Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

(Mary Oliver, Wild Geese)

There is something very shocking about these lines.

If the body is a soft animal, then my first impulse is that it needs to be toughened up, and disciplined.  Is that because of my early exposure to religious teaching about mortifying the flesh?  Perhaps. But there are also secular cultural messages about the body as a source of error:  about how we are designed for scarcity but live in abundance, and so are hopelessly mismatched with our environment. 

I would understand Mary Oliver’s lines as being about self-acceptance, rather than self-indulgence.  Know what you love, and don’t pretend - to yourself or other people - that things are otherwise, even if loving what you love will get you into trouble.

An understanding of what it is that you love can come in surprising ways.  In an extraordinary interview, the Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley suggests that a spiritual practice based on silence can bring you to a fresh understanding of your own sexuality.  This is one of the things that can happen  when we are “just willing to be there without filling the space with all our good and pious thoughts”.  She puts it this way:

[You] can’t do that sort of simple prayer daily for very long without sexual stuff just flooding in, either in the time of prayer itself or outside of it. Why? If you want to talk about that secularly, you’ll say, “Well, of course. This is a state of disassociation, and the unconscious is welling up.” But if you want to put it more theologically, you say, “Yes, that’s happening, and there’s a reason for it: God wants us whole.” God wants us. God doesn’t want a polite version of us but all our desires laid out for inspection and transformation. 

For any sort of religious or spiritual life - for any sort of human life - this level of honesty is foundational; not just in your inner life, but in your dealings with other people. Paradoxically, perhaps, the path towards transformation is partly about finding our right place in the world. 

This week, a friend of mine has come out publicly as bisexual.  It’s brave - her family are great, but there are people in her life who won’t necessarily see this as positive.  Nevertheless, she’s chosen truth-telling over comfort.

I sent her a very short message, just to say that I was proud of her.  

There was plenty more I wanted to say besides.  Mary Oliver - in the final lines of the poem that I quoted above - says it best:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.