Drink in Beauty

Audio recording here.

There’s this story you might know - it’s about an apple and a garden - and a woman named Eve. There’s a snake - Adam’s there too. I couldn’t tell you when I actually, literally, read this story - but I also can’t remember a time when I didn’t know it.

And I haven’t been able to get it out of my head in preparing for today and diving into this new worship series on feeling good, on desire, and pleasure - and its role in our lives.

The version that many of you may know - whether you grew up Christian or just in this country - is the one where Adam and Eve are told by God that they can eat the fruit of any tree in the whole garden - except for the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And that if they do - they will die.

As this version of the story goes, Eve - is seduced by a serpent, disobeys God, eats the fruit from this forbidden tree, shares it with Adam - and then they are reprimanded by God and cast out of the garden.

Eve is often blamed in this version - as if her desire - the way she longed to taste the ripened red fruit of the tree was - so powerful - that it lead to the fall of humanity.

Eve and desire become responsible for the fall of humanity - which is really intense…and a message that has appeared and reappeared in art, literature and popular culture for a long, long time.

Even if you think you haven’t agreed to take this story into your life - it has likely seeped in anyway.

Most theology - for thousands of years - especially if it was written down and reproduced, was written by and for men within a patriarchal culture and context.

And for generations, layers and layers of interpretation named desire - and women - as something that needed to be controlled - as dangerous.

Until things began to change - slowly, painstakingly. Until the voices of women and feminists — not that long ago — began to make some noise - saying that this pervasive interpretation of Eve and the apple and the serpent — revealed more about the values and context of the theologian - and less about some enduring - truth.

The first time I heard a liberating interpretation of this story was in seminary. From friends and scholars I heard reclaimed retellings much like this one I stumbled upon recently - from Trelawney Grenfall-Muir who is responding to her 7 year-old daughter’s question about Adam and Eve:

But one day, (she writes) Eve was sitting under the tree, when another face of the God, the snake, the serpent of Earth wisdom, came and spoke to her. And she told Eve, “Did Mother God tell you that if you eat this fruit you will die? She was trying to protect you, but that’s not true. If you eat this fruit, you will become much more wise and be able to choose whether to do right or wrong…you will become wild and free, and you will experience difficulty and pain..You will be able to learn and grow, become adults, make love, have children, and learn from your mistakes how to become much more powerful. Once you eat it, you can never go back to being sheltered children, though – you will understand that life is full of choices, and those choices have consequences, and only by experiencing those consequences can we learn and grow.

In this line of interpretation Eve is celebrated as the bringer of knowledge, of consciousness. Because she said yes to her desire for the fruit, all textures and layers of life were revealed, the bitterness and the sour, the pain and the struggle - yes - but also the sweet and the savory - the deliciously pleasurable and satisfying. In this retelling of a pervasive cultural story, it’s because of Eve’s courageous choice that humans can wake up - which is a reality of both pleasure and pain.

But we must not forget pleasure.

And this really isn’t as much about trying to reclaim a Biblical text as it is about the journey of reclaiming desire and pleasure - as good.

And with almost 2000 years of loud voices shaming desire, you can imagine that when writer and scholar Audre Lorde delivered a paper at Mount Holyoke College in the summer of 1978 called “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” - she disrupted some old stories.

(There’s an audio recording of this on youtube that I highly recommend.)

Self-described black lesbian feminist, mother, warrior, poet - Audre Lorde is in a long lineage of courageous black women speaking a difficult truth for the sake of freedom - not just for themselves, but for all. Lorde names the erotic as being a source of power that has been intentionally distorted and suppressed for the purpose of preventing real change - the kind of real change that moves us, propels us toward collective liberation, toward a place and a time where all life - all bodies - are free.

Lorde describes how the word - Erotic - stems from the Greek word Eros - the personification of Love in all its aspects, personifying creative power and harmony.

“Another important way in which the erotic connection functions” she writes, “is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. “

Like yesterday in the early evening. In the midst of a very packed weekend with a lot of moving pieces and demands - in the midst of trying to decide if and how I wanted to share Audre Lorde’s words with you - my partner Andie said - let’s go for a walk.

It was just so particularly beautiful this weekend - the temperature,
the fact that every moment seemed to reveal this pop of new color.

But I felt busy, and struggled to be with this Beauty…dripping everywhere.
“Did you know I like little walks?” Andie asked as we moved slowly out the door - “just 15 or 20 minutes around a few blocks”.

It began to feel like an attempt at practicing all of what we’re naming this morning. In the midst of it all - taking a few moments to walk around the block, to say Yes to the life longing to be seen and recognized around me.

There were these deep purple cone-like flowers - but purple doesn’t quite do it, it’s a shade that I don’t have language for - then there were the teeny yellow ones just beside, insane shades of tulips - bright blue.

And then of course there were the ones that had white stripes of different thicknesses down the center. This sense of abundance - everywhere.

Aliveness, rebirth, desire - patiently waiting for us to acknowledge it for a moment. Showing itself - right now - around us, just for a moment - that will soon lead to something different.

“The erotic functions for me in several ways,” writes Lorde, “and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”

Inspired, changed and energized by Audre Lorde, adrienne maree brown’s new book “Pleasure Activism: Essays and conversations on the possibilities of making social justice work more gratifying” - just debut at #6 on the NYTimes bestseller list in March.

In this book she and so many others observe that pleasure is a natural, safe and liberated part of life, and that this moment is calling us to shift our focus from what we are negatively reacting to - to what we long for and love.

That collective liberation doesn’t come through collective suffering but rather when we work for - and live now - our collective pleasure.

It’s about that source of power that audre lorde named - a source of power that has been - for so long - locked up, not just for women, or women-identified people - but for all.

Locked up through other self-denying stories like the way Western philosophy split the mind from the body - elevating the mind.

Because experiencing pleasure is about our bodies.
And every single body is invited.
That includes your body.

We don’t experience feeling good here (head), we experience feeling good here - in our bodies. Your body, with it’s exact shape, it’s exact level of ability, with its exact amount of scars and spots and hair and folds - what makes your body feel good - matters, especially if some part of your identity or experience has told you that your body and what you desire doesn’t matter or belong to you.

Each of us has a different relationship to our body - yet, no matter the stories your body carries - still, this life force of Eros - the flow, the river that moves through you is your guide - what offers you that deep sense of satisfaction - your compass.

What unleashes that current of longing- matters - but not only for you, it matters to all of us and all life that you listen to that longing. Our inherent interdependence makes it so.

“I think a result of sourcing power” brown writes “in our longing and pleasure is abundant justice - that we can stop competing with each other…That we can instead generate power from the overlapping space of desire and aliveness, tapping into an abundance that has enough attention, liberation, and justice for all of us to have plenty.”

Valuing what makes us feel good - is a reclaiming of a disconnected part of ourselves. It’s about re-aligning our minds with our bodies - our heart and our spirits and surrendering into the rush of abundant life that pours forth when we do - just waiting to be unleashed.

It’s about reclaiming consensual and mutually pleasurable sex, eating, cooking, fashion, humor, music, so many different kinds of art - and so much more. It’s about reclaiming a relationship to our bodies. Tuning into what satisfies you, what nourishes you, what brings you joy - and paying attention to it.

And this isn’t about excess, as brown really clearly names - it’s not even about indulgence. It’s about “learning what it means to be satisfiable…learning how to sense when something is good for you, and - to be able to feel what enough is.”

And we do this by saying Yes to what makes us feel good when it arrives.

Which is not an invitation to avoid or deny pain, that’s still there - and always will be - it’s part of the whole too. It’s rather an invitation to surrender into the pleasure when it is present.

When you take a bite of something warm and delicious cooked for you by someone who makes you laugh, when you share sticky fruit with another who you love, relationships of love and sex, based in trust and honest communication, the sound of the crunching forest underneath your feet, the smudge of paints.

Throughout the whole month we’ll be exploring some of the many ways we experience feeling good, experience this abundant power of aliveness - through music, our bodies, humor.

And each Monday we’ll send you an email with a few recipes, practices, movements, movies and music - anything that brings joy, pleasure, and happiness into your life, and the lives of those around you. The staff is kicking things off this week - teaser, tomorrow’s email might include a playlist of songs that we’re all dancing/moving to right now.

“...We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” writes audre lorde

But when we surrender into the yes within ourselves we are a little bit closer to freedom.
A freedom from old stories designed to forge disconnection and oppression, to keep things the same.
When we surrender into the yes within ourselves we are a little bit closer to freedom.
Freedom to love - and be loved - in new and generative ways.
Freedom to sing, to move, to be in the fullness of our bodies just as they are and this life just as it is.

Amen. May it be so.