Touch god through sacred intimacy.
Photo by Becca Tapert on Unsplash
I remember in my early 20s, as I was exploring sexuality and partnership with my first lover, yearning deeply for a sort of closeness where he and I merged into one.
The way I named this was by saying that I wanted the only space that separated us to be the space between our belly buttons.
I never would've known then that I would go on to study, teach, and live deeply entrenched in the world of relational intimacy and sensuality that all but meets this craving with or without physical proximity.
I know now in my bones what it means to become one, and I also know that this sort of oneness isn't possible without a pre-established sense of sovereignty.
Not independence, but sovereignty. An undeniable knowing that you are sovereign such that you can let go and merge with someone else and find your way back to *you* again. Or the *you* you become after such a sacred merging with another. Because truly, there is no going back from there. It's more like a death and a rebirth. Over and over again. Each and every time.
Physical proximity is an external manifestation of that unquenched internal yearning. Physical proximity will never satiate the way sacred intimacy can.
And the deeper I go in my own exploration of sacred intimacy, the more I experience an almost defiant impossibility in quenching this particular thirst completely. Almost, but not completely. The yearning for more love, more closeness, feels like scraping fingernails against flesh, an animalistic ripping apart of what can be identified with the eye in search of something unknown and much deeper, perhaps just outside of our reach.
A depth that has no floor — no bottom that can be reached — is holy indeed. It's here in this divine suspension between surrender and yearning that we touch god.