Tag Archives: Seeking

Work in a Brothel

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On Tuesday the Jones family is crowded into my office sitting in a semi-circle on chairs hastily borrowed from the auditorium. Nancy died last week. The matriarch. They are in various stages of emotional turmoil – the kind of thing one would expect. The kind of thing I’ve experienced before.

They are a timid clan. None of them able to make sustained eye contact for more than a few seconds before awkwardly looking away to relieve the tension they’re feeling at being here with a functional stranger and talking about  the deep things of life and death.

It is the first time I have met the widower, as he hands me the life story of his wife of 37 years to summarize.

Relative number 1 I have met once before – a brief, formal handshake at some meaningless event, as I recall. Relative number 2 sits with her two, moon-faced toddlers who stare blankly, un-smiling, vacuous. She is similarly flat; no emotional edges to feel for and peel back, slate-smooth.

Relative number 3, I am most familiar with, but this is not saying much. I have visited the group she is a part of several times in an official capacity. I visited her in the hospital once. Prayed for her. Read to her from the Bible. I have no idea if she cared. It seemed to me at the time that she simply expected this particular service to be performed for her, and being that it was in fact performed, one could speculate that she experienced an almost-emotion akin to satisfaction – but you couldn’t tell by looking.

So, this monochromatic group sits before me and is asking me to do a job for them. These people whom I really don’t know at all are hiring me to create some emotional context for them to grieve. They need a professional actor/priest.

I’m being asked to perform. To plumb them for un-named feelings and weave them into some coherent performance that will make them feel something that is definable.

I’m being asked to provide a professional service. They are saying, “Be our emotions for us. Put some kind of public face on the things we have never been able to express ourselves, and are only now overtaking us. We’re scared – it’s all going to come out with spit and bile and coughing. We’ll gag on it – we’ll stop breathing and pass out, panic is overtaking us – what is this thing that is happening to us?! Give us some order!”

If they had more experience with grieving, the adults would , at least, recognize that orgasms are a close kin – the “little death”, it’s called in France.

“Don’t be afraid….let it come.

Let it overtake you – fall backwards into the warmth of it all.

Don’t think about the stained sheets, or the noises we make.

Let it flow –  there is no judgment. You were built for this. Let it come. Let it come.”

But they will not.

They will instead ask me to be their whore. I will fake an orgasm for them. I will throw my head back and scream with my wrists crossed over my head and my eyes shut in pretend abandon. They will watch with a mix of longing, horror, desire, disgust and a certain awareness that it is at least mostly…an act.

But somehow the act of watching it, will for them be enough. They can convince themselves that they have mourned fully and deeply, and so go back to work on Monday – carrying the dirty little secret that they’ve been with a whore, and no one at the office will ever know.

What strange little things we do. How we rub up against each other like this. How we build institutions to make it possible. How we are taught from the earliest  that we must manage our experiences in a certain way. That they must be put into a context FOR us.

For me to do this is obedience. I am repulsed by the idea on a certain level – yet I see it’s necessity. I see it reflected in every culture, throughout all of history. Yahweh rejected LITERAL temple prostitution – but he instituted a kind of ritualized one – one that didn’t require the actual act of intercourse.

Why this is important to Him – I do not fully understand. But I know that it is true, and I am a player in this intimacy drama. I must obey.

Obey:

Hebrew 8085 Shaw Maw to hear intelligently.

Greek 5219 to HEAR UNDER to listen attentively.

May 16th, 2006

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Alick asked me to write about the idea of “otherness” that I said made me miss Brazil. The words I jotted down as we spoke were: “otherness” “flow” “celebrity”. These were things that stood out to me about the Brazil experience.

I felt drawn to sit on the landing outside the children’s area at church this morning. As I went – I remembered the last time I sat there, and I recall gaining an insight about birds and how they don’t follow the paths and conventions of human development. They live in a FLOW outside the everyday life of humanity, though they still utilize it’s structures for homes, food, perches etc.

I began to think that perhaps inserting ourselves into another culture, another space, and another geography has a similar impact on us. Because the environment we find ourselves in is so “other”, like birds, we are un-able to use the structures around us for their intended purposes, and instead discover a beautiful, unintended “secret” purpose in the otherwise everyday things around us.

The child squatting outside his ramshackle hut tearing at a piece of bread with his teeth is not simply having breakfast – he is serving as a touch point with humanity.

The shouting and back-slapping at the corner bar serve not as a loud annoyance, but a reminder that I do not let Joy into my life. I scold Joy and keep him in the corner with his face to the wall for being petulant and insubordinate to his big brother named Accomplishment.

Ahh, “Flow”. This poor little child called Joy is much freer to play when his big brother is so disoriented by these strange surroundings. While Accomplishment is busy trying to find his ranking – Joy sneaks out and plays footeball with the other kids. He lies under the strange stars at night, and with great glee, sees the Southern Cross “for the first time” just like David Crosby sang about.

The smell of burning Cashew wood mingling with the dry musk of the soil does not simply tell me that the dry season is coming. It reminds me that I am part of an enormous creation that encompasses thousands of eco-systems, millions of stars and billions of other galaxies. The Atlantic seems saltier than the Pacific – but at least here, it won’t try to kill you for wading in it for 20 minutes.

There are, of course,  parallels to all of these structures here at home: The guy with the sign at the freeway off-ramp, the screaming children in that damn Habitrail thing at McDonald’s, and the salty smell of Bull Kelp that comes off Puget Sound when there is a West wind. But those are too familiar. I am too much a part of those structures for them to be anything other than a part of my life. Or could I CHOOSE to see them as more?

The following eyes of the Brazilians lounging on the corner remind me that I am a rare bird in Brazil. I’m a celebrity – flitting from roof top to roof top, learning my lessons, living my life high above their streets and telephone wires. My song must sound as strange to them as theirs does to me. We can live together for a while like this – weeks…maybe months, until time washes the otherness out of us like water and detergent wash a stain out of your shirt – and away it swirls down the drain. Then the flow begins to align with the local flow, which inevitably results in the loss of celebrity because you look just like everyone else, and they look just like you.

There should be a way to ALWAYS live out the otherness of being a citizen of Heaven. We should always look for the “secret” purpose of life’s structures, always able to flow with freedom from accomplishment, and as a result enjoy a certain amount of celebrity as we stand out against the world around us.