God is Not a Prude
You & a peach tree.
God is not a prude.
He put peach trees out in the late spring under a warm sun for you. He put them out so when you came walking by, feeling the soft, fresh ground beneath you, still too cold to be barefoot, but you had to, you had to feel your naked feet on the earth again after all those months sheltered in shoes. You had to risk the muddy patches and sharp hidden twigs for this, the inevitable return to warm your feet again because you had to.
You had to come to smell the blossoms on the tree.
Are they not beautiful? Do they not make you feel… something?
Something like waking up again, although you have been awake all this time, it feels new again.
So, you breathe in that sweet blossom on the cold air with your eyes shut and the only thing in the world is you and the cool air and the smell of the tree, and the whole world has only ever been you and the cold and the tree.
You reach your arm up to touch the branches, you reach all the way up into summer where the air becomes warm just at this moment when the tips of your fingers find that first soft and fuzzy peach.
This is the first moment of contact, your flesh on the flesh of the peach.
In one second, a million options.
Leave now before it is too late.
Grab it and run.
Devour it before you even know it is in your mouth.
Rip it from the tree and throw it as far from you as possible.
Run home.
Warm your feet.
In this moment though, you hold fast to your courage.
You watch your thoughts move on the tide of an inhale, just you and those thoughts and a moment of courage never breaking your fingertips from the skin of the peach.
Who is holding who?
You breathe out, and with it, all the fear you could follow if you were not so courageous today.
If no one had ever taught you, or ever told you, if you had never found somewhere in a less known part of yourself, that you, and this peach tree, and the space between was God.
And how God loves to revel in your ecstatic worship.
Now that you remember, your arm seems to grow longer, the whole peach slides into your palm.
It is late summer.
You feel the peach warm, soft, and fuzzy, and that warm, soft fuzzy feeling extends from your palm down into your arm, tickles you around the ribs, slides down, and lands with a thud in your own ripe middle. You feel so much pleasure in receiving that you do not consider the tree.
How the warm soft touch of your hand on her fruit extends through her branches and tickles the tips of her roots.
You and the tree, ecstatic together, giving to each other.
You and the tree and a sun-warmed peach.
You feel so humble in your receiving, you do not consider all that you give, too. Once muddy toes, now tickled by the grass growing over tingling roots. Your soft warm mouth around the soft warm peach. You can smell the fading summer in that floral scent floating off this peach, whispering to you about her insides.
Your insides mingle together, sweet, soft, wet.
This moment is all there is and all there has ever been.
Ecstatic, sensational Life.
Life birthed from the death of winter and the cold ground into a peach tree. A bare pit sucked of juices and flesh. You drop it onto the ground—a peach pit for the earth, taken back by winter. Death birthed from a full life.
Who has ever known God could believe her a prude?
God ripens, entices, and pulls us out onto the ground despite the cold.
God made a world of pleasure. Of muddy feet, of courage and connection. God made a sun-soaked landscape and created oneness. God made peaches and flesh, and sweet juice, and then gave you tastebuds and fingertips.
Oh, the absolute rapture to taste a peach from a tree that has been warmed by the sun.
Oh, the perfection of God’s creations.
You, and a peach tree.
God made a world of pleasure here, among all this pain, that despite the fear and the cold and the recently barren landscape, there are trees here, fully ripened, longing for you as you long for them. Longing for your touch as you long to touch and be touched. Longing to give of themselves as you long to give too.
God made us a place of wonder.
God made us a place of wonder.
A place to play and to take in an abundance of pleasure. So that we may feel awake again.
To feel our feet on the ground.
To eat the fruit so that we may know.
We are here, for this short moment, to taste this life of longing and pleasure, because that is how to worship God.
If you’d like to read more of my work, please follow me here.
Thanks for reading! We’d love to receive your submissions for our new publication.
