Puritan Ideology And the Cult of Normal…
Spiritual Purity, And the Cult of Normal, A meditation...
Spiritual Purity, And the Cult of Normal, A meditation...
There is so much purity inherent in Western Christian Imperialism.
Held up against this backdrop, I am often left questioning something along these lines.....
If the cultural soup that gestated me was this very puritan ideology...
This ideology of “this, not that’
‘This WAY, Not that WAY”
This paradigm that compels us to classify things as either good or bad.
That presents reality strictly in dualisms….
The curiosity becomes, what kind of container does this create for my grief? (But we can insert almost anything here. Rest, Sex, Parenting, Marriage. Because the background ideology always creates the container.)
I had said early on that the paradoxes I found in this new place of grief were extremely exaggerated. Because I found so many things that are normally in conflict, were true at the same time.
But what I’m finding as I explore these paradoxes, is that there is a veritable garden of competing truths that don't neatly mix and match. In other words, it's bigger than just paradoxes.
Which has led me to confront the way my own Spiritual purity has incarcerated me. Limited all that is possible in the expression of my grief.
It is becoming clear that my reality is contaminated by my bias towards normality. Normality as defined by this Western Puritan Soup.
And how I’ve used “normal” as a kind of baseline measurement relative to the question, “How am I doing?”.
As if the ultimate goal is to arrive someday, "back to normal". So I have to answer with how my current state corresponds to our understanding of "normal".
How am I? Let's see, all I can do is take a walk, a shower, and feed myself. Half of the day I am in the hell realms, the other half, my heart is overflowing with love. I think that means I’m doing ok.
However, people who measure the question relative to production, output, and functionality, our puritan values, just feel sad for me. That isn’t “doing ok”, in our current paradigm. That’s disability.
I even find myself caught in this trap. Frustrated with myself, that I’m not living up to some standard of “normal”. It's so insidious.
What if instead, I invited the disturbance. What if the “troubled-ness” and disorientation I am feeling, is actually the medicine?
I have this compelling desire to frustrate any existing ideas or models of grief I previously held.
And alternately, to be in a deep, abiding, RECIPROCAL, relationship with every single thing that is arising in my field.
What if I lay down my spiritual purity, and leaned into a kind of childlike, divinely entangled animism, instead?
What if I let the disorientation, the cross pollination, the compost heap of regrets, to actually nourish and enliven me, rather than tucking them away in neatly labeled “Mindset” boxes?
What if I didn’t immediately move towards integration, but rather, allowed it ALL to exist, to populate the landscape of my life.
Instead of acting on my conditioning that says, all disturbance must ultimately be ushered towards the destination of understanding?
What if it were all available for enchanted engagement rather than detached analysis?
What if I resurrected my childlike wonder and awe? My childlike tender heart? My access to magic? The animism that was able to hold the vitality and Eros of grief effortlessly when I was young?
This is where I am.
Alice, in Wonderland.
Walking the Mystery.
Exploring the upside down.
Just me and my feral senses, on the lookout for a trickster God.
Who will keep disrupting any crystallizations, around how I answer the question “How am I?’
