TW fic recs

These are both filthy and hot, but I'm actually bothering to rec them because of how they hit me emotionally.

Theosis by ceefax_the_sane.
An AU in which Ianto is a monk and Jack is researching Abaddon for reasons unknown. Hit me in a very strange personal place because of my own flirtations with the ascetic. Silent meals, communal work and an odd humor about is one of those things that's been a part of my life, albeit not in a religious context (the fact that we were once staying at a monastery, aside). This spoke to me in the stately part of my nature I will never be able to explain to you.

a lullaby, by unknown by resourceress
This is mindblowingly hot, but where it wins is for the praise and the aftercare. Sure, I want to come that hard, but mostly I want to be that spoiled.

what's next after IHNIIHBT

http://kalichan.livejournal.com/165258.html

hope

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/01/12/openly-gay-bishop-to-deliver-first-inauguration-event-invocation/

LJ Idol, week 16: Coloring Outside the Lines

I have a year I call The Black Year wherein I spent a great deal of time in St. Patrick's Cathedral and prayed a novena to St. Jude. And while my father is, officially speaking, Catholic, I was not raised with or within the church. My mother is Jewish and taught me the Hebrew alphabet with a plastic bubble of a device with a button on the top that scrolled through the letters when clicked.

Religion, though, was just a home thing, a family thing, and an awkward, all-consuming, freaky one at that. My father changed religions every two years when I was growing up. He had a guru and then a swami, read the Book of Mormon, was Muslim, attended Theosophy and now self-publishes the poetry he writes in the voice of Jesus.

It's a strange sort of relief that it's not just my father; the whole family is cracked. He has a sister who is mentally unwell and talks to Jesus, conversationally, at socially inappropriate times. And my late cousin was in the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's cult and was allowed to wear no other color but red. As a child I wondered if it was to signify desire, but I never had the nerve to ask.

Religion is the family madness, and for all my lack of faith, I have always sort of aspired to taking orders, in the -- let's be clear, here -- spiritually devotional sense. Nothing gives me a charge in places it's not quite polite to talk about in casual company about than the hideous complexity of vows.

Maybe I watched too much of The Flying Nun as a child or maybe I just wanted the Virgin Mary for a friend when I was twelve and visiting the cathedrals of Montreal, I don't really know. But ritual -- formal and high -- calls to me not like a siren, but like that asshole ex-boyfriend who knows you're always going to be good for one more fuck.

To be frank, I'm a bit uncomfortable with it, but mostly because for me, asceticism has always been some sort of strange and easy slide that no one was ever present to help me govern. Even so, it's also always been one of those things I like about myself best.

There is a clarity in living to a bell and a sensuality to things that are basic: the components of food, the weave of fabric, the rarity of speech. I've lived that way enough to know its truth -- even if it was in many cases only by virtue of inappropriate bargaining: I want this success; I want this lover returned; I want this financial woe solved.

And that, right there, of course, is why I'd never make any sort of decent postulant (original meaning quite aside) at all. I'm a bargainer, through and through. In fifth grade I told God I'd never ask for anything else if he gave me the role of Ko-ko in The Mikado. He kept up his end, but I didn't keep up mine, and even though I don't really believe in him particularly (I figure we're probably equally fictive to each other and if you want to try to sort through that paradox, be my guest) I still feel a bit bad about it.

In all sorts of ways that freak me out I am not unlike my completely batshit family. I go to Catholic Mass when I feel bereft; I go to pujas with Amma, the hugging saint, when I feel in need of strange signs. I have helped to raise stone circles and recited the names of rather unlikely saints. And I've made peace with animal-headed gods who seem to have a use for me whether I like it or not.

I don't talk about it, hardly ever. And when I do, I laugh about it, quite sincerely. It is ridiculous! And the religions that would have me are not harsh enough, not high enough, not full of the drama that grants me the grace of an economy of motion or a week without speech. It amuses me really, to live between worlds in yet one more way. I am afraid of dogs, but Anubis is my guardian of the road.

So I take my rough cloth and simple food in other places.

I take it in fencing and in dance; after all, I first learned to pray when I was eleven through the contraction of my pelvis and the baring of my throat in the supplications of Martha Graham's choreography.

I take it in Guitar Craft, where we always say "instructor" and never "teacher," lest someone like me lose easy perspective.

And I take it in the shape of my partner's absence when she goes on digs and my devotion to anything that has ever broken my heart.

I take it in my service to lives that have never been, and the ache in my knees when I pray in churches that would not have me and museums whose purpose I mistake.

I take it in the longing I can feel towards head coverings and prairie dresses, vestments and habits.

I take it in the way I've learned to walk barefoot so that each toe hits the ground individually and in quick succession, smallest to the largest, for it is not the ability to worship that I crave, but these acts of order in the face of the chaos of my flesh and fascinations, my hopes and simply terrible housekeeping.

It is beauty in details and precision, even if I pray the way planes go on the tarmac, not inside the lines, but right down the bright and sinful center of them.