May love wreck us. (Full Moon in Pisces)

I’ve been writing a lot this Virgo season about the mundane’s capacity to make space for and express the divine. In my last blog post I asked the question: how can you receive good things if you do not make room for them? 

Each full moon, in every season, shows up in the sign opposite the sun. Astronomically this makes sense, as we see the part of the moon in full light while we are directly in-between it and the sun.

Full moons also have a tendency to be mega emotional, as the moon represents emotions, and full moons are on full display. Today I realized that full moons might also be so emotional because they present us with the dialectic to the energy we’ve been working with in the season, and the stark contrast can be as overwhelming as it is illuminating. 

Again, Virgo season asks us the question: how can you receive good things if you do not make room for them? 

And the full moon in Pisces responds: when you receive the truly good things, they will break you open. They will wreck you. 

I write this amidst crying spells today. I have this person in my life. Many of you may know him. His name is AJ. We met 9 years ago and drove each other bananas for a few years. And then we got married. And then we decided not to be married anymore. And then we bought an orchard together with a friend because we wanted to stay together anyway. And countless, countless things have happened in-between.

AJ’s on a road trip right now and we will be apart for a total of three weeks, by far the longest time we’ve gone without seeing each other in this near-decade together. 

I texted him today, to tell him I missed him. To thank him for when he sprinted for two hours from one public transit vehicle to another six years ago at midnight when I had a life-threatening emergency. To remind him that four years ago we celebrated our marriage with all our friends from seminary. And we looked good. 

And then, overcome, I wrote, “I married you because you were in my bones. Our marriage was a declaration of that. And even though we aren’t married anymore, you’re still in my bones, and I now don’t know how to mark it or make it material.”

And maybe this is the cosmic joke, or warning, or promise, of the full moon in Pisces (sign of unconditional love, of letting go, of the metaphysical and the eternal). When we let good things in, when we let love in, it becomes a part of us. And sometimes, it can feel like a bomb and like we are a detonation chamber and that our little, mortal bodies cannot possibly handle what it feels like to know truly unconditional love. Love that’s as true as gravity, love that’s as real as your bones, love that sits at the bottom of your heart like a throbbing gold orb or like the weight of lead times a million. 

Virgo reminds us that our mortal bodies are capable of calling divine love into the world. Pisces reminds us that we are three-dimensional meat sacks that, no matter how much we strive, will generally be one word or one expression or one moment short of divine love. 

I think about how we tell little babies and puppies that we are going to “gobble them up” and how, as strange and cannibalistic it might seem, it makes perfect sense to express love through a desire to become one with something. When we eat, and our food becomes us, it’s about as close as our flesh can get to perfect unity, which recalls our cosmic (and Piscean) nature of total oneness without separation. Perhaps this can give more meaning to the idea of Jesus instructing us to eat his body and drink his blood to overcome sin. If sin is a function of how our 3D bodies fall short of the cosmic love which exists beyond parameters, then surely the way to overcome it is to work to overcome all needless parameters ourselves. 

It’s the Jewish holy days of Yom Kippur, and my friend Rabbi Lauren Henderson wrote a beautiful reflection:

I was chatting with my brother a few weeks ago, and we got to talking about the essence of Yom Kippur, and he asked the question that so many people have asked: Why all of this beating ourselves up? Where is forgiveness, and compassion, on Yom Kippur? 

In the moment when he asked me this, my immediate response was, “Forgiveness and compassion are the essence of Yom Kippur!” But of course, this gets obscured underneath the confessing and the chest-beating. 

Over and over again, throughout Yom Kippur, we return to the shlosh esrei middot, the thirteen attributes of Divine compassion, and so often this get explained as “God is infinitely loving and forgiving” without seeing the intricacies of each of these thirteen middot and how they meet us in different moments of our lives. So early this morning, I was inspired to write my own meditation on each of the 13 attributes, based on various interpretations from the Talmud and later medieval commentaries, and strongly influenced by process theology, where the Divine meets us in each moment of choice and lures us toward the best possible option, but we are always free to choose.

Adonai

I am the one with you in the moment before, when you’re struggling to choose the right way. I’m holding out possibility before you, open-handed, letting you choose.

Adonai

I am the one with you in the moment after, once the choice has been made, good or bad, extending the next choice, the next best option. I am the one still here with you in the moment after. In the doctor’s waiting room. In the driver’s seat. Staring down at the silent phone in your hand. 

El - God

I am with each person in this way, without exception. Feeling with you. Crying with you. Accompanying you.

Rachum - Merciful

I am with you at your best. I am with the surgeon in her operating room. I am with the PhD at his podium. I am with the judge in their chambers. I am with the Olympian and her jingling medals. 

V’chanun - And Compassionate

I am with the one in the jail cell. I am with the woman holding the cardboard sign and her dog on the street corner. I am with the disgraced, the despised, the cast-away.

Erekh Appayim - Slow to Anger

I am patient with the one who is ruthless, the one whom everyone else has written off as beyond hope. 

V’rav Chesed - Abounding in Love

I am the grandmother who folds you into her arms when you’ve skinned your knee, tears running down your face. I am the lawyer, walking onto death row to meet his client for the first time. I am the teacher who believed in you when no one else saw what you were capable of.

V’Emet - And Truth

I am the truth-teller. The reality check. The friend who tells it like it is, and you know in your heart she’s right. The sponsor who said, don’t trust the decisions and rationalizations that got you to this point. Trust your higher power. 

Notzer Chesed LaAlafim - Assuring love for thousands of generations

I was with your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents before you in their hardest moments. I will be with your children,  your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren in theirs.

Nosei Avon - Bearing Iniquity

I will hold you when you knew exactly the choice you were making and went ahead and did it anyway.

VaFesha - And Transgression

I will hold you when you said “screw it,” when you lashed out in anger without remorse. 

V’Chataah - And Sin

And I will hold you when you made a mistake, when you’d give anything to go back in time and change what happened.

V’Nakeh - And Granting Pardon

I am the one who washes it all away, the blood and dirt and schmutz and pain and longing. I am the one with the soft washcloth, wiping away your snot and your tears. Unlocking the cell. Unbolting the latch. Walking with you into the next choice, and the next, and the next. 

G'mar chatimah tovah - may all of your good intentions for this year to come be sealed.

I adore Rabbi Lauren’s reflection on the love of God for us, mere mortals, marked by particularity and difference and struggle and separation (for better or worse), longing for unification. 

Sometimes, our mundane, Virgoan existence falls short, and we feel it acutely. Sometimes we love someone so deeply that no utterance or ritual or institution or display can capture it, because it’s actually

just

bigger

than all of that. 

Blessed full moon in Pisces. Love is bigger than the sum of its parts. May we make room for love, may we summon love, and in turn may love wreck us.