Day Fifteen.
Sacremént. Isaiah 61:1–3.
We welcome, as our featured #ShutTheHellUp writer, Lauren Muratore. Lauren is a part-time Lyft driver, amateur bartender, pastor-person, and embodied theologian. She likes people and art a lot, and figures the two are pretty much inextricable. Lauren dwells at home with her tiny lion, Elliott, and kick-ass flatmates. She dwells in ministry with the people of Salem Lutheran Church in South Baltimore, for whom she gives thanks on the daily.
Following the lead of Harlem-born prophetess Tarana Burke, women across the globe started saying #MeToo. We said it with hashtagged stories, actions, and even through our own self-protective silence. We whispered, wrote, sang, hollered, dreamt: Truth. Brave. Wild. Wounded. Wholly holy.
We said, “this body is mine” maybe for the first time, forever.
And also, “don’t fuck with us.”
‘Cause we are All. Done.
It was powerful. And exhausting. And there’s some societal movement, which we celebrate! And. Every day there is still a myriad of new stories to hashtag. For women — and women of color, especially — it can feel as though we’re screaming into a void.
Today, God responds to our laments through the prophet Isaiah, in the poetic language of promise: the Advent cadence of hope. Because sister, no matter where it’s been, what it’s done, or what has been done to it, our bodies are sacramental: (noun) An outward and visible sign of divine grace; something regarded as possessing a sacred character or mysterious significance; woman.
Any aggressor who acts or says otherwise can #ShutTheHellUp.
Isaiah 61: 1–3, remixed
1 The Spirit of the Living God is upon me,
because the Spirit has anointed me;
She has sent me to bring good news to the many-toned, variably sized, defiantly
dressed, high-heeled and bare-footed, too tired to give a damn, all-beautiful
women:
She will bind up their broken hearts and misused bodies,
proclaiming liberty to female flesh, locked up by Purity since Eve’s
name hit the news cycle and the First Murdoch declared war.
She does now proclaim a release, like climax, to the
re(op)pressed.
2 Woman, do you know that you are beloved?
Femme of every ilk, hear now that God has not forgotten you;
She has made her dwelling place in you and calls your body sanctuary.
Pure grace-power in your marrow, rising. In blood, flowing holy.
3 She will blaze a healing path for the trafficked and raped, for the cat-called and harassed, for the bought and sold and unwillingly circumcised daughters, for the put down and controlled, the boxed up and cast aside, the married-too-young and the so-called harlots who dared to leave, the idealized and the objectified; for the shamed and pregnant — or not, the shamed and sexual — or not, the shamed and fat, the shamed and proud, the shamed and single, the shamed and trans, the shamed and silenced, the shamed and beat down, the shamed and shamed and shamed and shamed; the shamed and She,
to give them — us, we — a new lifetime of relief.
A deep breath; chests expanding
in undomesticated freedom under the gaze of no one but God. Under the hands
of no one but the loving partners of our choosing.
Yes, She will blaze a healing path for sensuality instead of indignity,
enthusiastic consent instead of presumed submission,
sovereignty instead of demands and decrees writ large in every palely
airbrushed photo and misinterpreted scripture that Man ever made.
In a subversive turn of events women’s bodies will be called the oaks of righteousness — strong and ancient and mythically powerful,
the unapologetic planting and flowering of God, to display creation’s glory.
