Touch Me in the Morning

September 19, 2013.Reading time 6 minutes.

I want to thank my friend and student Jasmine for pointing me toward the following article:

In the midst of national crises about gun violence, racial profiling, privacy, our role in international war and the like, we forget that we are in the beginning and in the end just human beings…not human DOINGS, but human BEINGS. The most accessible aspect of that state is our ability to touch.

This semester, I am teaching a class: In Your Hands: Spirituality, Language and Ethics of Touch at Starr King School for the Ministry. It is geared toward students in seminary, to get us thinking and open up the dialogue about touch. You see, I believe that the solution to the problems listed above is finding a way to reclaim our ability to be in physical contact with one another without it being commodified. We have stepped so far outside of our bodies and our embodied experience that we immediately associate touch with exchanges of power, particularly of a sexual nature, and although touch is intimate, intimacy does not always mean sex. The way a child breastfeeds is intimate, but it is not sex; the way we touch the hand of someone when they need help is intimate, but it is not sex; the way we embrace others in a time of joy is intimate, but it is not sex. The intimacy is determined by the emotional context that we share when we touch, not by the act alone.

Why do a graduate class on touch in seminary? Because faith communities have simultaneously done the most to destroy the language of touch and also have the most to lose by eliminating touch. There have been abuses in every religious denomination…it is not just a Catholic problem. It is an issue of power and using touch as a tool to gain that power. Inappropriate touch is the tool of people who are scared and desperate and who have no other way in their understanding, to find what they really seek. They understand that as people of the big monolithic religious body, they have certain power to direct people’s lives…yet they still feel out of control within themselves. I am no psychotherapist, but I am a body therapist and I have seen reflections of this kind of behavior in the massage room; where someone who is struggling to feel more in control of their own body is looking for something more from the massage…they never quite surrender to the experience of touch and may direct or anticipate your every move. Some will make an out and out a pass at you. Not at all to say that this is every case, but I’ve seen it first hand.

Let me be clear, I am not teaching people how to touch in church. However, I may be trying to teach people how to ask why and why not to touch in church. If faith communities can make an effort to not just enforce boundaries, but learn about and teach through our natural boundaries, we might just be able to reclaim this thing. I am not a Christian minister (though I identify as Christian within the Unitarian Universalist Church) but there are countless examples of Christ touching people, or people touching Christ (Matthew 9: 18 – 22 is chocka) and these are beautiful and inspiring examples of faith. By reacting to those who would abuse touch by saying “don’t touch” we all lose and the abusers win. Suddenly, we are agreeing with those who misuse touch and in our tacet response we are saying “you’re right, touch is bad and evil and can only be a no-good thing.” We don’t deserve that as human beings. Instead I say, don’t let the abusers win; let’s explore and thoroughly discuss the ways and the reasons why we touch in the open. Shine a light on it and leave the abusers nowhere to hide.

Already, two weeks in, my class is deeply fascinating and threads of thought and engagement are emerging that I could never have anticipated. We’ll see where it goes. At the very least there are seven future religious leaders in the world who are asking questions along with me. Its not much, but an avalanche starts when just one stone comes loose.

Peace.

Thank you to everyone who has been reading my blog. My last post Heartbreak received about 1000 hits and numerous comments. Again, I am deeply grateful to those of you who read, but it is bittersweet that tragedy would have to touch us this way. I have not written, and may not write about the shooting in Virginia, because truly, my heart is too heavy with the combination of these stories. I only offer a prayer for those we lost, including the gunman, their families and for our nation to find a solution to feeling as if we need to carry around life and death in our pockets.

Body

July 25, 2013.Reading time 8 minutes.

In the Fall of 2003 I was asked to be a model for P90X. It is now the world’s best selling workout DVD. If you’re unfamiliar with it, there’s a link at the bottom of this page. At that time, I was in the midst of a grand personal experiment. I had come to Los Angeles at the end of a national tour determined to be “LA Adam.” When I started the experiment, I wasn’t actually sure what that meant. But I knew one thing for sure, it involved having what I called the “LA Body.” This was a body that would always be camera ready, shaved, sculpted and looking 10 – 15 years younger than it actually was. Prior to the LA body, I had lived with people commenting on my body as a dancer, for its shape and definition and flexibility; sometimes, welcome, sometimes not. The most disturbing and regular comment on my body was “you black guys, never have to work out” or “you all look like that” or “dark skin always makes someone look better” or some variation on that theme. I will happily admit that my parents gave me some good clay to work with, but it was up to me as to what I did with that clay. The idea that my body simply appeared the way it did is naive to say the least. I started exercising when I was about ten or eleven. I secretly did hours of ballet exercises in my basement throughout high school. My freshman year of college, I spent more time in a dance studio than I did in class and then throughout the rest of college, the gym was my refuge from feeling like an outsider. This past year is the longest I’ve gone in 30 years without a gym membership or regular access to an exercise facility of some kind…only because I spend so much time blogging…but I still, run, do pushups and situps and ride my bike to work. Yeah, my body just happens because I’m black!

Black men and women have been objectified since day one in America. Being paraded, proded and peddled as livestock meant we had to have strong bones and teeth, good backs and healthy genitals for breeding. Stories of auction block antics surrounding the treatment of slaves would disgust most of you so I will let you explore that on your own (see links below.) But it is that same history that expects us to be good athletes and day laborers and not necessarily bookish and un-athletic. It is the same history that is behind racial profiling and is history that sits behind the assumptions about Trayvon Martin’s physical ability to inflict harm on George Zimmerman. Black women who are called “Brown Sugar”, black men who are called “Mandingo”…these and the dumb jock mentality are gross assumptions and the worst kind of stereotypes because the black community has frequently adopted them as well. Blacks have played into a self objectification that makes us out to be nothing more than collection of wildly exaggerated body parts.

It has been a very dicey business for me personally to separate just what is the perverse racially motivated fascination with black bodies in America and what is the perverse fascination with sexuality in America in general. Living at those crossroads is at times unbearable. How do you know if someone is going out with you because they like you or because they want to sleep with the ‘P90X Ab Guy’ or because they are expecting nothing short of a sexual freak when they get in your pants? Or how do you know if that same fascination isn’t just part of the whole “body=sex” equation here in the US?

Simply, you don’t.

I’d love to see us change the dialogue about how we not only talk about black bodies, but how we talk about ALL bodies. Objectification, racialization, gendering…these are all aggressions we throw at each other, sometimes all too casually. This fall I will be teaching a course at the Starr King School for the Ministry, In Your Hands: The Language, Ethics and Spirituality of Touch. My hope is that in this class I can lay the groundwork for changing the game. When I think of racially motivated violence, both physical and verbal, it is very clear to me that people are only capable of doing these things if they have never been intimate (in the platonic sense) with someone who looks different than they do. I also believe that faith community leaders have a unique power to introduce a new language of touch. The crimes of the Catholic church in abusing this power, show just how much power really exists in the ability to influence how someone sees their body. Repulsively, this power was used by certain members of the Catholic church to horrific ends. If we only punish them, no matter how severely, they have still won. We must make a concerted effort to not only make sure those crimes don’t happen again, but to establish a new way to communicate through touch. The answer is not to eliminate touch…that is inhuman. The answer is in exploring the deeper meaning of touch as it relates to our physical identity, sense of physical well being and creating a language of liberated body justice where we can not only touch one another, but we can enjoy what that means, without fear or threat. Imagine a room full of gang members (of any race), or people who hate one another, or total strangers, who are put in a room and simply asked to hold hands…no words. The potential is tremendous, if we do the tough work…exploring our fears about touch, bodies and physical intimacies. Faith communities have been vilified in terms of how they view the body and how they use the body. If faith communities and spiritual people can lead the way to reclaim touch and body awareness, we literally can change the world.

P90X

Starr King School for the Ministry Course Descriptions (mine is at the bottom)

Slave Auction History 1

Slave Auction History 2

Slave Auction History 3

Slave Auction History 4