My Inner Guadalupe Is Getting to Work

This is to let subscribers to this Welcome to Virgin Territory blog know what I’m doing. Or at least as I’m trying to figure it out, I thought I’d let you in on my process.  A new blog of mine, “Clothed With the Sun, Feet on the Ground,” is where I’m starting to get back to doing what I used to be pretty good at — before I turned into a reactionary, screaming angry harridan who internalized all those feelings, moved to Mexico, got embroiled with countless health issues and almost checked out. What I was pretty good at back before I got sidetracked by all that was finding a spiritual perspective on daily life.

Although the recent craziness in the U.S. capital has nudged me back toward the angry harridan position, I am refusing to go. I insist, dang it, that I will draw on those Inner Guadalupe virgin qualities, take refuge in virginity — innate wholeness, sanity, and steadfast presence of Mind. (OK, I’m repeating this to myself, reminding myself. It’s a constant process.) My true treasure — my ability to love life and live love — remains pure and intact. No one in Washington can touch that.

I’m not quite up to loving my fellow beings on the political scene. Maybe because I’m still American and they’re like, well, family. You expect a lot more from your family, and it hurts more when they hurt you.

I’m reminded of a story I heard as a jail chaplain. Two inmates shared a cell. Each felt they were in jail because of betrayal and false charges by someone close to them, one by an employer, the other by a brother-in-law. After “getting religion” they each knew that love and forgiveness were key elements toward winning their freedom — freedom on so many levels. But each felt incapable of loving or forgiving the person close to them.

“So, why don’t I take on sending love and light to your brother-in-law, and you send love and light to my @#$%* boss?” one asked the other one day.

“Agreed,” came the reply. “I don’t know your @#$% boss, but he can’t be as bad as my @#$%. brother-in-law. I’ll be happy to send him love and light.” So they did. And it wasn’t long before both the @#$%s had rethought their stories and all charges were dropped against the two cellmates.

I’m wondering if that can’t work on an international level. Maybe I should ask my Canadian friends to send a little love and light to our U.S. Congress and President. I, in the meantime, will take on the drug violence in Mexico. And that’s where “Clothed with the Sun, Feet on the Ground” is headed. I’m making that blog a frequent practice in sending love and light to that particular situation. I invite you to join me there, and on the corresponding Facebook page put up by my friend Chris Raymond, Corazon a Corazon – A Spiritual Defense of Mexico. That’s an open page, which means if you have a little love and light to lend you can post it yourself. Heart to heart, we’ll get through all this.

* Did you catch the * after the @#$%? I decided to use @#$% because all profanity is either sexist, racist, unintelligible or unimaginative.  This way you can create your own.

Let’s provide asylum for Marisol

I’ve written before about the young woman who took over as chief of police in Praxedis G. Guerrero, a town overrun and overcome with the violence resulting from the rivalry of two drug cartels. According to today’s Fort Worth Star Telegram she is now seeking asylum in the U.S. She fled here four months ago after receiving death threats. The seriousness of those threats was born out after an attack last Wednesday on a policewoman who remained behind.

Last March I revised the title of my original October, 2010, post to indicate that Marisol Valles Garcia’s “Guadalupe Presence” was now “gone.” Identifying “virgin qualities” has been a recurring theme of this blog. To unabashedly quote myself:

Virginity is powerful.  In its original concept, it had NOTHING to do with physiology. Being a virgin meant having authority, because a virgin was “author” of her own experience. She carried no labels from any faction. She was defined by no relationship other than the one she maintained with her Creator. She was no one’s daughter, servant, wife, lover, or mother. She was “one-in-herself.” She was whole, complete, un-captured, unbroken, un-invaded, intact.

Revision is a necessity when we place one person on a pedestal and say “SHE” or “HE” is the embodiment of whatever good we’re searching for — and trust that that individual will come up with solutions — will be “the answer” for whatever ails us. Surveying the current field of Republican hopefuls in the States, taking account of the current incumbent, and then doing the same thing for a field of Mexican presidential hopefuls, I am convinced that the days of looking for “a hero,” male or female, are past us. The “pickin’s” are rather sparse in the hero department these days. They seem to be even sparser in the virgin department, whatever variety of virgin you might consider. But enough has been written about that.

Or maybe not. If anything comes out of the constant litany of hero failures and moral shortcomings of elected officials, it may be a heightened longing for virtues lost. In our forty year long “War on Drugs” the U.S. has used practically every violent and subversive means to counteract violent and subversive means — even providing arms to drug cartels. Recriminations on this subject are many, but recriminations only go so far. A practical, positive step toward redeeming our collective “virgin qualities” would be to provide safe harbor for those virtues when someone has tried to live them. Let’s provide asylum for Marisol Valles Garcia.