Recently I came across a small booklet of photographs depicting a nude woman posed in a tiny Catholic church, photographed by a man named Evald Schadt. In one image, the model, who looks like an angel, is seated in a pew, praying passionately with her bra dangling from her clutched fingers. In another, she is lying in gentle repose on the carpet that leads down the church's main aisle, right before the altar. In another, she is relaxing near a portrait of Jesus and Mary, with her fingers laced across her womb.

The images are stirring in a deep and strange way, vibrating with a clear ray of Goddess energy and calling to focus the irony of the Church’s official position on sexuality. One moment the erotic energy pours off of them, and in another they blossom into three-dimensional images from some ancient religion, and then suddenly they are hilarious. I guess that makes them art.

The pictures were born spontaneously. One day Evald had been working with the model on a routine freelance project—posing her nude on a horse with a cowboy hat and gun, for a local tavern—and since they had a little extra time, they decided to work in the church, which they did without interruption for 90 minutes one weekday afternoon. Evald developed the film and published his work.

Four years passed. The priest and the parishioners found out about the impromptu art project, but nobody seemed to care that much. Sure, it was sacrilegious, but so is everything, and besides, the photos were tasteful and the girl was pretty and they had all known about Evald and his eccentricities for 50 years. So they let it slide. Or so he thought.

One day last year, the German police showed up at Evald’s door, demanded entrance, searched his home and studio and seized the prints, negatives, posters, catalog booklets and anything else they could find associated with the church shots. He, his wife and the model were brought up on criminal charges and ordered to appear for processing, and were told they had to pay huge fines or go to jail. Apparently there is some dusty old law in Germany against taking nude pictures in church, and this law was somehow interpreted to mean that the government had the right to breach his privacy, take his property and censor his ideas four years later.

Who knows how it happened. I am speculating, but my sense is that four years is how long it took for the photos to make it from Evald’s studio to high enough in the Vatican where somebody with enough clout burst a blood vessel and demanded action.

On one level, nothing surprises me when it comes to government or Church officials abusing their power. Government bigwigs generally think they’re God. And the modern Church, which thinks it’s the government, is built on Crusades and Holy Inquisitions and witch hunts and the execution of people for believing the world is round and that it revolves around the Sun. For these reasons, Copernicus published his ideas on his death bed; William Lilly published Christian Astrology, the first astrology text in English, on his. But on even deeper levels, the Church is built on the philosophical and physical ruins of the Old Religion that it conquered, and the Old Religion had some very different ideas about women than does the current one.

But this is old news. What really shocked me to my senses were some of the conversations I’ve had about this episode with people here in Germany. I’m not claiming my few discussions represent the statistical majority of Germany's opinion, though I kept stumbling across the same thing. And it wasn't simply that people were not outraged that this happened.

What I could not believe is that people seemed to understand. "Oh yes, well, it’s illegal and old folks find it offensive, so yes, the police just did their jobs. They were just following orders."

One evening after a poetry reading, a young woman approached me for copies of my poems, and we started talking, and I started to tell her about this episode and how amazed I was that people just seemed to understand.

Well, she understood too. She didn't think the pictures were offensive, or that the law was particularly brilliant, but old folks and religious people, well, they had a right not to be offended, and the cops had to do their jobs.

I tried to explain some basic civil rights principles and how especially in Germany you don’t want the cops getting too gung-ho when it comes to busting people for their ideas. But in a short time, I found myself bouncing off the walls, because she simply understood.

"Obviously, some people are going to be offended by the pictures, but that’s the whole point," I said. No response.

"If we follow the reasoning that ‘offensive things are bad, then don't we create the standard in society that if someone or some group is offended—not hurt, not injured, but offended in concept by the ideas of another person, they are now all to be stopped from expressing their views at the point of a gun? And isn’t everything offensive to someone? And once you have that as a policy, who’s next?"

And so on. She just kept shaking her head. The cops were just doing their jobs.

"I mean, there were other ways to handle this. The priest could have said something during the sermon about how sinful this all was." Well, no, she said, he didn’t really have that freedom. Ah, so he’s got a muzzle on, too.

"They could have had a meeting," I said. "They could have written a letter. But the police? The armed police? Defending the Church against an idea? Against a sheet of paper? Threatening to send people to jail? Raiding his home? Just what is the Church protecting? Why is it so scared? Why the display of force and the incredible fines and the threat of jail?"

But it was no use.

I’m going to let these questions stand for now, and share my real discovery. I learned that where the disagreements occurred was on a level so deep and so invisible that I had stumbled across something called values.

Values are the foundation of our whole mental and emotional concept of reality. They are not what we usually think of as "ideas" and they are not opinions. They are the concepts so deep within our thoughts that they have the power to shape everything we experience, perceive and understand. We all have values, but I believe that for many of us, they are often quite far from our awareness, which is why we put up with so much bullshit all the time, and why we can find ourselves so often agreeing with, or even advocating for, things that make absolutely no sense.

As I made the same arguments again and again, I began to love what I lived for, I made contact with something so strong and so alive inside of myself I knew that I’d walked straight into a whole different dimension of reality. I had found out what I really value, and loved myself for it.

There is an astrological point to all this, by the way. For the next three years, the planet Saturn, our old friend and buddy the Lord of Karma, will be moving across the sign Taurus. I believe this means there will be many experiences in our lives designed to create opportunities for us to make contact with our real values, both as individuals and as a society. And some of them may be pretty big. So, in case things get weird, and you’re wondering what’s happening, or why, remember that, and see how it fits.

Sign by Sign for July 1998