Photo: Pam White Anima Motrix by Paula Josa-Jones
My friend Nicole Rushin recently posted a link to a film about the brilliant Jungian writer, scholar and dreamer, Marion Woodman called Dancing in the Flames.
Many years ago, I attended a conference headlined by Marion Woodman. I was reading Jung day and night, in the midst of a Jungian analysis, and steeped in Joseph Campbell. It was a heady time. Mystical, sublime.
In the intervening years, I feel that I have lost some of that connection to mysticism. I am dancing in the flames, but it can often feel like the flames of hell, with me doing a scorched tango.
Last night, we had dinner with our friend Brett, a lawyer who is also studying to become ordained as an Episcopal priest. I have not had lovely experiences with religion. But Brett is drawn to something deep and lovely and mystical in his relationship to God. It is not my experience, but as we talked, I could remember some ecstatic, embodied moments in the music – the divine in the unspoken.
Brett said that he recently gave a sermonette titled “Wounded Corporeality.” It was about coming together to share our wounds. That surprised me. When I heard the title, I immediately thought he meant something else: how corporeality itself is wounded in the church. That the disembodied, dogmatic nature of religion is the real wound, and that until we can discover a sensuous, embodied mysticism, that wound will persist.
Something in me is wanting to re-awaken to the mystical and this lovely film about a living goddess is shining a light.
