Looking for your face

in honor of Valentine’s Day, here is my favorite bit of love/mystical poetry:

Looking for Your Face

From the beginning of my life
I have been looking for your face
but today I have seen it

Today I have seen
the charm, the beauty,
the unfathomable grace
of the face
that I was looking for

Today I have found you
and those who laughed
and scorned me yesterday
are sorry that they were not looking
as I did

I am bewildered by the magnificence
of your beauty
and wish to see you
with a hundred eyes

My heart has burned with passion
and has searched forever
for this wondrous beauty
that I now behold

I am ashamed
to call this love human
and afraid of God
to call it divine

Your fragrant breath
like the morning breeze
has come to the stillness of the garden
You have breathed new life into me
I have become your sunshine
and also your shadow

My soul is screaming in ecstasy
Every fiber of my being
is in love with you

Your effulgence
has lit a fire in my heart
for me
the earth and sky

My arrow of love
has arrived at the target
I am in the house of mercy
and my heart
is a place of prayer

-Rumi

All the ladies, louder now, help me out

I’ve been slowly making my way through ten poems to change your life by Roger Housden, and I’m really, really enjoying it.

As I was reading last night, I did something I rarely do…I picked up a pen and underlined a passage.

The poem was “Last Gods” by Galway Kinnell, which is a beautiful, sensual poem that “elevates the instinctual play of lovemaking to an activity worthy of the gods and…shows how deeply resonant our loving is with all the currents and rhythms of nature itself.”

Housden spends a good deal of time explaining why he chose this poem for a collection purporting to be able to change your life, and he touched on something that resonates deeply with me, something that I’ve talked about here before:

Yet like erotic, the word pleasure has become divorced from its original savor. We still live in the aftermath of a religion (the Catholic variety) for whom the litmus test for a sin remains the question: Did you take pleasure in it?

Our culture, Housden continues, keeps us “in thrall to shame.”

It’s like I said when I was venting about taking the high schoolers to confession, where they were handed an “examination of conscience” flyer. This is an institution that teaches kids that not only is it sinful to have sex, it’s sinful to even *think* about it. It’s no wonder so many young people (and some not-so-young people) are so sorely misguided about sex and sexuality.

“Sex and the City” did a great job of pointing out some of the ways these deeply ingrained attitudes manifested themselves in adult dating behavior. Here are two examples I can think of off the top of my head.

In one case, Charlotte was dating a guy who seemed great except that during sex, he would scream out “You f***ing bitch. You f***ing whore!” When she asked him about it later, he had no memory of saying this, and couldn’t believe he would say any such thing. Needless to say, Charlotte found this disturbing.

The second one (and now that I think of it, I think this one was Miranda. I can’t remember…) was a man who was (of course) a not-quite-recovered Catholic who always, always HAD to get up and immediately shower afterwards. He just felt “dirty,” he explained.

Ach.

It would appear that I meandered a bit from my original point, which was to say that I loved both this poem and Mr. Housden’s analysis/explanation of it.