

I think that for the rest of my life I have been trying to re-align the feminine and the sacred. I have always had a keen sense of the incongruous whether I was able to articulate it or not. My life has been a journey of figuring out how to put the pieces of the profaneness of the female body back together with the sacredness of being created in the image of God.  Throughout my life I have been learning and testing ideas and living into modes of being that empower the female circumstance and imbue it with the holiness it has always had from the beginning.

Throughout this journey of faith-life, I have experienced healings of the pain of the past born in my body. One of those moments came unexpectedly during a reflexology treatment. This was a time in my life where I had gone through burn out and was rebuilding myself. I was in the process of excavating all types of baggage that didn’t serve me anymore. I don’t remember exactly what she said or did but it was something about feeling that something was “stuck.” And the floodgates poured open. I started weeping and through the tears I managed to sob out that I believed that I was inherently evil. She took my hands and said, “No you’re not. You are created good.” I don’t know what or how or why but that moment was transformational. That reflexology room became a sacred place. I was being healed by holy sacred hands. I felt the weight and burden in my heart that had been torturing me for years fall away. I was free, free at last.

I tested it out over the weeks and months afterward, seeing if that feeling of being evil had returned even a bit. I would probe my heart every so often…nothing. When I did something wrong, hurt someone, felt bad feelings or had bad thoughts towards others I would wait for the feeling to return. But it didn’t. Even when I did something which hurt a bunch of people and over which I felt overwhelming shame and remorse for quite some time, the, I am evil feeling, wasn’t there.

Looking back, I can now see that it was at this point in my healing from burn out that I grew exponentially in accepting myself as feminine. It’s been in these last several years, now that my female body is morphing into middle age, becoming softly flaccid (a more body-friendly way of saying fat and saggy), that I am more comfortable than ever with my female form. Go figure (pun intended).

This body is sacred.

If God is everywhere, then God is in all things, though never wholly contained in any one thing. I am one of those things in which God dwells, that is, God’s temple. I have always been sacred having been “knit together in my mother’s womb” and having “been made in the image and likeness of God.” There has never been a time in my life that my body has not been sacred, when I, my embodied soul-self, was menstruating, when I, Holy Spirit filled me, grew breasts, when I, beloved of God enjoyed the pleasure of sex, when I, in concert with divine mystery, inside my very body grew lives, when I in pain, and joy gave birth to those lives, and from my physical body nourished them,… all of it… all of it was and continues to be sacred. "What else could it be?"