Naming-Claiming One's Own Divinity?

One of the most significant challenges for religious folk reared in a wholly-Other God is what to do when Wisdom emerges as intimately Given within–a flash of Light or Feeling received in the body, known in the bones. Coming not from outside of yourself but intimately within your own cells. Knowing divinely.

Most of us traditionalist folk are well socialized to immediately challenge and dissect any intimate revelation we might receive from within our bodies, so to become certain by means of Scripture, in the God we have known out there, about Whom it’s impossible to know for sure in the body. Christianity, for all its rootedness in incarnation, is one of the most body-dissociating traditions spewing fear about bodies today. Furthermore, beyond this root tradition, human idolatries of certainty preclude such intimate revelation in many traditions and none. Then we wonder why we are so lonely. Or we lash out to protect our tribal affiliations so we are not left out in the cold (a deeply visceral fear of most human beings originating in colder climes).

Except even the Christian/Jewish/Islamic Scriptural God/de has no one name-location-body/presence unless it also be a being-verb in a cyclical-becoming-phrase–I AM AS I AM, for instance. Enlightenment, scientific, logical habits of mind parse this down to a Being with a Becoming in the middle somehow, though certainly not with a presumption of changeability. God is God is God, never to be changed or challenged.

Hooey, I say. 

I’m beginning to be convicted in how large an obstacle this certainty-idolatry is for living life fully, abundantly, in interdependence and interconnection of all things. Our propensity to analytical separation is our propensity, after all. God/de’s propensity is to connect, dance, refine, transform in Relationship. Everything is energetically connected to everything else, no matter what. If you cannot develop your energetic-perception-muscles, subtle may they be, you will not evolve into the fully human being you were created to be. More often, fear keeps the human spirit locked up in the mind-alone, the cognitive machines of distrust, dissociation, denial. The pathway to the Fullness I know is exploring and becoming receptive to your own spark of divinity, given to you as your birthright, resting within you now as an ember that will never go out but which may also not grow into flame if you refuse to acknowledge it is there. We all have a spark of the divine within us. All sentient beings, human and non-human. 

What does it mean to claim your own spark of divinity? How is such an act not just human ego, pride or presumption?

My own journey here was roundabout, and certainly not complete yet. I felt an Invitation to return to the Sacred Mountain in a Women’s Fast circle, an ancient ways ‘technology’ for ‘lamenting for a vision,’ or listening to the Wisdom of the land for intention and purpose, with gifts to bring back to one’s community(ies). We met in the South Steens Wilderness Area for 10 days to prepare, enter into a 3-day solo fast, then begin to incorporate the experience. We concluded the ceremonial ways on Saturday, departing to our various homes across states and country. I arrived home on Sunday evening, glad to sleep in my own bed again, sad to miss my circle-sisters with whom I shared this intense Wisdom way.

One of the preparatory practices was to come to speech about a naming-claiming intention or I AM statement, so to enter into the fast as who you were-and-are-becoming. It was a process of storytelling, mirroring, questioning, body/brain-storming to see what words might form. My own statement surprised me, forming in the group-held process but not articulated until the next morning, waking up into the first phrases: I am the speaking red fires of Loving, freed in the waters of Wisdom, found by Forgiveness, now healing and willing to tend as Invited from above and Welcomed from below, enough as I am.

I don’t know what “speaking red fires of Loving” actually means, as it arrived fully formed upon waking. Perhaps it means I am to accept that my work for now remains in words, even though writing books seems a fool's errand while the world is burning down. The second and third phrases honor previous initiations in my eldering journey that have both freed and found me. The “healing and willing to tend” phrasing points to the intentions I have for my harvest-woman years, not by agenda or outcome, but by soul-posture and curiosity. I don’t have a clear work-project, per se, but a heart-hope to make a difference as I am Led, Invited, Welcomed.

Part of the work-project I did receive emerged here too: an exploration of the gnostic/hermetic phrase as above, so below. Purportedly from the Gospel of Thomas, a Nag Hammadi text discovered in the 1940’s, it bows to the dance of contribution I hope to embody: a sense of sacred purpose or felt-Invitation and a confirmation in hospitality or welcome from the community(ies) I will serve. But all of this with an understanding that right now, at this very moment, I am enough. Who I am may serve more in the future than anything I might create or do. Bringing my presence, my being-self, into community(ies) is enough.

Then an utter afterthought arrived, surprising me with its force. Belatedly, I saw that my statement mimics or mirrors my own root traditions name of the divine, my own spark of Whom I therefore named, claimed, if unknowingly. The statement begins with I AM. It concludes with AS I AM. The pieces in the middle are all my own storying and willingness to be faithful to gifts given. But I AM AS I AM begins and ends this being-Self of me, surrounds me with holy intention, guides me toward holy purpose(s) yet to be known in the flesh.

This is how Wisdom is honored from within, I guess. I named-claimed my own divinity as it emerges within my own cells, surprises me in its wholeness, fills me with passion, direction, purpose, all to offer any gifts that might be welcomed in community(ies). Does this mean I am saying I am God? Of course not. I had no awareness of any bodacious statements I might make, only staying in my story as I’ve lived it these past years, decades. But I will be evermore attuned now to letting the Work come through me, having claimed and been claimed by God/de in this body, on this day. I AM speaking Loving, healing and willing to tend, AS I AM.

Those dissociated from their own bodies will be horrified by this, of course, having not done the work to metabolize ingested shames for self- and others-benefit, nor the work to disrupt wounded ancestral lineages within themselves. Everyone is on a journey, and I make no judgment on anyone in their own path. Way out of my paygrade. I do hope that the life of abundance, beauty, and truth known in one’s bones surrounded by the I AM AS I AM will plant seeds of curiosity and desire in others…to come to know themselves as a connected-and-unique spark of the divine too.

The more healed divine-sparks willing to gather, tend the earth, the more hope we have as the Body of Humanity evolving into an interconnected web of becoming for healing, the Good, for All.