Catharsis
On purity culture, turkey vultures and spiritual evolution
Driving in my car today, I sped past a mangled coyote lying bloodied in the median of the highway. I’d seen it as a blur. Every time, without fail, I am filled with an ache. I hold my own quiet vigil at 60 miles an hour, feeling the pit of my stomach, taking a moment to share in the grief of another life lost. Moving through the world at this speed is a violence.
I think of the woman I know in South Texas who keeps thick leather gloves in her car for this very purpose: she pulls over, wrangles and hoists the dead animal into her truck bed, and lays him to rest next to a remote, secluded pond on her land for the vultures to consume in peace. My day dreams of living in a smaller, slower town where I could follow in her footsteps are interrupted mysteriously by a memory from this morning, also a blur. A dear friend of mine leaned forward, looked sweetly into my eyes and said in a quieted, serious tone, “I see such a purity in you.”
The word purity was thrown around a lot when I was growing up. There was no shortage of camps, retreats, books, rings, workshops devoted to the pursuit of purity, provided free of charge by the Evangelical church. The pursuit of purity, as it turns out, meant pretty simply, avoiding sex. At least, that’s how it appeared from the outside. From the inside, it felt a lot more complicated, vague, and unattainable.
One such purity retreat was hosted at a friends’ house. We were all around twelve years old, except for the eighteen year old mentors. The air smelled sweet in a bad way, due to the excessive number of air fresheners, and that about sums up the vibe. Around other girls, every girl’s voice went up a full octave, every word coming out shrill and strained. There was giggling and chatter, and I felt like crawling out of my skin. Without even fully understanding what exactly the standards were, I knew for certain I was not meeting them. Without any knowledge about the sexual exploits of my peers or our mentors, I knew for sure I’d done the worst. The keynote speaker of this retreat was a brown-haired twenty year old with short bangs who had come to confess to all of us sitting in a circle at her feet, like she was our guru, about how deeply she regrets having had sex. Nothing seemed particularly tragic or traumatic about her sexual experiences, but it was hard to put all the pieces together through her copious tears and labored breathing. It’s safe to say the point of her story was this: sex will ruin you.
At thirty years old, now I can see that it is shame that will ruin you, after all. I’ve come to expect shame peering over my shoulder in any kind of group setting, especially if it’s primarily women, especially if their voices get all high-pitched like that. At twelve years old, I didn’t know shame was a thing you could ever disentangle from your being, in order to hold it in your hand to be examined. I didn’t know that my feelings weren’t always telling me the truth about a situation– although at a purity retreat, shame is the name of the game, so it was likely telling me the truth about that situation, and I should have ran.
In fact, at happy hour with a dear friend of mine last week, she said, “Oh yeah I got invited to all that purity stuff, but I just told them ‘no way, I like sex too much, I’m not going to that’ and I never went. I kept going to church though.” My eyes widened in amazement, it never occurred to me that was an option! When threatened with hell or Disappointed Dad in the sky is involved, options become limited.
For reasons beyond obligation, I likely would have been drawn to the Purity Industrial Complex anyway. Shame about my own sexuality was ever-present, with no identifiable start date. I seemed to have been birthed into this world, clutching this shame in my hand like my own special, scalding treasure. I never questioned it, it was just a fact of existence– sex was a bad, dirty thing, before I even knew what sex was.
My mother, sister, and I took a rare trip together to Yellowstone, while my sister was living in Montana. My sister had recently married, and was in the front seat of our Subaru talking quietly to mom about the possibility of her being pregnant. I had recently read a (disgusting) book about sex that my mother had given me without a word- I flipped through it grimacing, looking at it with only one eye, unable to get through any one page fully. Finally I happened upon an illustrated diagram of a penis and a vagina and oh my god what were they doing so close to each other and slammed the book shut, tossing it across the room. After that, I avoided that god-forsaken book like the plague, walking in wide circles around it sitting there on the hotel night stand, side-eyeing it the whole time in case it grew teeth and lurched towards me. I never talked to my mother about it after she handed it to me, and she never asked any questions when I left it there on that hotel nightstand, confirming for the third time that “yes mom, I got everything.” We both silently eyed the book, my book, resting from and center on that night stand. She nodded at me, confused and uncomfortable, and we both walked out of the room with an unspoken agreement to never speak of it again.
Anyway, now I knew that babies involved something about penises and vaginas being way way too close to each other, and my precious, well-meaning (and much older) sister was talking about babies. And that meant one thing- she didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Because she was a decent person, and there’s no way a decent person would even consider doing that (it is a mercy that at this point in life, I still didn’t actually know the mechanics of sex). Interrupting their conversation, I leaned forward in between their seats and they were both surprised to remember I was still back there and apparently had been listening. With tears pooling in my eyes, I asked my sister, “But, do you know how babies are made?” They must not have seen the tears, because they both laughed and she said, “yes, silly. Of course I do.” Then my voice cracked and my entire world fell apart and I said, “Well there’s no way you could be doing that, then.” The pooling tears turned to streaming tears and I demanded my mom pull the car over. Before the car was at a complete stop, I flung the door open and ran over the tall grass, struggling to go as fast as I could and pull my knees up high enough to prevent tumbling forward at the same time. I hurled myself behind the tallest bush I could find, pulled my knees into my chest, hid my face, and wept. I wept out of confusion, dismay, and rage towards my sister- it felt exactly like she betrayed me. All of this was well before I attended anything close to a purity retreat.
So you can imagine that when I finally encountered purity culture, it felt like a huge, twisted relief that somebody else was reflecting back to me what I already knew: sex is terrible, sex will ruin you, and sex is to be avoided at all cost. Words like broken and wretched made all the sense in the world to me, and apparently sex was the problem, abstinence the solution. Thank god, there was a solution.
The only trouble was, I liked boys also. I liked their attention and affection. And apparently, to either earn their attention, repay them for it, or sustain it, you had to do things like kiss them, and sometimes worse. And if I was honest with myself, which I couldn’t have been, sometimes I liked kissing them, or worse. Thus began the torment of my adolescence as hand in hand, Disappointed Dad and I waged a holy war against my own sexuality, along with a great many other of my qualities.
Thank God for the entire sex-positive industry that exists now to dismantle purity culture and help people like me make sense of the havoc it wreaked on our sexual (and human) development. Thanks to a lot of therapy, and books like Pure and Shameless, I know first and foremost that I’m not alone in having shame as a foundational building block of my childhood and beyond. There was a time during my own reflection on, and deconstruction of, the lessons I learned in purity culture, that purity itself began to feel like a dirty word.
Even now, purity, in the context it was presented to me, was cheap. It represented adults- adults with a stunted sexual development and a theological misunderstanding of a Disappointed Dad in the sky who valued impulse control above all- imposing their shaming worldviews on vulnerable, naive adolescents. Purity meant abstaining from not only having sex, but also from being fully human. It meant fighting tooth and nail to shove your full Self into a one-size-fits-all, tiny-ass box. Bloodied, immobilized, and isolated you were left wondering if this shape you’re in was small enough or square enough for Disappointed Daddy, only to peek out of your tiny-ass box to see the goalpost had, once again, moved. Because shame was the point, as it turned out. Shame is an excellent means to the end of behavioral control, at least it seems that way at the outset.
Now, having cussed out Disappointed Dad and slammed the door in his face, and having befriended a more amicable and less offendable god (who is not overly concerned with impulse control), purity hasn’t crossed my mind in years and years. But upon reflection, my understanding of what purity does and doesn’t mean, has changed immensely. Thankfully, my way of learning has changed also.
Nature has always been our first teacher, teaching us about what is most true in this life, in this world. In nature we find the original Incarnation- God made plain- showing us how to live in a good and meaningful way, before we had language, written words, tools, wars. And no Created thing embodies purity better than our bald-headed, red-faced friend who has filled each of us with disgust at one point or another, the Turkey Vulture.
Another name for Turkey vulture is Cathartes Aura- emanating catharsis; purifying breeze. Catharsis: to purify, to purge. Perhaps my unsettling vision of the dead coyote body was right on point. Perhaps vultures are the emblem of purity, which of course, would mean we’ve had it all wrong. And of course, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Turkey vultures can smell rotting flesh from miles away. Their stomachs are armed with a substance so acidic, it wouldn’t be a stretch to compare it to battery acid. And this is their superpower- enabling them to ingest diseases like anthrax, rabies, tuberculosis, tetanus, gangrene, botulism- to name a few. As a result of their powerful gut microbiome, their excretions are anti-bacterial. Every time they defecate, they cover their legs with sanitizer. This enables them to stand directly inside of the decaying body of a diseased cow, without risking getting a lethal infection in their feet or legs.
Vultures are the immune system of our one, precious planet.
When vultures disappear, other scavenger populations explode. Unarmed with the same cleansing digestive superpowers, these scavengers spread diseases amongst their own communities, and eventually humans.
The irony is that vultures are the single most threatened group of birds on our planet. Here in Central Texas, this can be hard to believe. Some days, it feels like vultures are the only bird in the sky. But this is the reality.
The cause? Poisoning. Vultures have co-evolved over thousands of years with the naturally occurring diseases they miraculously digest, but they are not immune to the poisons we manufacture. This poison comes in many forms. Here in the States, the rapid decline and near extinction of the California Condor was due to “toxic lead bullet fragments in the gut piles left behind by hunters after animals had been field-dressed.”
In India, over 95% of vultures died between the mid-1990s and the early 2000’s. The cause was cattle treated with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug meant to relieve pain. It proved lethal to vultures, as hundreds at a time would be found dead after eating a single carcass. In the absence of adequate vulture populations, the feral dog took their place and their population skyrocketed. The result was a tragic rabies outbreak throughout India that killed 48,000 people over the course of fourteen years, and it is very likely these deaths could have been avoided if the vultures were still able to do their jobs.
Both of these ecological nightmares in India and the American West have been met with conservation efforts, resulting in a slow but steady rebound in populations.
In other areas of the world, though, the situation is more dire. In sub-Saharan Africa, newly available poisons are being used to control predators- lions and wild dogs (read: coyotes). These toxins are wreaking havoc on the entire ecosystem- who here is surprised by that? But, being the immune system powerhouses they are, vultures eat more meat than all or most predators combined, so they are naturally hit the hardest. Due to their slow reproductive timelines, it is much, much harder to recover a vulture population that is already declining, than it is to prevent these declines in the first place.
Our cultural opinion of vultures as repulsive doesn’t diminish the fact that they are one of the single most important species to have ever existed- protecting the health of an entire planet. Apparently, in the visible plane at least, only vultures are ordained for this sacred task. Every cell in his body is finely tuned to the register of the dying, decaying. Through his willingness and instinctual drive to consume what we despise and discard, he has become our purifying breeze. Through him, not a thing is wasted.
Looking back on the messaging I received throughout my adolescence, I see clearly that shame was the bathwater and purity, the baby. We can wholeheartedly drain the bathtub, but tossing the baby would be in bad taste. Purity in it’s infantile stages, is synonymous with abstinence or self-control, benefitting primarily us as individuals. At best, it can give us some guardrails- hopefully, maybe, preventing catastrophic damage to ourselves or others. If, at fourteen, we’re able to refrain from having sex with everything with a pulse, we’re less likely to get pregnant or contract chlamydia. That is well and good.
But if we get stuck there- influenced either by religion or societal expectations around good, appropriate behavior- and stay preoccupied with all the fine print delineating the Shoulds from the Should Nots, not only for ourselves, but also for everyone around us, a certain discomfort sets in. This is the necessary dissonance between that within us which wants to loosen and expand, and our own fears about what allowing those changes could mean for us. In other words, once the guard rails are in place, we need to find a way to move on with our lives, to grow up.
As Purity matures and evolves within us, individually and collectively, it naturally takes on much broader and more difficult tasks. It is no longer solely concerned with the individual; abstinence has nothing to do with it. All grown up, Purity has become unflinching as the vulture, and it’s chief concern is transformation.
In it’s evolved state, Purity is not defined by all the things we so dutifully avoid- externally, or more importantly, internally. The shadowy parts of ourselves we would prefer to ignore- carcasses in the ditch. We hope if we shut our eyes tight enough, the envy, self-absorption, superiority complex, perpetual fear, hatred will soon vanish in our rear view mirrors as we speed past. In the external landscape, we have vultures to thank for tending to the repulsive. Internally though, we must learn to embody that same unflinching attitude that not only acknowledges the shadowy parts, but learns to spend time with them. If we leave them to rot on the side of the road, that is exactly what they will do. These Shadowy bits thrive when they are denied or ignored; these are the conditions they are given most permission to rule our lives and influence our behavior.
So, with radical honesty and courage, we must acknowledge and digest them and in the process, learn to see them not as threats, but as trailheads that can lead us into a more whole-hearted way of being with ourselves and other people that is honest, compassionate, and deeply human.
We find that we, too, can take and eat- transforming what disgusts and threatens to destroy, into that which cleanses and protects.
Sources:
Meet the Scientist Studying Vulture Guts for Clues to Disease Immunity | Smithsonian Voices
Vultures Myth Buster - Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy
Why vultures matter – and what we lose if they’re gone | UNews