Sister Powers

Theology is insufficient for spiritual experience because systematic theory offers no satisfactory substitute for a hug. I was far too young to understand how I am different from white patriarchal dreams of MidWestern U.S. 1950's vintage. Dying family farm communities were also too young in our North and West hemisphere dying to understand how we had already been bitten by the Industrial Extractive and Ballistic Revolution that bred us and fed us and bled us. I had a younger sister who knew I loved her. I would protect and care for her, I would want her only to be healthy and happy, I would never intend to harm her, I would always want to play and work with her, And role-play work with her cooking cleaning farming gardening raising her baby dolls and stuffed bears and dogs with divine benign compassion, to speak kindly and to listen carefully for this curious non-suppression that had grown courageously cooperative between my sister and me, and thereby also within me and within her, individually Good to go separately to rejoin later Trading stories of lesser relational cultures and co-relational climates, Together, we shaped a sacred curiosity tool for listening to love's most compassionate and actively incarnating possibilities, right there on our slowly dying extended family farm. Years later, when the farm was gone and I was studying psychology and communication theory and theology and ecology in a still wildly homophobic society, I knew to whom I could safely come out, If this Earth provided hospitality, sanctuary shared with any non-***** person. When I told her about this uninvited, yet curiously natural, attraction to other men, she reassured me, She would protect and care for me, She would want me to be only healthy and happy, She would never intend to harm me, She would always want to play and work with me, So I knew, from her words and from long-tested experience she loves me most for who I am, and not at all for who I am not. Spiritual theologies and natural ecologies of love were originally rooted in compassionate experience Reflected upon, noticed and appreciated, then put into feeble left-brain words growing abstractly transcendent universalizing theories to monopolize explanations for scriptured, and scripted, yet still enscribing personal love experienced within Earth's hospitality, Wherever we can find and feed and water healthy co-passions. Earth's embodied hospitality would protect and care for us, would want us to become healthy and happy, would never intend to harm, would always want to play and work with us.