Fleshing the Spirit: Spirituality and Activism in Chicana, Latina, and Indigenous Women’s Lives

Writing with Crooked Lines

23 My friend Father Eddie Fernandez, a Jesuit doctor of theology, once said to me in response to my worries about the possible errors and confusion that writing about hybrid spiritualities could cause, “God writes with crooked lines.” This is so, Father Eddie explained, because “Dios es bueno.” God is good. What turns up most often if you Google is the phrase, “God writes straight with crooked lines.” But it occurs to me that it isn’t just that God fixes our mistakes. God writes crookedly. The natural world and human nature as a part of it are neither really straight nor straightforward. The natural world is in constant motion—fluid, porous, changeable, inexhaustibly enigmatic.1 And our handiwork, the social worlds and all the cultural objects humans create within these, including our individual and collective ways of being through the cultural, are likewise continually improvised, never fully decipherable, contours. Spirit Writing Split as we are into various shades of unhappiness by the tension between undomesticated being and desire and how we have been socialized to be and want, we are taught to embody, to produce reality as binary.2 We live on the crumbling faith act, the historically specific aftereffect of colonization of the Americas and the rationalization of racialized, gendered, and sexed hierarchical orders in post-Enlightenment thought—that we are unrelated, gulfs apart from nature, from other people, even from parts of our own selves, as if Writing with Crooked Lines Laura E. Pérez Dedicated to my father, David “Miguel” Pérez Ordaz (February 4, 1931–April 20, 2010) 24 · Laura E. Pérez our interdependence on all these levels were fantasy, delusion, superstition, or the demonic.3 And so, swept away are the ancient cross-cultural imperatives to know ourselves, to be true to ourselves, and to care for others as our own selves.4 Discovering ourselves, nonjudgmentally, is dismissed as useless navel gazing rather than the indispensable road to respectful coexistence with others.5 Perhaps, therefore, the crooked lines of our living are a spirit writing, traces that life forces some of us call spirit(s) and/or Spirit(s) leave, testifying to that which is disincarnate in us, not quite killed yet not fully born in us, yet the marrow of our being.6 Traced in us and by us is a different alphabet, markings between and beyond the social text of dominant, dominating orders: a spirit writing. Winding, returning, spiraling and seemingly dead-ended jagged paths characterize the pilgrimage toward understanding that the (re)harmonization of the mind-body-spirit and the synchronizing of humanity to the rest of the natural world is sane, healthy, necessary, a craft work that is not solely personal, but perhaps the most pressing ideological and political work, the heart of the “decolonial.”7 Working to undo or shift to a different form of consciousness beyond the racializing, patriarchal, homophobic, and classist ordering of social reality and being in the westernized world is, by necessity, a journey through the dark forest of human power gone awry. The hypnotic suasion of ideological discourses of supposed superiority that have rationalized power and exploitation of one kind of human over another, and of humans over other beings in nature, dehumanizes us; that is, we are desensitized and alienated from what is natural within and to us. Social disempowerment occurs in tandem with disempowerment at the level of individuality, within our psyches, and more generally within our entire being’s multiple sources of intelligence and our capacity to “know” through our contact with human and nonhuman life forms. Gloria Anzaldúa (1987; 2002a) called this extrarational knowing “la facultad,” and “conocimiento”—“the faculty” and “cognizance”—but numerous writers alongside her speak of intuitive awareness and the multiple, simultaneous , complex forms of knowing that our different senses produce beyond the more obvious capacity to consciously reason through the intellect (for example Gardner 2006). Interpellating Love and Integrity Art, spirituality, and traditional popular wisdom rooted in timeless truths remind us that love is the source of all life, and its lack the source of error, psychological, somatic, and social suffering, and illness. The intention and Writing with Crooked Lines · 25 practice of loving care seems to be a fundamental, harmonizing expression of the natural, perduring, and enigmatic reality of which we form part, signified cross-culturally as energy, the vital life force, aché, qi/chi, shakti, kora, s/Spirit(s), and...