Truth-and-Darkness                                                            Page 47

The image of the "truth of my body", associated, as it is in this poem, with

physical birth, is compelling. This is naked truth. This is waves of pain,

unutterable hope, breathing and screaming and bleeding, on the edge of death

in a massive surge of life - "the realm of the absolute event." The "truth of my

body" is as close as we can come to truth.

It is through the body and its senses, all of them, inner and outer, that we come

to intuit and create images and symbols of the divine. It is in the body that

mind, imagination, feelings, memories, intuitions, emotions, language live and

grow. In our bodies we relate, love and create. It is the female body and

female sexuality that is central to the poem "Ishtar":

...female sexuality would not, I suspect, be so feared or found so

fascinating if sexuality, both female and male, had been accepted in a

more open and healthy manner both as a human good and as an

important way to model the activity of God in relation to the world.⁵⁵

The truth of the body, the truth of human sexuality is inside our own skin,

flowing in our blood and in every breath we draw. It is in how we relate to

others and to the whole "body” of creation - to "all things that glow and move,/

all things that change and pass". ("The Maker" C.P. p.29) The body is the

storehouse of both truth and darkness, love and death, life and destruction.

Traditional western spirituality has given a strong impression that truth resides

in the mind, in an abstract way. The '-truth of my body in "Ishtar" is in flesh

and blood, bone, water and nerves, birth and pain. These are images of God

incarnate, God in relation to the world.

The poem ends appropriately with a question :

then why is it that when I at last see your face

under that hood of slate-blue, so calm and dark,

so worn with the burden of an inexpressible knowledge -

why is it that I begin to worship you with tears?

⁵⁵ Sallie McFague. "God as Mother" in Weaving The Visions. Ed. Judith Plaskow & Carol

     Christ  (New York: Harper Collins. 1989) p. 140