I Am The Good: The Truth of 1000 Tongues

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Sin penetrated Jackson's skin at puberty, split her body, soul and sexuality into disparate pieces and fueled insecurity and unworthiness. Jackson's memoir tells the story of her Grail-like search for soul where she faces "sin" head on, fights through its toxic fumes of shame and guilt and claims as the Good her sensuous, sin-free body. A bawdy book. Told with humor, dead seriousness and dashes of irreverence, Jackson’s narrative explores the ways in which religious doctrine penetrated her female body, influenced major life decisions and sent her on a long search to name and claim divinity as her birth-rite.

 

            Jackson, who was raised Methodist in Southern California, describes the earliest stirrings of God inside her body that morphed in her teen years from loving spirit to sin police who placed her budding passion on house arrest until she married. Forced to take sides in the battle between God and hormones raging beneath her skin, Jackson chose passion and pushed God aside. Even so, her search for divine blessings never waned.

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            Her book shares her story and offers concrete ways to uncover and heal from all the ways in which female sin and shame, taught by too many religions, seep into female bodies, whether or not they are a church-goers. These admonitions and shamings are in the zeitgeist, and we ingest them, body deep, where they negatively impact our mental and physical health and well-being. "When the lips are silent, the heart has a thousand tongues,” wrote the Sufi Poet Rumi. The thousand tongues of Jackson’s heart had long whispered the presence of God. A truth she overrode for many years. When she finally trusted the multiple dimensions of mystery that her eyes saw and her ears heard, the 1000 tongues of her heart sang her home, to her body, where God had been waiting all along.

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