Epiphany point

We are clearly not very at home in our bodies, yet Jesus came to show us that we can and must trust our human, and thus body-based, experience. The material world is the privileged place for the divine encounter.

       Many years ago I attended a retreat in the Canadian Rockies with an old friend. I was overwhelmed by the vastness and enormity of nature around me. It seemed to me like I was sinking, being immersed in something that was all around me, so encompassing that I was becoming one with nature. The expression "remember man that you are dust and unto dust you shall return" had taken on a new meaning. 

        We tend to get locked into our daily lives and the physicality we try to create. It seems almost like an insult to God that we sometimes are more interested in what we have created and what we want to create than to appreciate what we are and what God has created around us.  On a brisk morning in August in the middle of a glacial valley, I shed all remnants of my daily life and existed in the sensuality and physicality of my singular being, at one with nature. There seemed no barrier between the dirt and rocks that pressed against my flesh as I sat.  I could feel the movement and rawness of nature because it was exactly the same in me. 

         The vastness and intricacies of nature are ever present in us. We come from the same source. We feel the same ebbs and flows in our souls and in our bodies. And so it was on another bright glacial afternoon on that same retreat that I stood as a pebble at the foot of an enormous, yet receding, glacier, towering over me and around me. Even in its retreat it advanced. Roads had been created for tourists to access this glacier and each and every road swallowed as the mass relentlessly advanced. There would be no stopping the very nature of this ice field until it alone yielded it's own nature and died. This was the first time I think that I came to the realization, a mere thought, that if I was gay, there would be no stopping what God had created. No measure of tortured denials or rationalizations could deny the essence of who I was. I felt it. I was scared. The worldly self of me came face to face with the being at one and consumed by the awesome world God had created that surrounded me. Indeed, I could feel the world within me. 

       I could see Jesus going out into the desert. I understand not only the merit but the imperative to go out into nature to 'hear' God calling us. As humans, animals, we are one with all of nature no matter how hard we try to deny or disguise it.  Our answers do not come from without with things and adornments, our answers come from within. 

        I returned to that glacier. The ice field advances to this day.  The place I had stood years ago was now hundreds of feet below the glacier. My previous epiphany point now yielded to the knowledge that I am a gay man. In all that it entails a major aspect of my being broke forth and emerged as a force of my nature that can no more denied than the force of that glacier. Powerful. Beautiful. Sensual. Godly. Mere words to try and capture the essence of what God has created in the world and in me and you. 

            Enter the desert or mountains to help be one with your essence, your being, your own undeniable nature and undeniable truths.