Βάπτισμα (Báptisma)
Davey and Finn discuss Báptisma on Himeros Backstage Podcast.
We live within the confines of our own personal worlds of direct experience, private bodily constructions built over collective social agreements that have been infused with both illusion and fact. No matter where we have originated on the planet, life in a human body demands a dual process of understanding and accepting paradox: the unifying spiritual task of embodying a divided and dying world. On one hand, we need certainty, stability, the knowledge that tomorrow is coming. Alongside this necessity for linear, structural awareness, we tread an ocean of unknowability, subjectivity, and the collapse of absolutes. When we need to be stabilized in the chaos, religion can only patch us up so much; nobody is coming to save us from our own depths of disavowed pain. In these waters, many will drown while others will only float the shallows, though I believe that mastery is the cultivation of both diving and surfacing in any-and-all currents—no matter how wild and treacherous their crashes against us. For me, putting sex and spirit back together again has been painful, blissfully enlivening to my body, and a template by which the rest of my world has begun to be reassembled.
Each of us contains an internal continuum of truth that we tend to chop up and divide the fragments into associations of good and evil, light and dark, virtuous and violent, holy and profane, etc. On an individual level, we might prefer to lean more heavily into either side of this seesaw, whether by accident or great, deliberate commitment; however, a razor’s edge of non-dual truth is always present beneath the oscillation of our contradictions. Our behaviors, opinions, personas, and aspirations collide with our own selves at every turn. In choosing one stance, we automatically have not chosen another. In sum, we are grand reservoirs of myriad conflicting yet fervent convictions and allegiances.
To embrace paradox is to resist taking sides within our own fragmented experiences but to rest in the tension of our opposites; it is the stuff of true religious aim, an art by which dedication, practice, and reverence lead one into insights that exist beyond duality. Unfortunately, we when get lost in the mazes of our perceptions, we cannot find our way out of judgment and defense. We tip the see-saw in whatever direction we need to balance out what we cannot or will not take responsibility for within ourselves. In so doing, religion becomes an agent of murder, sex becomes a desecration of the body, we stand in opposition to the very healing that would free us. After all, one person’s gold is, to another, gore. In the end, reconciliation is only possible if we are willing to endure the suffering that we will surely encounter in the collapse of whatever, for us, has been assumed to be resolved.
I am still recovering from embodied patterns of puritanical guilt and shame about sex. I have learned to clench and pull away from love instead of opening to it. I, like the rest of us, have learned—by any means possible—to carry out the instructions that elevate crude strength, size, and emotional distance over tenderness, vulnerability, and emotional contact. I have adeptly learned to lie to myself. I have learned to cope with fragmentation by isolating myself, erecting enormous walls of judgment about others. For me, true spirituality has been the process of examining these fractures around which my life and body have been organized. For every piece of myself reclaimed, I gain a deeper understanding of a genuine impulse that religiously drives me toward self-confrontation and, ultimately, toward healing. I believe that we are looking for this merger in every erotic connection—even when we have lost touch with the formative, delicate layers of our bodies, layers in which sex and spirit were inherently experienced without demarcation.
When it comes to our sex, the only sins for which we will pay, are of cutting ourselves into pieces, cocks without men, bodies without the experience of our souls, fidelity to self-loathing and denial. Really, the price has never paid to a vengeful, skybound god who withholds love from men fucking men. Rather, it is to ourselves, because, in our judgments, we suffer immense disconnection and loneliness on a planet that needs our sex and devotion to each other especially as we are dying every moment that we live. Without each other, we drown in feelings of loneliness and isolation. May we join together and walk in newness of life.