Retrieving Eros: Isn’t Anything Sacred Anymore?
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What do the words god, faith, sacred and holy evoke? Perhaps they need to be reclaimed and re-sacralized. I have done so, and with a particular aim.
An aim to reclaim and re-sacralize what is truly sacred in my experience. To reclaim the sacred, especially the language and experiences of being human, and re-imbue them with the essence that is rooted in the creatrix of the earth, and in the mythopoetic and erotic forces of life.
And to reclaim the truly sacred from the uptight, narrow, pathologically childish consciousness which has reduced, contorted, and dehumanized the meaning of what is god-like, divine, and imminent in the forces of nature, and in all that is naturally human, to reclaim the sacred from that hell.
To reclaim the sacred from the claptrap, dogmatic machinations and oppressive have-tos of the major world religions, which too often wield the words god and faith as if they are proprietary commodities to be owned and weaponized, literally turned into battle cries by chosen people — in the name of control and oppression for financial gain, and self-aggrandizement to rationalize the abdication of adult responsibility to act as compassionate human beings, is vital now.
When I write or say the words god, faith, sacred, holy, I mean to re-sacralize all that is natural,
human and more-than-human,
genuinely wild and real,
numinous, divine essence,
ineffable yet palpable,
imminent, holy, whole,
all that quiets the anxious,
and breaks open the heart.
When I write or say the words god, faith, sacred, holy, I remember C.G. Jung’s response to a journalist when asked if he “believed in God.” Jung said, “I know God.”
So, in that vein, I acknowledge that my own gut-level knowing of god, the sacred, the holy, the Mystery, is a tangible gift I painstaking excavated from the rubble of decades of depth-psychological and psycho-spiritual healing and wholing, soul-mending and rending work of my own.
In what resulted in the retrieval of my soul. And thus, of my relationship with the sacred. With faith. Trust. And hope. Hope without reason.
As I healed childhood wounds and trauma, I have learned from my own direct experience with psychological and spiritual healing of my psyche, soul and body — as well as from my psychological/spiritual education, and most profoundly, from extended time I have spent in the wilderness, further deepened and solidified by my practice as a Depth Psychotherapist — that unhealed trauma, and its aftermath, often results in a profoundly re-wounding loss of trust.
And that trust must be uncovered through the recovery of our woundings and losses in order to retrieve and claim our relationship with whatever it is we experience as depthfully and reliably sacred guiding forces for our otherwise multi-contextual life, down here on earth.
Often this loss of trust is experienced as a loss of our own soul, an emptiness that is met by loss of trust in our self and in our caregivers when we were children, then in others as we age, and then in the world in general. Often followed by a loss of trust in the idea of the presence of the sacred, the holy, the larger forces, or in a sense that life contains a sort of wholeness, meaning, telos, or purpose.
Because how could it, we lament, when we and hundreds of millions throughout time have suffered so much?
How could our life, then, be guided by some unnameable, untouchable, and larger forces? If some god or gods or goddess were shaping our fate in the direction of our destiny, crafting the image we were born with and the gifts we came to deliver, why in hell is the path so difficult to walk?
Maybe you know, as I do, there is no answer to those kinds of questions. There is only living into them. And it is that choice to wholly and uncomfortably live into those questions that renders us deeply and unapologetically human. Compassionate. Open, having chosen to let the breaking to the Mystery of it all have us, like we let a soulful lover take us.
I can tell you this though, it has been, and continues to be, my direct experience, as it has been for hundreds of millions of others across time and culture, that what I know as god, goddess, divine, sacred, holy, that which drops me to my knees in awe and reverence, tearful and alive, is what I’ve come to experience as a richly imbued encounter with deep Eros, otherwise known as the forces of life and of creation itself. With love itself.
And it has been through the portals of wilderness, the psyche, and a shattered open heart that I have come to reclaim and re-sacralize the word god as my own.
My own kind of religion, or re-weaving and re-sacralizing of trust in my experience of the presence of the larger forces of Eros — of trust in the expanse of a numinous and ultimate reality, right here on earth — where all god, goddesses, Spirit and Mystery are indwelling, in us, as us, while all at once imminent and as close-in as the next step we take on this weeping and solid ground.
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Melissa La Flamme is a visionary artisan of cultural evolution. As an author, poet, Jungian & shamanic psychotherapist and troublemaker, she kindles soul’s smoldering longing for everything real. She helps hack and track the smell of our longing to fully inhabit our life. She shows us how to enact our own prison break, from the inner and outer lockdowns we have unknowingly built. Melissa teaches the soul’s clandestine trade. The trade of the code-breaker of our one authentic life. The way of the Holy Hacker of our soul. The one writhing alive in our glistening, raving heart, vulnerable, ravished, undone and messy in a world where anything but is the safe way to belong. Visit her at her website, and on Facebook.
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