The Minor Miracle of St. Ignacio

A confession of perspective, by Chu.Chas

It is important that you know he fully embraced his imperfections. Talking with him and assessing his demeanor, it was clear that he took responsibility for his many weaknesses and failures, and I sense he was fully committed to a practice of truth and love. To avoid confusion it is best to be clear that the ‘I’ heard in this story was used when he asked me to listen to him read a draft letter of apology to his friends. That the ‘I’ that will follow refers to that tortured fellow who had the first-person experience and felt so sad about it and its deep cultural and societal antecedents that he needed to clarify the event even to himself, in writing, and to ask his friends to consider the odd unfolding of shock, and to clear the air. He gave me his permission to recount this tale.

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Dear Friends,

I was disappointed that I never got a chance to apologize to both of you in person. I approached both of you separately with a request for a ‘family meeting.’ A meeting to address the event by getting everyone together before I was scheduled to leave your hospitality for my own home in Virginia. But it did not happen. I tried to feel for a correct moment that never occurred, and now, with no other option, I can only hope the delay will be for the best. As it turns out, I was already compelled to write about the actual events, not as an act of contrition or confession or penance, but because it is a good adult story and funny in its poignant absurdity.

With good intentions, dear friend, I ardently wanted to reach out with opportunities for your wife to get to know me. I have always felt she held me at a distance, perhaps the result of a bad impression I had somehow made on a previous visit? So I was hopeful when she supported the idea of my slideshow of our adventures in Baja delivered by smart phone to your television. But who could have expected such a benign travelog to have such a dramatically bizarre last scene. At this point we might all agree to call my attempt at reaching out to your wife; as children might say, a ‘huge fail’!

The event, the brief angled ‘vision’ of a close-up torso of a generously endowed unclad woman, you are being asked to believe, startled me as much as it startled both of you. That moment had the awkward emotional quality of walking in on a teenage boy, maybe these days even a teenage girl, disturbing a private vulnerable moment of personal pleasure that regrettably and unfortunately can bring guilt and shame and self-loathing…about something natural. I am of a mind that rejecting worldviews instilled in us as children can, at least in the intellectual realm, be successful; but I have experienced emotional reactions that betray the intellect, and I react with feelings built on sensitivities and prohibitions pounded into my heart by experience. It is sad but true.

I am very sorry that I inappropriately displayed sensitive materials that, if they do not offend, certainly shocked. I would never intentionally disrespect friends, or the wife of a friend, with that kind of joke, but pure stupidity and senile inattention are certainly realistic possibilities and more likely causes for this surprise than sophomoric intent.

I ask for forgiveness and compassion, and if you will permit me, I would appreciate a chance to avoid a certain lingering image or impression in your minds, however fleeting. An impression associated with the feeling that I am simply a ‘dirty old man.’ A true character assessment of me turns out to be far more complex than such a limited stereotype based on limited information, but we are creatures of snap judgement.

My ongoing spiritual practice is to be honest and loving, even with myself, and part of that practice includes creating space to choose how to respond to an event of ‘fierce grace’ when it comes my way to point out where I am stuck—where I have spiritual work to do. So I really had a good laugh about how totally perfect, profound, and poignant was the embarrassing moment we shared. My lingering, seemingly foolish, but apparently real, attachment to sensuality at my age, openly exposed. Priceless, utterly priceless vulnerability.

What you, Dear Friends, could never know is the background narrative that might mitigate damages and soften the final judgement. The story of…

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Mona and the St. Ignacio Minor Miracle

Regardless of how politically incorrect it may be, I would have to lie to say that I never choose to look, in the appropriate context, at naked women. As one gets older the opportunities for that earthly delight get fewer, but I share my phone photos with children, adults, family, and friends. I intensely dislike drama, and so I never use my phone to store photos even for medical reasons as in documentation of rashes, swellings, tick bites, and weird moles. There is no need to use my phone to store images to help refresh my memory of the diversity and appeal, for me, of the naked female form. To store them on the phone is not necessary or wise or prudent.

However, I am compelled to share that I feel blessed that my attraction and response to women is clear and present. LGBTQ+ issues seem far too complex and stressful for me as a necessary starting point for sensate fulfillment. And yet, even I am amazed at the durability of my attraction and response to women.

I expose my heart to you to offer that, truth be told, I have rarely been a man who was successful at meeting and wooing women so that, beyond their mere consent, they wanted to be naked with me. I have never been able to seduce a woman in that way outside of marriage, and only occasionally inside of marriage. I respect women too much, more likely I simply do not sense the way to push the issue of intimacy, and yet it seems to have been an expectation of ‘real men’ to be initiators, to push that boundary. And so my experiences have been modest. More accurately, monkish.

Apparently there is an elusive balance of the forces of give and take, advance and retreat, in an area of human interaction that has gotten more complex as we have trained our daughters to be assertive: to be intolerant of disrespect, and empowered to determine the boundaries of their pleasure without harassment, and to choose whom they will invite to play. All these changing social norms are confusing for me because of what seems like my chronic debilitating naïveté. I would be grateful for maybe a medical condition, such as Asperger’s, ‘sensitive temperament,’ or some other mysterious syndrome outside of my control. Or perhaps simply being a dolt? I expect that now is the ideal time to deflect responsibility and blame forceps delivery and the failed socialization of a dysfunctional family? My parents’ fault!

So, Dear Friends, it was a unique experience for me when an age-appropriate, attractive, vivacious, and assertive woman seemed to be treating me, in the common phase, like a ‘boy toy.’ I am single. My long-time friend-girl does not seem to want, or I fail to induce, expression of her sensual or sexual nature as part of intimacy with me. And the worst of the already tragic is that I have not been able to drop my desires. At the same time I am loyal and faithful and believed that only one element, human intimacy with my woman friend, was keeping me from moments of earthly bliss. Shoot me. Really, please do. Please, put me out of my misery.

I like women. I would willingly sacrifice myself, if consent was openly mutual, to share pleasures of the flesh as a friendly service-oriented ‘beck and call’ boy. Those opportunities are so rare that celibacy is imposed on me against my will. I can think of no paradise on earth better than occasional adult fun within a committed and loving relationship where intimacy can flower into joy. It is my fate and my experience that now, when I have resources and time, that such lovely joy escapes me. It is a weakness that I feel sad about it. But…here comes Mona.

For the first time in years I felt normal healthy arousal in my body. For forty years in a health profession, seeing bodies, I, of necessity, inhibited this response. It was she who initiated the adult play! This I offer to you is the minor miracle of St. Ignacio.

“Let’s take pictures together, I will show cleavage.”

“Take a video of us dancing…”

“Take a picture with our heads together.

I felt no barrier to following her lead as she sprawled and crawled on her back across the bar to write her name—under the lintel over the outdoor, rustic bar. The lintel that held party lights. After she finished her obvious display of her amble figure and moved off the bar, I moved to comply with her wish for me to contort and invert to sign my name, and then, at her request to add a heart between the names, her comment was, “You take instructions well.” I enjoyed the surreal nature of the evening and willingly allowed the evening to unfold. This type of fun never happens to me.

Ah, yes, and it is so true to my character that I assumed she was uninhibited by drink, and my protective instinct was activated. We bantered a bit more about meeting in Los Angeles, and eventually I made sure she was safely escorted to her yurt and her travel girlfriend, and I hugged her goodnight.

I had spent time helping Mona understand the route to Tony’s whale watching. The route was so poorly marked and out of the range of GPS that even you, my travel buddy, and I had moments of doubt about being on the correct road, taking unmarked turns on the desolate, unique, sunny, and beautiful landscape of salt flats along a wide bay contained by distance mountains. She made a game of questioning my instruction to her to trust herself… there being only one main road and to turn, left, when that dirt road offered only one unequivocal left or right turn at a watery shore.

And so, later, it was natural to follow up to see if a fellow adventurer got to her destination and if she got closer to the whales than we did. She shared a good video of a very close encounter of a whale coming up to her boat, which I shared with you.

We were going in different directions. You and I were on our way back up to northern Baja, toward wine country. Mona and her girlfriend were heading south. After a few days I sent a respectful text of compliment, offered my willing slavishness in the service of her pleasure, more as a joke than a commitment, and assumed it was the end of our flirting. A few days later, I got an informational text with a bunch of attachments that I did not open since the tone of the note seemed distant. Disappointed, I apparently hit the download check mark that would put the ‘hotel’ pictures in my phone. Pictures from her that we later identified as the hotel that your wife had mentioned earlier as a nice place to stay near Loreto. I had not bothered to look at her pictures other than the first ones—more hotels and scenes. Boring. We were traveling and I just kept shooting pictures. Valle de Guadalupe in the wine country had beautiful scenery. I do not have a habit of viewing all my photos as I take them, to delete the bad shots of the inside of my pocket or my foot, or delete simply poorly composed pictures: I usually wait until the end of the trip.

So your Honors…as I stand in the court of social judgement…what I remember of that brief embarrassing discontinuity were a few pictures Mona had shared of her hotel and surrounding beauty scenes…and then…a view of profoundly large naked breasts that were consistent with Mona’s figure. In that brief glimpse, as I struggled to remove the image blazoned across the large screen television as it seared in our memories, and I saw your wife cringing.

I recall that it seemed to be a photo taken of another phone showing adult content, angled in a way that was not at all in the aspect or orientation of a screen shot that I could take? Unfortunately, the picture was deleted in the heat of the horror of inappropriateness, and so the evidence is gone. I ask you to rely on my frightened memory.

Now at a calmer time, recalling the event, the richness of male imagination might wonder if she is the type of woman who might post pictures of herself, and that I missed out on a wonderful gift and a not-so-subtle message? Oh dear, such a loss, such a fantasy.

A certain type of woman might ask me, “And what sort of man would want that sort of woman?” Is that a trick question?

Of course, I could be lying to myself about the picture, preferring to blame others, a tactic I am not above. Knowing Mona, a Californian, even briefly, I can believe she might ‘punk me’ with a playful tame teasing text without words: “See these? …That is as close as you are going to get!” Because, you see, there is always the issue, the barrier of the prestige of profession.

At the bar she brazenly came up to me and started flirting. She had made some sort of assessment of me after overhearing my conversation with two management professors. I was giving them a hard time about the limits of their business doctrine of ‘value creation’ when it is based on a disharmonious rapacious destructive relationship with our Earth.

She asked me, “Are you a pilot?”

These days I have learned to quote my business card, “I am an Itinerant Philosopher, Yoga Teacher, Sorcerer, and Handyman.”

She asked, “What is a sorcerer?” The word is a conversation starter.

Yes, I have learned the hard way. Even in these modern times, when a man says he is a nurse, all too frequently conversation takes a polite nosedive. Whereas meeting a female nurse has for decades evoked a wonderful range of possibly naughty and nice attributes, no one seems interested in the thoughts of a lovingly compassionate male nurse who respects and admires women. Plenty of human beings would prefer to bask in the glow of status by association…with an actor, musician, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, or pilot.

A tragic comical predicament: Now I think of embarrassment as a gift. Given that the spread of STIs is growing at a steady rate among seniors, it is time perhaps, to appreciate that there are both old women and old men who want to ‘roll in the mud,’ so to speak, if we must view our wonderful humanness with such disdain. Perhaps physical intimacy is not at all what some religions label as ‘dirty,’ but a healthy aspect of being human. A relief to those who are lonely and need the comfort of human touch, and a joy to those who contain that, oh so brief, experience of having a human body in a loving relationship.

But most certainly there is a time and place for everything—if we were in Paris I could turn any corner and a piece of art would remind me of the female form, certainly the torso, in champagne glass glory. Regrettably and unintentionally that corner was turned in your living room. For that, dear Friends, I apologize.

All the Best,