The tattooed temple: a home for the sacred and profane

While 27 needles in a tattoo gun jutted into my skin, I decided to celebrate having a body.

The alchemy symbol for Earth.

At two months old, babies typically discover they have hands. At 22 years old, I discovered I had a body. I can’t pinpoint the moment—it wasn’t characterized by a chorus of angels or levitation or even staring at a hand and labeling it mine. It happened gradually, possibly through a combination of bouldering and dancing and storing anger in my spine. Like a child singing head, shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, I had to learn where my body harbored each emotion. Sadness: stomach. Anxiety: chest. Joy: cheeks.

Heredity stunted my physical growth. Heretical as it sounds, religion stunted my physical awareness. Grains of Gnosticism filtered through my Lutheran upbringing and taught me the material world is evil. Sunday school messages both upgraded my body to a temple and downgraded it to a temporary holding cell for my soul. It has taken me years to unlearn these messages and understand my body is flesh and bone, stubbed toes and period cramps and hangnails. My body is a liminal space for the sacred and profane.

Director Martin Scorsese introduced me to the mingling of the sacred and profane. His films play with divinity and violence, with bloody mobsters and Catholic masses. My fascination grew when a professor placed author Flannery O’Connor in my hands. In her short stories, grace intrudes in the unlikeliest of places. These creators kick-started my lifelong wrestling.

Identifying as a spiritual being makes owning a body uncomfortable. I have felt riven between the realm of transcendence and the realm of mundanity. But when someone questions the realness of her own skin, she can’t affect anything real. I was told to wait patiently for God’s return so I could get beamed up to Heaven like a hokey alien blockbuster. A lot of life passes by in the waiting. Patience may be a virtue, but passivity is spiritual death. We're not here to sit in a lukewarm kitty-pool of acceptance while injustice and pain and beauty form a whirlpool around us.

As a 22-year-old woman, the resurrection story pounded into my head took on fresh meaning. I realized my God condescended to a human to experience the joys and atrocities on Earth. My God became carnal. My God exited the womb, screaming and bloody, before taking wobbly steps into this vast world. So, why couldn’t I?

The first time my fingertips provoked goosebumps on a man’s skin, I felt alive. The first time I vomited cherry Mcgillicuddy’s out a car window, I felt shame. The first time I paid attention to birdsong in the morning, I felt harmony. The first time I head-bobbed to sleepy folk music in a London pub, I felt God in the guitar riffs. A complexity exists between sin and holiness—and I’ve chosen to set up camp there. Not because I want to drink and cuss and seek hedonistic pleasure. Not because I’ve relinquished my goal of being a “good Christian” and settled for something more attainable. Not because it’s easier, but because it’s harder.

Splicing the world into good and evil is lazy theology. Things are rarely one or the other. But we often rely on this certainty so we don’t have to engage in the messiness of the human condition. When Christians create a black-and-white dichotomy, we strip the world of complication. By connecting with the profane, I’m exploring the good within the bad. I’m not concerned with rescuing people from darkness and bringing them into light. I want to poke and prod at the light that already exists in the darkness. My God isn’t limited to the realm of the sacred.

The cross, a symbol for the sacred.

As an 18-year-old woman, a man with a needle-gun tattooed a large cross on the inside of my arm. Four years later, a band across my bicep connects the cross to the alchemy symbol for Earth. My tattoo is an assertion of identity—one that has taken years of confusion and guilt to establish. Growing up, I had been too religious for my secular friends and too secular for my religious friends. I thought there was something wrong with the way I lived. I didn’t fit the archetype of the flaming evangelical Christian. I strived to be Mom, the most beautiful example of sacrifice and love I could fathom. But my faith manifests differently, and rather than feel inferior, I’ve learned to celebrate this.

Because of my implicit spirituality, I’ve rubbed elbows with the metaphorical tax collectors and prostitutes. I don’t bring God to them in hopes of conversion. They bring God to me in authentic communion. Communion with “The Other” doesn’t begin with the stiff-armed gesture of tolerance the church has historically presented. It begins with acceptance and results in love. Love without acceptance is thin love. I’m here, tattooed arms extended, offering radical love to the other flesh and bones stumbling around this Earth. No one can stop this goddamn body.

Shout out to Cam at Grand Avenue Tattoo. Check out his work.