Women | everdeepening

For the last two years, I have been frequenting a restaurant down in Calabasas that has live music Friday and Saturday nights. One of the owners decided on Friday that I couldn’t dance there anymore. The band had come back on stage, and the floor that the DJ had filled up was emptied. I went out, as I usually do, and danced by myself, filling the floor up with joy. When I walked off, the party of twelve at the front table began applauding wildly. That’s when he walked up and told me to never dance that way again. I frowned at him, and asked “Why?”, and he just stalked off.

The bouncer came up and told me that, while he didn’t agree with the owner, he had been told to tell me that I couldn’t dance there. So I took my sweater and left. The manager intercepted me at the parking lot and made his apologizes as well. I asked him not to worry about it, and to have a wonderful holiday season.

The thing that cracks me up was that people have approached me and said that they had seen videos of me dancing on YouTube. The bands have approached me, too, just to say how wonderful it is to play when I’m there with them. So here I am, generating trade for this venue, never having hurt anybody in two years, and they basically throw me out.

While some rationale was put forward about liability in case of an accident, I have a sense that something else was going on. There’s a group of four gigolos that hang out there, and they’ve been really proud to make a point of setting the owners against me. One of them in particular is actually dangerous: his “come-on” move on the dance floor is to trip the lady and throw her over into a deep back bend. I’ve actually seen girls walk off the floor in pain. Recently I had a woman ask to dance with me, and the first thing out of her mouth was “no back bends”. I had a pretty good idea who had put that into her head.

Their problem is that they can’t pick up women when I’m on the dance floor. We just get this glow of joy going. While I’ve had women come on pretty strong, for me it’s not a sexual thing. It’s just the joy of feeling what women feel when they no longer have to fight off the dirt that the world heaps on them.

There’s a “Freedom From Religion” group out on Facebook that cross-posts to the Religious Tolerance group. I decided to go out and see what their dialog is like on their home turf, and the first post quoted a male sympathizer of the women’s suffrage movement. In summary, the quote said that the Bible was a piece of trash that never taught anything of value to anyone. The issue of the day, of course, was the admonition in Paul’s letters that women should be “submissive” to their husbands, which was used by some to justify the denial of voting rights to women.

I have to admit, until you get to Luke, the Bible is really not good to women. When I was at Torah study one day, a young lady got really upset about that, and I leaned over and whispered: “You know, you’re right. But the Bible is all about men’s problems.” We weren’t good enough for you ladies, and that’s part of why Daniel 11:37 describes Jesus as “the one desired by women.”

So what is the problem with men? Well, we’re designed to change things. Unfortunately, the easiest way to change something is to break it. I see so many men struggling with this, and I have to say, I have submitted myself. What’s kept me steadiest is the strong sense of feminine approval I receive when I try to fix things. Mostly, of course, that’s fixing people’s hearts, and women bring me a lot of opportunities. Not just to work on them: women feel things deeply, and carry people around with them.

So: thank-you for being what you are. Please just try to remember that you’re supposed to feel that way all of the time. And grant me the benefit of this testimony: the example of Jesus is what made me what I am.

Over the last fifteen years, I’ve had the privilege of being passionately committed to the service of two spectacularly beautiful feminine personalities. Unfortunately, as women like that tend to have a lot of dirt dumped on them, neither of them understood the depth of their beauty. In the second case, I finally found myself whispering across a crowded room, “Please, please, please. Please come into yourself. We need you here so badly.”

While I’ve been physically lonely for a long time, this process of calling beautiful women into the world has its positive benefits. I dance alone most Saturdays, but I dance with the joy of knowing that my loving is connected to a purpose that I find to be precious.

Many women respect that intention, but there are those that see my devotion as a resource to be turned to their benefit. The methods they use are pretty crude, and I have to say: after you’ve been sleep deprived for long enough, being beaten on by lust tends to lose its luster. So I really appreciate it when a woman approaches me with the attitude that she just wants to know what it feels like to step into devotion. Most of the time they finish dancing with me and go off into bliss with their lovers.

My most powerful experience of the impact of psychic wounding came under such circumstances. At the venue I haunted, a man in a rainbow tunic would show up occasionally on a field trip with a group of emotionally disturbed followers. One evening, I noticed a woman – let’s call her Deanne – staring at me. She seemed really timid, so I asked her to dance with me. When we got to the dance floor she announced “But I can’t go away with you or take my clothes off.” Realizing who I was talking to, I agreed. The song was a little forward, and Deanne looked uncomfortable. She agreed that she didn’t like the music, so I told her to come and get me when she heard something that she liked.

I kept on dancing by myself, and Deanne finally joined me again. Her movements were really wound up, and I just tried to invite her to move around into the space I left behind me on the floor. She began to play a little bit, and I had this strange sense of her opening up. Putting my hands on either side of Deanne’s head, I took hold of the threads of personality that she had wound up so carefully in herself, and attached them to the joy that my friends and I had built on the dance floor. I was overwhelmed by this glorious surge of energy, the likes of which I had never before experienced. Deanne just smiled and returned to her friends.

Scott Peck, author of People of the Lie, remarks that ‘evil’ is ‘live’ spelled backwards. From the physicist’s perspective, living is the process of investing the world with our spirit. Somebody had pounded Deanne out of the world, leaving her not even her body to inhabit. What happened that night, though, gave me an absolute conviction that evil is impotent in the face of love. That surge of energy was the joy of spirits welcoming Deanne back into the world. It was as though they had been waiting for her to reclaim them.

When we are first taught about sin, it’s as a prophylactic against evil. “Thou shalt not kill” definitely qualifies. Most of the Law of the Pentateuch (the Jewish holy books) can be interpreted in this way. The goal was to avoid corruption in the relationships between the people, the sacred land, and the God they worshipped.

The problem with the law is that it yoked guilt to evil: it created sin. This was the uniquely human evil that entered the world with the fall of Adam and Eve. Before that time, evil happened and living creatures just shrugged it off and moved forward. Man ate of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and began to ask “why?” From that point, whenever evil happened, our questioning minds looked for a place to affix the blame, and our materialistic tendencies led us to assign fault to the person that committed the sin.

When Jesus died for the forgiveness of sins, he sought to liberate us from this burden of guilt. As he put it “It is not the well that need a doctor, but the sick.” Implicitly, he is asserting “Who cares why it happened? Shouldn’t we just fix it and move on? Here: let me show you how love works.” In the most impressive case: the oppressor Saul goes blind on the road to Damascus and is healed to become Paul, the foremost Christian evangelist of his time.

Healing through love is the absolute bedrock of Christian ethics. Those that prefer to judge sinners might better focus their energies on learning to emulate the master that they adore. You’ll have a lot more fun when love moves freely through you. Assigning guilt just gets in the way.