“If we learn to trust our senses, our capacities to touch, taste, smell, hear, see and thereby know, they can teach us what is good and what is bad, what is real and what is false, for us in relation to one another and to the earth and cosmos…sensuality is a foundation for our authority.” So writes Carter Heyward in ‘Touching Our Strength – The Erotic as Power and the Love of God’.
The greatest challenge in life is to learn to trust ourselves, to trust the deep wisdom in the divine ground of our own being. From our earliest days we’re educated to mistrust it. Sensuality is suspect, if not downright evil.
I remember being 5 years old and being dragged to Mass one day by my mother. I was protesting as usual as I found it so boring. I asked her “Why do we have to go to Mass?” She replied “Because Holy God is in the Mass”. This made no sense to me. I asked her “But do you not see that Holy God is in other people and the trees and the animals?” Because this was obvious to me. She brusquely replied “Don’t be so silly, you have to go to your Mass”. That was the last word on the subject.
As children, we were in touch with the sensuality of the world around us. We experienced this sensuality through our senses. Then we were ‘educated’ and reason took over. What didn’t make sense to the rational mind was discarded. Over time we became more and more disconnected from ourselves, from our divine ground. Needing more and bigger distractions to ease the pain. Look around you, isn’t it frightening what this has led to?
It’s time to trust our senses again. To hear our own roar of delight at discovering once again that sensuality is not only a foundation for our authority but a gateway to life.
