Reflexive Theology

Everything done to the human body is also
done to the body of god all that sweet sweet lovin’
and that loving burping and the caressing and wiping
and cleaning and healing and the slightest of kisses that convey
everything too dense for words. Everything done

to the human body is also done to the body
of god. Circumcision. Clitoridectomy. Vulva sewn shut
to protect male virtue. Bound feet, bound breasts, all that is female
bound tight and forbidden. Bodies bent double and tied tight
for hours upon hours. Bodies hung by the hands, by the feet, by the
neck to die, bodies burned, for god’s sake, burned alive, bodies
pierced with steel and stone and wood and bone and iron and bodies led
tied one to another, kidnapped, shackled, hauled off across an ocean, bodies starved
and raped in every way imagined and invented. Bodies shocked and
waterboarded and strangled and bit by dogs and locked in cages, exposed, alone
and thousands of miles from home. Bodies mutilated

in the name of god, in fear of god, in sacrifice to god. What would be left
of the body of god if god’s body was attacked as people attack the body
in god’s name? A single limb, a single hair, a single cell? Wherever our bodies

are not sacred, god’s body is not sacred. Wherever our bodies are attacked, god’s
body opens and bleeds and hates its own shape and bends to break and wounded
and weakened god’s body hears our cries but with limbs lost to land mines
and eyes lost in the chemical plant explosion and asbestos lungs god’s body
sits in the great chair of the sky and prays to no longer hear what
can no longer be fixed.

Reflexive Theology

Imagine if everything done in god’s name
to the human body was done in return
to god’s body. No penis tip. No clitoris. Vulva
sewn shut. Feet bound, feet beaten, body bent double
and tied tight, hung by the hands, by the feet, by the
neck to die, burned, for gods’ sake, burned alive,
pierced with steel with wood with iron with lead
kidnapped and shackled and hauled off across an ocean, starved
and raped repeatedly in every oracle. What then would be left of the body of god
if god was treated as people treat people in god’s name? A single limb,
a single hair, a single cell and can you image that whatever is left might
deem itself worthy of praise?

בשׂר וגוּף

It is one supposes, on some days, at some times, possible,
theologically speaking, to imagine a god who has
no body. God of Ideals. God of Spirit. God of Thought. God of
No Thing therefore God of Nothing. God, what a tragedy
that a human, all flesh and bone in her world of wood and
stone, water and earth, could be so disembodied herself
that she conceives a divinity without a body
without its creaks and hungers, without its desires and demons,
without taste buds, without a pulse to quicken
to pound visibly in the throat when the scent of the one she needs
overwhelms all sense. To love an idea can be quite quite satisfying
but only the body, beloved,
is holy, holy, holy.

Source Text
What is Holy
Nett Hart

What is holy to us is that which we apprehend by the senses, touch in its fleshly life; what is untouched, pristine, exists in idea only. The idea is not holy in the way its incarnation is. To be holy, something must exist in relationship: it must smell, prickle, moan.

Nett Hart from Spirited Lesbians: Lesbian Desire as Social Action

Conflagration

Fire proves that bodies
can be utterly
consumed
by motion all that
space between molecules
for heat to heat
until heat is all
there is and that is
how god’s body when
it first met a volcano
invented
samba.

In-inside

The question of what dwells inside
of inside goes on forever, for
nothing is full of only
nothing, for everything
is inside god’s body and god’s
body, inside
everything.

Source Text
שְׁמַת חַיַּי/ Morning Blessing Marcia Falk

Nishmat hayay t’vareykh v’kerev libi yashir נִשְׁמַת חַיַּי תְּבָרֵךּ וְקֶרֶב לִבִּי יָשִׁר:
Kol od n’shamah b’kirbi modah/modeh ani מוֹדָהּ\מוֹדֶה אֲנִי כָּל עוֹד נְשָׁמָה בְּקִרְבִּי

The soul of my life will bless, and the innermost part of my heart will sing.
As long as breath is in my innermost being, I give thanks.

On how we tend to the body of our beloved

For every prayer for hope god’s body sprouts a feather
for every prayer for vengeance, a wound from a feather plucked

Once and again every now and then on god’s body
there are feathers enough to fly

but mainly god’s body sinks and swells and
oozes puss while we cry out אָנָא אֵל נָא רְפָא נָא לָה

bit’hila

חַכְמוֹת נָשִים

Let us praise now
this one woman’s body, how
it crackles and jerks, more lumber
than stride, how these two upper arms sling
pounds of loose flesh, how this face decades past
puberty and years past periods still sprouts pimples and
blackheads and little red dots that seem to have no names of
their own. How the weight it carries keeps her face full and soft and smooth,
so few wrinkles beyond the worry furrows of a forehead inherited from her father how years
of honorable dyke laughing have insured against lines from frowns yielded as weapons by
those women who forced fake smiles at the hest of imperious men.

בָּנְתָה בֵיתָהּ

Let us now praise praise because praise
is the hardest-won right.

בֹּאוּ שְעָרֵיהָ

Let us praise now these calves in their cellulite glory, these fingers so slight they startle, these toes, one bent already by arthritis and both littlest ones crooked from speeding
on roller skates or bikes, these thin blue veins exposed and throbbing
at the wrists, this mole at base of the back of the right hand,
this mole every doctor has wanted to remove,
this mole from which I learned to defend my body
as it is from those who pry and cut, this mole
without I would not know
left from right.

בְּתוֹדָה

Can you praise that which you do not love? Can you build a gateway
of praise and throw open wide its doors? Can you build of a desire to praise even when
you cannot yet praise a courtyard whose hard-packed earth glistens with the shining
of Wissahickon schist?

חַצֵרֹתֵיהָ בִּתְהִלָה

Let us now praise this woman’s body because the wisdom
of this woman’s body knows how to live with dirt for a floor and knows how
to open gates and knows how to live as if worthy of praise, as if praise
were a birthright and not a commandment.

To enter into the body of god

נְבָרֵך אֶת עֵן הַחַיִים

To enter into the body of god
is what sex wants to be, all that clanging
and need           all that wanting
to know everything knowable through the electric charge
leaping between skin and skin           that single second
everything knowable is your kin is
an entire universe           without strangers

מְקוֹר הַשְׁלֵמוּת וְהַתֹּהוּ

to enter           to enter            to enter into where
there is no exit            no going back            to turn and turn and turn again
but never to be turned around            never to be turned off            never
to be turned down            in the heart of the body of god is a room
with 1000 doors and all of them are yes and while half are locked
there waits a key with your name and all you have to do
is want

מְקוֹר הַטּוֹב וְהָרָע

It has been imagined that the body of god must be a mountain
or ocean or cave as ancient as rock            but I tell you now            the only way in
is the desire rocking the dreams you have            when you aren’t stopping yourself
when you aren’t asleep but are awake Oh! awake            when you face
the solid rock of your life and desire a door and one appears           its shape
the very shape of the body of god that only you
could invoke

מְקוֹר כָּל יְצִירָה