A
week ago today during prayers I suddenly felt grateful for embodiment. First,
for my own body. Even when it feels pain, I realize it’s the body’s alarm
system that something has gone wrong. And when it feels pleasure, ecstasy lifts
me onto a different plane of reality, and I know what’s good and true and
beautiful.
I
did not stop at thanking God for my own body, but began a stream of “thank
you’s” for the embodiment of others. For my parents: my mother’s body growing
me, my father’s body making love with my mom, together conceiving me. Then the
bodies of my partner, family, friends, pets, as well as lovers of times past. And
nature and community and the cosmos. It was becoming an American-Psalmist-Walt-Whitman-style
song of praise. I thanked God for their touch, their warmth, their holding me,
their smiling at me, their crying with me.
But
as quickly as gratitude flooded my thoughts, a stream of confessions followed:
times when I mishandled or demanded or exploited or ignored or judged or passed
by bodies, including the earth’s body,
the Body of Christ, and my own body. The
elevation of Paradise is never far from the Fall of human mismanagement.
Then
I remembered Becki Jayne Harrelson’s painting, Judas Kiss, and its discomfiting, tender, and sensuous depiction of
Judas handing over a nearly naked and thus vulnerable Jesus to suffering with a
kiss. We most often hurt those we love, and they us. Many of us have been
“handed over to suffering” by a kiss in various expressions, from the kiss of
baptismal waters, to the kiss of the laying
on of hands, to the kiss of promising relationships. And our own bodies have
handed us over to suffering through artificial pleasures that seemed good and
true and beautiful at the time.
The
eroticism of Becki Jayne’s painting cannot be missed, the eros that impels us
both to another’s body and to another’s spirit, and to God’s body and Spirit.
(For more about the artist and painting, see below.)
The
day after these revelations, I found myself praying that I wish I could see
God, who evolved a wondrous world and whose creative work also evolved you and me.
I opened my eyes as another realization came—I was seeing God. Pictures of family and friends and ancestors on the
credenza, the tree outside the window holding a nest of baby birds, the
fuchsia-colored orchid flowering in the other room after a long dormancy, our
dog Hobbes snoring on the sofa, the furniture and rugs and the people who
crafted them, my own arms and legs. And again my gratitude was followed by
confession: for betraying, denying, abandoning, and doubting this face of God.
As
if that were not enough, the next day on the front page of the newspaper appeared
an image of the cosmos as it looked 370,000 years after the Big Bang, looking
like an elongated speckled Easter egg in blue, red, orange, and yellow. Inside
the paper I read the article associated with the picture, reporting that the
age of the universe has been upgraded to 13.8 billion years old. As I turned
back to the front page, the unfolded paper revealed again the colorful cosmos,
but this time juxtaposed by a full page ad on the back page featuring a model—and
all I could think of in that moment was, “from this (the universe) to this (the
human being).” God’s countenance is constantly lifted upon us, no matter how
much we look away, turn away, are blinded by tears, have doubts, or simply fail
to see.
“Judas Kiss” image
Copyright © 1993 by Becki Jayne Harrelson. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Judas Kiss” words Copyright
© 2013 by Chris R. Glaser. All rights reserved. Permission granted for
non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Suggested uses: personal
reflection, contemporary readings in worship, conversation starters in classes.
Past posts are available in the archive in the right rail on the blogsite.
This ministry is solely supported by your donations. Click here to make a tax-deductible gift. Thank you!
Becki Jayne Harrelson painted
“Judas Kiss” during Lent and Easter 1993 “in response to the verbal gay bashing
that Congress was doing” over then President Clinton’s attempt to rescind the
ban against gays and lesbians serving in the military. It is part of a series of
Christian iconography intended to serve as “a narrative about sexuality in
harmony with spirituality.” For further explanation, click here.
See another in her
series in the post, “Faggot” Jesus.
A post you may have
missed: Where is God?
