making love to god: part two

This is the second in a series from Making Love To God, my memoir of Divine Union and contemporary spiritual relationship. The series began on July 29, 2008, with the Introduction and Chapter One, and will continue through completion. You may resonate with the material more powerfully if you follow it in order; all posts are categorized in the Making Love To God category in the sidebar to your right. May we all find the courage to strip away anything that separates ourselves from our own Divinity.

Author’s Note: I have relied on the words God, Goddess, Creation, Divine, Jesus, and Beloved to represent energy that is inherently indefinable. Interpretation lies with the reader.

The Awakening
from Making Love To God
by Rachel Snyder

As soon as I met Jesus, I wanted to have Him. Wanted to feel as human as He felt, wanted to reach past the numbing and the hypnosis to feel the nails pierce my skin and crack my bones into splinters.

How He must have known without question that He was of the Earth, hole in his side and a crimson stream of blood spilling onto the dusty ground beneath him. I wanted to feel my body no less deeply. Wanted to share it with One who understood the roar of fire that so often held my being captive, reaching into barren spots and licking upwards and holding my face in its searing embrace.

How I wanted Jesus to take me in His strong arms, muscled from banging nails and heaving rough-hewn beams and weathered by the desert sun. Only in the body of this heavenly being lay a passion equal to my own.

Who better to walk me to the door of Divine Union?

Who knew the way like He did? Who else held the key to unlock all things? Earthly lovers held nothing for me, as they crashed and bumped and fumbled in their cloddish attempts to reach the Heavenly heights. Their ineptitude bored me, as one by one, they proved themselves finally, merely, mortal.

But Jesus! Here was a man of revolutionary zeal, radical of radicals, filled to overflowing with frustration and courage and unparalleled vision. This is the Lover I wanted. His were the wounds I wanted to soothe, to lick clean and make anew with my tongue. Not the self-indulgent, seeping inner wounds of menboys still rooting around to latch on to their mothers’ breast for sustenance and knowing not to turn their gaze upward.

Take me to your garden! I cried into the night. Lift me aloft, carry me through my body and into yours and above the wretched landscape of Earth. Sweet, sweet Jesus! Let us weep together, my Beloved, let our tears mingle and purify the sins of a world gone mad. Only You share my nectar-sweet taste of freedom; only You have knocked on the door and it has opened. Wrap me in your arms, Precious One, and rock me gently to the breaking dawn.

I wanted the eyes of the Christ to penetrate me. To bore holes through my earthly armor, to some deep fleshy core at the center of my soul. Who else could split me open wide enough to touch the storehouses of gold within?

It was not enough to see Him in my mind’s eye, to observe Him walking alone, to ponder His innermost thoughts and fears and desires. I needed the touch of Jesus’s hand gently stroking my hair. Needed to feel the power of the Almighty beneath His robes and needed to feel His parched skin against my own.

This was the Son of God and Man as I wanted to know Him, and a dilute version brought forth from His earthly lineage would not do. The picture on the wall would not suffice. The quiet mumbling of vapid hymns could not satisfy my yearning for this God-Man in His glory.

Had I not prepared myself for Him? Before I ached to make love to God, I made love to men. I sought them out in the usual and not-so-usual places, deftly placed them under my spell, whisked an invisible net of desire over their befuddled heads, and led them into a brief or not-so-brief experience of Divine ecstasy.

They thought they were in Heaven. I knew I had carried them through the doorway.

Yet in their presence I have not found my true Beloved! I have cut my hair and secluded myself and surrendered my Self. I have swooned and twirled in a valley of delights and have reveled in my own humanity. I have given and received, acted and been patient, wept and wailed and keened into the darkness, lain on the edge of a canyon and branded His name into my flesh with the sharp edge of a jagged stone. My body bears the scars of sacrifice, matched only by the scars upon my soul.

How many nights do I wait for Him? I anoint myself with most provocative oils, potent aphrodisiacs. Sweet ylang-ylang, spicy ginger, a drop here, two drops there, in places only God and I know. I prepare my body, inside and out, for Him, for a lover whose touch is as the soft flutter of any angel’s wings, whose caress can ride my body like a never-ending Caribbean breeze.

My ankle arches slowly while my hands rest lightly on the home keys.

And yet, who approaches me? Not my Beloved, but some lumpish man who knows only of the world of flesh and gold, and nothing of the world of Spirit. And this, I tell you, is not for what I waited and is not for what I prayed!

Do you mock me, Mother? I await a most suitable suitor and you send me this shadow imitation! How am I to see beyond the shallow edges of this monster? How am I to find the eyes that can spy my true heart’s desire beneath these mountains of debris? Why must I dig? Why must my hands bleed in the search for union? Why can I not return to the Garden in a light mist, heady with dark, redolent foliage, light laughter surrounding us and the flutter of wings all about? Always in my path you set rocks and leaves, twisted stumps and thorny branches, encircling my way and weighing down my every step. My lover awaits, if you would only open the gates!

O! What joy attends, in the strong, sweet arms of God. What ripe and glorious fruit awaits we who can open wide enough to take it in. Feel, taste, the golden sweet syrup of at-one-ment, showering a gentle storm of delight. Would God have created me for any less? Would Your life have been given for anything but total and everlasting pleasure?

Eros, deny me not your pungency, yet fill my being with your pulsating life, with the light of millennia, a rippling current of connectedness. For in you lies my whole Divinity, and the force of all humanity and non, beingness and being, bringer of the pure, the passion, the power of Love.

My wings encircle, enwrap, in rapture.

The Glory the Holy, the Passion of Love. In the midst of the All and the Nothing, Love.

(to be continued…)