Untame your God: a poem by Chelan Harkin from Susceptible to Light

Untame your God.

Let her run through the wilderness

of your soul again.

Allow her to take off all her clothes – 

enough with modesty – 

she wants to pound her chest 

and drink moonlight through you.

Let her re-invoke the stars

back into each cell 

and give them all wine.

Allow her to unapologetically 

sever every cord of control 

and let you feel how tender freedom is,

how loving you can be without obeying 

anything but the pulsing truth

that’s eternally yearned

to sing out from you heart

inviting magic home.

I’m invited to let go of control and allow myself to enter the space where I am more fully myself. To welcome the cutting away of all that constrains me and makes me small, of all within that habitually conforms to the way things are and should be, to the unspoken rules that culture asks of me. 

It feels vulnerable and daunting, to allow this process to continue, to allow the remaining masks of myself, these safe places of hiding to carry on being broken, piece by piece and fall to the floor becoming the ground upon which I walk. 

I am beckoned by these words, they stir my soul beyond itself, they invite me to somewhere bigger, more expansive and beyond the space that I currently inhabit. They stir me to roar, to cry and shout aloud a yes that forms deep in the core of myself. 

I want God to run through the wilderness of my soul. I want her wild, unencumbered presence to run through me and upend what is stagnant, to run through me kicking up dust, disturbing the soil of my life that has become compacted and safe. I want the naked, swirling, twirling, immodest Divine to leap through me and pound herself on my chest. I want to wake up more and more and more until my eyes are wide open. I want to wake up to myself – the truest version – and I want to wake up more to the glory of the world in which I live, in all of it’s beauty and chaotic mess. 

I notice the trepidation that exists between the desire of longing and the vulnerability of being so much “me” without apology. The trepidation that hesitates, at times, to let myself be fully me and fully seen as wild and unencumbered. I don’t yet know who that me is. What may happen if I fully surrender to this pounding her chest and drinking moonlight through me? What if I open wide and welcome her immodest stars and wine to fill each cell? Who will I become? What wild, dancing, untamed glory will unleash? 

I welcome the severing of every cord of control, I invite the feeling of tender love and I say yes to learning how to obey the pulsing truth within. Divine Love meets me, meets you, here in this tentative yes, this opening of hand and heart, this deeper surrender. I invite the song of my heart to grow stronger in its untamed glory. I shake and roar into the dark night, into the illusion of being remotely in control, I untame my God and invite magic home.