Matins

For twenty years of my life, first thing, early in the morning, I would find myself in a church or chapel chanting the psalms. Those 150 chunks of song were spread out over a month --in the tough old days, over a week!-- and I found a particular pleasure in them. They are not uniform, with a single message. You can find mostly every human mood in them, from exultation and a sense that all is right with the world to abject misery, rage and sadness. What Jung said of the whole of Scripture is especially true of them, that they are not only the word of God, but the voices of the soul. In a way I liked the Office, the set of simple daily services based on chanting psalms and reading Scripture, better than Mass. It appealed to my introversion and my intuition. It felt like sinking into an ancient river and letting it flow over you.

When I first visited my birthfather's grave, I read the Office of the Dead over him. In Latin, in the older form, the one he would have known when he was alive. Didn't seem right to disturb him with some new-fangled prayers.

Now I read the Internet every morning on my living room couch, with a cup of double-brewed coffee. Not a calming religious experience.

Been thinking a lot about reality of late. What's real and what's not. For a creature "ontologically inferior, morally weak and epistemically challenged," no small undertaking. A lot of "spiritual" people, who infest this part of the world like crabs, some kind of higher perspective is their chosen lens. Well, in the End and in God's eye, maybe We Are All One, but not on the street where I live. Passed a guy last night who had a T-shirt with the phrase "No Enemies" on it. Talk about arrogance. I don't see how it's either useful or good or right to act as if you are living somewhere other than you are. Planet Earth, not The Astral Plane.

Thinking about what's real, in relation to my recently deceased relationship, I think that B has set up his life so that no one really can know him. But then I realized that, being a Five, knowing and being known is A Big Deal for me. For a hedonist Seven, compared to feeling good and having a good time, it hardly registers on the radar. My issue then, not his.

People sometimes react against the typology stuff because it supposedly reduces the purportedly infinite uniqueness of each person to, well, a type. First of all, after you live on the planet for several decades, you realize that originality is actually pretty hard to come by. On the other hand, let's take Sevens. I have a pretty decent experience with four men who are Sevens. They exhibit a set of core compulsions with more variation among them as you move to the periphery. But they are all quite different from one another. One of them, the least mature and healthy, is a good-time Charlie with a lot of sex appeal, no sense of honor, a boy in a man's body and with a major drinking problem. The classical Bad Boy. And he showed the usual ironic migration of the Seven under stress, toward the One position, moralizing. In his case, he would lament the way the world was and opine on how it should be and use that as an excuse for his bad behavior.

On the other end, two Sevens who are in long-term relationships (one with a man, the other with a woman), responsible and creative, although restless of boundaries, both needing home and needing to flee it. Fidelity and truthfulness are not easy for them. At the risk of indulging in Five Pride, both of them show definite elements of the Five that Sevens become more like as they integrate. One is both an artist and a therapist, the other a spiritual teacher in a non-made-up religious tradition. But they both love a good time. Who wouldn't?

I won't talk much more right here about B; I sometimes skirt the boundaries of his privacy and the better part of valor right now is to discretely say that while he is a classic Seven, he is as different from these other guys as they are from one another. His flaws are typical Seven flaws --like my Five, his are rooted in fear--but he has in superabundance that Sevenish gift for creating pleasure, magic and play, even, or especially, out of the most ordinary of moments. That's partly why losing him --realizing that I did not have him-- is so awful.

One of the best and healthiest things I have ever done for myself as a Five is to finally be incarnate. One of the slow-acting benefits of working with my therapist was that in 2002 I went to the gym with a new attitude. And in the last eight years, physically at least, I have become a different man. And it is really only in the last four years or so that I would say I was pretty comfortable, literally, in my own skin. I was certainly sexually active before this new era, but since 2006 especially, it seems that another dimension in me opened up. Not only, but especially, in sexual connection, I can feel my soul living right in my skin. Incarnation. I am still a creature of the brain and of knowing. But I am also very happy to be an animal. For the moment, a healthy animal. And a male animal.

As Psalm 8 says, "When I see the heavens, the work of Your hands, the moon and the stars that You have made, what is man, that You should keep him in mind? Mortal man, that you should care for him? Yet You have made him little less than a god, with glory and honor You crowned him, gave him power over the works of Your hands."

When I met J back in 2006 and began that series of extra-galactic and transcendental sexual meetings, even though I acted like a man in love, astoundingly, I did not want to make that twosome bond with him. He was like a shaman and a mentor and a friend and although he was a powerful presence, he actually made me want to connect more with other people, in lots of other ways. That was part of why and how I met B a year later. Talk about powerful presences, in an unlikely package. As I said before, discretion here should be the better part of valor for now.

So endeth Matins for Friday, August 27th, the 19th day of the New Dispensation.