Lushness and Lustiness
Saint Hildegard spoke of veridance, Greenness. This was what she, as an artist, called the spiritual life. The Holy Spirit, as a mother, send down her rain and made us lush with creativity. That is something that resonates with me as a Catholic and an artist. Great is the temptation to be a workhorse and to forsake the cycle of prayer. Everything I do comes from a gift, comes from this greenness, this lush life. All my work is prayer and celebration.
Related to lushness I think is the idea of lustiness, of the sensual. In the West religion has had a problem with earthiness and desire. As a queer I don't have the option of ignoring that. It seems that especially nowadays Catholicism in America has become increasingly Protestant, penitent and sexless. As someone passionately devoted to... well, passion, I cannot accept this. Many religions have had a problem with the flesh, with sex. The original Buddhists intended to leave the world by being monks. Sex was not an issue. But as Buddhism became a very real faith to be lived in the world, sex, the goodness, the sacredness of the flesh reasserted itself. This is not the same thing as those people who excuse disrespect for their bodies or lack of self control by saying "Sex is natural". This goes further by saying our sexuality is natural and nature is suffused with the sacred. The Great Mother. In Buddhism several of the female saints rescue the faith from being too cerebral. From reminding us that spirituality is in the skin, in the groin as well as the head.
Christianity, of course, began as an apocalyptic faith. We weren't supposed to stick around and so sex wasn't supposed to be much a part of us either. But we have been around and for us the chief saint who reminds us of our earthiness, of the sacredness of our bodies, is the lush Mary Magdalene, Our Lady Under the Earth. She has little to say in the Bible, but her example and the images of her are the ideas of lushness, of the melding of sexiness and sanctity.
What do the lush saints say? That sanctity is between our legs as well as between our ears. That the heart and not just the head is the wellspring of God. There are many people who write off holiness and treat their sexuality very glibly. For them there is only temptation, dirtiness, the devil talking to the groin. The lush saints remind us that down below is an Otherworld, not just an Underworld. Angels speak to our bowels, our wombs, and our balls, not just our minds.
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