No scene is quoted in my household more than this one, starring Raven Black (as Nina) and Paul Thomas (as Harding) in Taboo American Style 2. In it, Harding declares, “I’m still your father!” To which Nina responds, “You’re my lover!”
Why is this moment so sticky? For that matter, why is the whole Taboo series the most popular and long-lasting of all porno stories? Sure, it may have to do with this primal curiosity or urge to fuck family members, but I think it’s deeper than that. I think it has something to do with how we love. That there is something unsaid about the love of family, something about its hierarchical nature that keeps that love from being as whole and fulfilling as we seek it to be.
Recently I’ve been re-relating to Spirit, Source, God, Divine, whatever you want to call it: the animating force from which all things come, the Great Creator. And I find that I spend a lot of time worried about whether Spirit is happy with me. “Am I doing the right things?” I wonder. “Am I on the right track?” When I rest, I feel lazy or bad. When I am not working, I feel wrong and unlovable. But it dawned on me recently: these are not God’s values. These are my father’s values.
Growing up in a Christian household, there is much conflating of “God” and “Father.” My father was the God of our household, the leader of our Christian faith and understanding of it, and also very strict. It’s easy to see how, as a child, I got confused. My father was my God. Even when I left home, I still projected all the values of my father onto Source.
In the Christian tradition, no matter how loving, God punishes. He’s not supposed to, the God of the New Testament, taught to us by Jesus, is all loving, all forgiving, all good. But what is there to forgive if there isn’t some implication all we humans are sinners? Jesus’s portrayal as asexual certainly doesn’t help. Nor does the Church’s avoidance and condemnation of most sexual acts. And we see a petty, spiteful God in the Old Testament, one who picks favorites and punishes heathens; are we supposed to believe He left that all behind? I didn’t.
Curious that in patriarchal societies, God is a man or father figure, and in matriarchal societies God is a woman and a mother figure. I can see now these are also projections. Humans just can’t seem to imagine a force greater than, or more importantly different than we. But God is not male or female, and God is not a parental figure at all. No. God is a lover!
When I look out my window, I see a palm tree, a cat, grass, dandelions. How did all this wonder come to be? The way I see it, God makes love with the world. That love animates. That love creates. There is no womb, not even pain; just the process. There is no punishment, retaliation, or disappointment. God does not judge; that is a profoundly human trait. All God does is love.
Henceforth will I look on all things with love and I will be born again. . . .From this moment all hate is let from my veins for I have not time to hate, only time to love.
Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman in the World: The Scroll Marked II
How might my daily experience change if I thought of God not as a parent but as a lover? Well, like Nina in Taboo, the relationship is totally transformed. No more do I need to look to God for direction or approval. No, I’m not an equal, but I do feel empowered. Like Nina, I can walk with a level of assurance and confidence I never experienced in the other relationship. I feel lucky, chosen (indeed, there is no other me, and my existence is just happy luck of one in a 100 million sperm connecting with that one egg at the right time). I can see how God makes love to me and creates–creates these writings, creates art and poetry, co-creating my life experience and my soul’s expression. Much like my human lover, I enter a state of humble reverence, feeling the honor and specialness of God’s presence and care. Just like my human lover, I can assume God also maintains that loving stance toward me, rooting for me, loving me when I fall, not standing over me wagging a finger.
If God is my lover, I can let Life dote on me a little bit. Like Nina, I can enjoy all I’ve been given and let myself feel good.
Instead of judging–which is another word for hating–myself when I feel I’ve faltered, I can drop the hierarchy of “good” and “bad” in my mind and embrace that that all there is is me.
By affirming the essential worth of the forbidden, one disarms it of its power to pollute, degrade, and bind…In this way, one overcomes the distinction (or duality) of clean and unclean, sacred and profane, and breaks one’s bondage to a world that is artificially fragmented.
What we experience as disgusting, polluted, forbidden, and gruesome is grounded in limited human (or cultural) consciousness, which has ordered, regimented, and divided reality into categories that serve limited, ego-centered, selfish conceptions of how the world should be. Kali, in her rude way, deconstructs those categories, inviting those who would learn from her to be open to the whole world in all its aspects. She invites her devotees…to realize the state of consciousness in which all things are perceived to be essentially one… [to] contemplate their essential sameness. She invites devotees to dare to taste the world in its most disgusting and forbidding manifestations in order to detect its underlying unity and sacrality, which is the Great Goddess herself.
David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (82-83)
And most profoundly, if God is my lover, I am free to explore all this Life has to offer. The voices in my head telling me what I should want or what is allowable are wrong and I can overpower them. It’s all God. Einstein said, “I just want to think like God thinks.” But God does not think. God knows. How different life might be if we all trusted what we know, instead of what we think.
She does not waste time going to college, but follows her knowing straight to Hollywood.
I feel so grateful to be experiencing true, unconditional love at the hands of a human so that I can better understand the love of God. It’s a love that says, “I love you just the way you are,” and “I want to see all we can do, I believe in you and us.” A love that doesn’t react to my daily whims and woes. A love that is constant, unwavering, and wholehearted in its support, saying, “Do whatever you want to do, I’ll still love you.”
When God is my lover, I have nothing to fear.
Much love to you on your spiritual path,
Honey
