In His Image

 "So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them:  male and female."  The first time I truly absorbed this as my own, as a female, was a bit of a temblor for me.  I wanted to run barefoot into the backyard because, all alone, I was  standing on holy ground in front of the unsayable presence of God in a burning bush.  I was shattered by the idea that all of me in my womanhood was a reflection of God, not just an afterthought of man, a secondary, a helper, a companion, but part of the fullness of the picture of Who God Is, without whom the picture of Him is not complete.  It took me a long time  to accept God for Who He was trying to tell me He was and not to see Him as a presentation from others. Sometimes listening to others' representations made me dislike God a little bit with every telling.  I heard His voice as my dad's booming didactic, pistachio shaking, female belittling presentation and I felt, "no thanks." I took the long way around back to Him just to avoid many perceived Herods and I had to strain to hear His voice above the din.  Hilariously when I heard God tell me that I was made in His image, I  didn't bask in the revelation for long.  No, I immediately ran to tell my dad.  And my dad did not disappoint.  "That's ridiculous, God isn't some sort of giant hermaphrodite"  In my head brayed, "No shit Sherlock, I was just telling you, God isn't a giant version of man, the great news is this:  all of the best of us, male and female, are a reflection of what is God."  So then we see, the no shit Sherlock part will indicate that I had a lot of growing still to do.  Why had I run to my father with this revelation?  Because I wanted him to understand the fullness of Who God could be for him? Or because I wanted to say, "Yeah your theosophy sucks and the way you twisted the bible against me nearly made me miss out on God."  We can probably guess that sticking my thumbs in my ears, waving my fingers and blowing raspberries was my motivator.  When will I ever grow up?

Yup, I have miles to go before I sleep.  My father has been dead for nearly ten years and I still have arguments with him in my head, especially every time I read something in the bible about God being like a mother and Jesus going out of his way to be kind to women.  I can feel my head start to waggle and a shiver of steel ram down my spine saying, "In your face Dad....and you too Paul you pharisaical misogynist."  But I am getting better.   As I grew up I craved my parents' approval, as I imagine all children do.  In order to gain my mother's I tried to hide my worst self and made a sneaky, not precisely true presentation of me.  To gain my father's approval I tried to be more like a boy...or less like a girl?  I would take out the garbage, mow the lawn, run faster, jump higher, try to be tougher, cry less (impossible), be smartest because somehow my father made me think that smart and male were synonymous. And my father approved.  Possibly I was making inferences that weren't being implied but I don't think so.   I cherished every attaboy I got.  I was listening to a book by Madeleine L'Engle called "Walking on Water" and she was blithely saying how she grew up in a home where "they were created in His image:male and female" was a given and she doesn't feel like she has to justify herself as a woman writer.  Lucky.  Indeed, I wanted to scratch her eyes out for a minute for having it so easy.

As I got older, being less of a girl continued to manifest itself as being louder, more aggressive, first with my hand up, first to finish the race.  This became a bit of a tightrope walk because loud, aggressive and domineering was not exactly how a young lady was supposed to comport herself. And as with all growing adolescents and young adults, parental approval was less of an umbilical cord. Precisely at this juncture, my family got involved with a cult.  Most of institutional religion smacks hard of patriarchy and putting women in a second class role.  But this little cult was run by a man named Barnabas who was dying to bring back the good old days of women in complete subservience.  Seen a Handmaid's tale?  That.  We had to wear head coverings, no makeup, only skirts.  All the restrictions seemed to be placed on the women and consequently my feelings toward God became conflated with my feelings towards this Barnabas quack and all his brood of viper followers.  Honestly we were only in the club for approximately a year but it changed me.  I went from 'Jesus loves me this I know', 'His Banner Over Me is Love' arms over head, point to self, hug myself, felt and sequined hand puppets of the Good News to-- I must hate Jesus because I don't want anything to do with any of these people and any of the bible they're reading and or any of the songs they're singing.  Fortunately Jesus wouldn't let me go.  He didn't let me hate Him.  He kept calling to me in a voice so different from the ones I was hearing that I was unable to completely shake Him off.

Then one day I was around sixteen and I told my mother I was extremely lonely, that I wanted to be loved, I wanted a boyfriend.  I think she was on the other side of the bathroom door because I couldn't look her in the eye to say these things.  But I can imagine her shaking her head with wisdom and knowledge as she said, "Meghan, let Jesus be your lover."  Man, was I annoyed.  This, from a woman who had a husband of probably at least 25 years, nine children, a house filled with noise and laughter and fighting and busyness and then a whole private love relationship with the boy she had loved since she was fourteen years old.  Thanks for nothing.  Self-centered and sixteen I could not hear what she was telling me.  I wanted the empty parts of me filled up with love, someone to see me and be crazy about me, somebody to listen to me, somebody to help fill the void.  I thought a man might give it a whirl.  

And yes, I've been incredibly lucky in love and this has gone a long way for me in helping to heal my personal war of the sexes.  I read something today in a "Grief Observed" by CS Lewis that made me nod along saying, "Yes, sir you are correct."

        "There is....a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.  It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine.'  But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible.  Marriage heals this.  Jointly the two become fully human."  

Now obviously CS was also very lucky in love because marriage is not always the healing in the war of the sexes, is it?  In fact... enough said.  And yet I have had the opportunity to heal my regard for both men and women in my relationship first with my husband and then my sons and daughters.  I am not in a constant battle of self-justification and subsequent justification of all women.  I don't have to  be soprano in the Opera of Womanhood, singing the aria of female wondrousness because my husband doesn't need convincing, in fact sometimes he’s singing that high harmony for me.  On the flip side, I don't have to pay unnecessary obeisance to my husband and all of manhood because  he doesn't require it from a petty throne.  Simultaneously, I don't have to be angry with the entire male sex because I am not angry anymore…well not all the time anyway.  I am free to admire the qualities that I love about both my husband and my sons.  How horrible would it be to be at war with these children whom I loved at first sight  with a fierce and torn, aching  and exhausted heart.    Which makes me sad for my dad all over again.  What happened to him that he couldn't overcome his feelings against women by virtue of  the existence of his beautiful daughters?  How could the amazing patience and kindness of Wendy Harter not have bewitched him to worship at the altar of womankind? 

So let's circle back to my Mom telling me, "Let Jesus be your lover."  What did she mean?  Why point to Jesus as my lover?  Because her marriage wasn't healing her in the war of the sexes?  Possibly and probably, but I think she had discovered something much more profound.  Even in the best relationship where hurt is being healed and misunderstandings are being rectified, we cannot fill each other up in all the emptiest of spaces.  We can, together, be an echo, an image, a polaroid of the fulness of God.  But it’s not enough.  When the hot sweaty, feverish thrill of sex has dimmed, the poignancy and profundity of becoming one with another is magnified.  The receiving of another into your body, the entering in to someone else's body is a physical union to be sure, but the spiritual union is shocking, as earth shattering and body quaking as the climax itself.  Now here's where it pays to have no readers.  Talking about relationship with God and climax in the same context is a potential cringefest.  But I am not without precedent.  The Song of Solomon is a lush ode to sensuality and carnality wielded to  demonstrate the depth of love that God has for us.  When I read "Arise, my beautiful one and come with me."  That is a love note, a song, an invitation straight from God's heart to mine, saying, no matter how lost you get, I'm looking for you, I'm scanning the horizon anxiously searching for you.  As I have grown up and relinquished my childish grudges against  others' religiousness, I have allowed my ears to be unblocked so I can hear the love song being sung to me.  I hear it in the ocean, I hear it in the wind in the bamboo, I hear it when I read Isaiah, I hear it in my own tears when I just can't any more, I heard it the moment each of my children were born, I heard it when I fell in love with my husband, I hear in my sore throat when I've been screaming in frustration.  I hear it, I hear it, I hear it.

So my mother's advice of letting Jesus be my lover was something bigger, wider, longer, deeper.  She took my teenage complaint and heard my primal cry for completion that hearkens back to a time unremembered when I was complete and perfectly knitted in the image of God.  In her life experience she knew that a human being would never complete me in the way my heart was yearning for.  She jumped me out of time to the place where I needed to go and I couldn't hear her.  Because even now, when I have the closet thing to a perfect complementary partner in my life, it is not enough to fill the eternal longing.  My children, though they sparked a fire of love, company and challenge that I could never have anticipated, still do not fill the eternal longing.  My home, my things, my clothes, my garden, writing, singing, reading, friendship...all of these are only a reflection, an echo of a phrase in the love song that is being sung to me to woo me into communion, oneness, completion in God.  The song is "Let Me be the Lover of your soul, let Me see you in all your ways, heal you, love you, thrill at your every word, laugh at your stupid jokes, wait attentively for your smallest thought, let Me be one with you."  If I had grown up in a home like Madeleine L'Engle,  maybe I wouldn't have been so amazed by the revelation of belonging to God in celebration and complete acceptance of my female self.  I probably wouldn't  want to wash His feet with my tears and wipe them dry with my fading strawberry curls.  And even though my first instinct was to run across the playground to tattle to my father, I am growing.  My ears are opening and my heart of stone is becoming more absorbent.  I am opening myself up to the song being sung to me and I am hearing this:  we are made in His image and the whole, intricate long and short story is a reflection of the story of getting back to completion.  Selah.

Parosmia

 I have this thing, they're calling it Parosmia.  I know, it sounds like the fever-dream induced by psychedelic mushrooms.  Fair assessment. Here’s what we know: one of the indicators of Covid is some degree of  loss of the sense of smell and taste, aka anosmia.  Indeed, when I got sick with Covid I did lose some taste and smell.  Later, as I regained my sense of smell, it became this twisted mutation of what smell, and consequently taste, used to be: Parosmia. From what I’ve read the doctors think that  the nerve receptors are trying to relearn  how to send and receive the correct smell messages and in my case they’re not learning properly. My recalcitrant nerves.  I’ve read whatever information the studies are putting out on the subject and the consensus so far is, “ We’re not sure and no we don’t have substantial data or firm ideas for how it can be fixed”.  I have also read that 70 percent of those affected are women- so good luck ladies, we all know how seriously our “hysterias” have been taken over the centuries.

So what does Parosmia look like? Well, it smells and tastes wrong.   For example:  meat used to smell like meat, now it smells and tastes like the  flesh of  a Komodo dragon who has been in a death match  with the neighbor dragon and subsequently gone slinking off to fester with gangrenous, salmonella ridden wounds at the bottom of a dumpster filled with rotten diapers and sour milk.  Why so many gross words?  Because nothing smells like anything I've ever smelled before.  Now I sit around composing daisy chains of near comparisons to explain what is happening to me.   I imagine harum scarum recipes for this witch's brew of stink:  eye of newt, hair from the underbelly of a gryphon, toenail excretion from a raptor, oh and a pinch of truffle oil.   I’ve been feeling similar but different to the times when I was pregnant  and every smell was magnified to an exponential degree.  Some  of you know about this phenomenon: those times when you could smell the spaghetti breath of the man across the church at nine o'clock in the morning?  Like that.  But different because I don't recognize the exact smells I'm smelling.  They're wrong, slightly off, sometimes way off.  Coffee smells like the body odor of a person who drank an "I've made a huge mistake" amount of coffee and is now having a panic attack, add a daub of eau de skunk roadkill behind each of his fibrillating ears. Garlic smells like the breath of someone who indulged in a delicious Korean fried chicken meal the night before, drank alternating shots of sake and bourbon all night, vomited and then forgot to brush her teeth the next morning, gargling only with yesterday’s  coffee. Toothpaste tastes like rancid self-tanning lotion left in the back of the bathroom cabinet since the late 1990s when it was last used.  The closest I've come to a similar experience was when I was pregnant and living above a couple who cooked with many heavy spices I was not familiar with and as the strange, intense aromas invaded our apartment into my morning sickness, all I could think was, "This must be what hell smells like."

And all these descriptions are only for my own benefit because nobody can understand what's going on inside my nasal passages and therefore inside my head. Trying to explain to an outsider is an exercise in frustration.  But describing it to myself is useful because, indeed, sometimes I do feel as if I am in the throes of a fever-dream induced by psychedelic mushroom ingestion.  Nothing is quite right, nothing is the kind of real I'm completely familiar with.  I'm like Alice down the rabbit hole which has turned out to be the tunnel of a star nosed mole: at first disorienting, frightening and alienating and then it morphs into a nightmare. So describing it gives me a touchstone, a reference point that says,  "yes, I do know what garlic vomit that hasn't been washed by a toothbrush smells like”.

  My daughter Sabine has been a Parosmic ( yes I made that up) much  longer than I.  Mine began October 8 2021, I know the exact day because I sent my family a text saying "this chocolate coffee tastes disgusting- definitely won't try again."  Little did I know that it was the beginning of a much longer journey down dark and lonely byways.   Sabine has been plagued for probably a year longer.  And I must confess I could not understand what she was going through before it happened to me.  I was actually a little jealous of her being so skinny (that’s an unhealthy body image subject for another day). Now I understand a little better and my heart hurts for the isolation she has been experiencing for some time. In a tiny way we can form a  support group of two in that we each know that the other is a real person, having a tangible (smellable?) and similar experience.    We have, in common,  a sense of alienation, not only the  loss of  community in just sitting around a dinner table enjoying company and good food but this gaping vacuum around each of us created by the loss of shared experience.  "Why aren't you eating?', same reason as last night and the night before that and …. “I would never have that kind of willpower",  ITS NOT WILLPOWER ITS TORTURE!  And you definitely would have all the “willpower” in the world if your food smelled like horse's ass. "How much weight have you lost? I wish I could get that diet"  well actually I haven't lost a pound because I'm eating loaves of bread and butter daily and candy by the fistful in order to self-soothe....and I wish you could get this diet too.  Not really, but kind of.

So what is even the point of writing about it?  I'm not sure.  I might have to walk away from the computer and think about the things I could or should be learning from this helpless experience, or from writing about it  or from trying to discuss it with those who love me or those who might need some support themselves.  I missed the lilacs this year, I missed the wisteria....writing that just makes me want to cry.   For two months I missed bread until we discovered that freshly baked sourdough was edible and delicious.  I missed pizza like a wild woman until I found another source that makes garlic free sauce and if I eat three small pieces when they're hot enough to make burn bubbles on the roof of my mouth then I get to have some pizza once  a week.  I missed using my new Nespresso machine that we bought for its evocative coffee smell that reminded us of sneaky boutique hotel getaways.  Months later, I've reached the point where I can have one small shot of espresso quickly enough to savor the old taste and smell, down and done before the lingering nag of skunk and truffle oil can grab hold of my olfactory scruff and shake a gag out of me.  I am wildly appreciative of the steps I've taken forward: the bread, the pizza, the coffee.  I am wildly disappointed every time I try to make something I once loved, like tacos, and it just stinks like pig innards being boiled in truffle oil (yes truffle oil is a theme and I am not a fan).  I am heartbroken by the loss of smells I love for the sake of smelling: flowers, lemons, my husband, my kids, fresh cut grass.  What's the lesson? Appreciate what you have when you have it?  Appreciate the progress I have made since October 8?  Be grateful that all that is wrong with me is this Parosmia thing because other people are going through something much more difficult?  Be more patient and understanding with people who have obstacles that are troubling their life?  Eat all the steak you can get your hands on because there may come a day when you never eat meat again?

Weirdly, what has been singing through my mind as I take a lap and think about the consequences of Parosmia  is a song we used to sing at Mary Immaculate, the little yellow church in my home town.  "Make Me A Channel Of Your Peace."  The part that keeps coming to my mind is this:

      "Oh Master grant that I may never seek 

   so much to be consoled as to console

To be understood as to understand

         To be loved as to love with all my soul.

What does this mean?  Well, the song is supposed to be the prayer of St Francis of Assisi.  Reflected in the lines is not necessarily what he, or I in singing it, have already achieved but what we would like to see in ourselves  as the outcome of some growth.  We, me and Francis, are asking God to empower us to be more understanding, consoling and loving, within the confines of our ability, through our trials both great and small.  Maybe I can help my daughter negotiate this situation better in having a deeper understanding of her struggle.  Maybe I can be more mindful of praying for my friend who has been fighting liver cancer with tenacious endurance and grace.  Maybe I can be grateful for every small kindness that is extended to me through a crust of bread.  And if I do catch a whiff of  an old fragrance, maybe I will be attentive and  ready to stop, drink it in,  full of gratitude and grace for the small favors that come my way.