Being Fully Alive Means Taking Ownership of Our Rainbow of Feelings

“I am the true vine, you are the branches. He who lives in me and I in him will produce abundantly… My Father has been glorified by your bearing
much fruit and becoming my disciples.”

John 15

In my lifetime I don’t know of anyone who has borne more fruit than Carmen Miranda. OK. Laugh for a moment. After all she was “The Lady in the Tutti Frutti Hat.” But she was also the most vivacious person I have ever witnessed. Her eyes were so big and bright and her beaming smile was as large as any movie theater screen she ever graced. The joyful electricity of her inner-spirit was also vividly expressed through the brightly-colored costumes she created for herself, and the energizing ever-happy samba songs she sang and danced to with great gusto.

Everything about Carmen Miranda painted a radiant portrait of a person who was fully in-touch with herself, with the Spirit of God within her, and who was fully alive. She wasn’t afraid to live her feelings and to live life as God intended. She was a living branch that shook the Vine!

If we are to be living branches on the true Vine, we have to be fully in-touch with our feelings—all of our feelings—like Carmen Miranda seemed to be. Joy was her trademark emotion, but she was often serious and even explosively angry in her film portrayals. One moment, bright as day, she could be singing and dancing to “I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like You very Much)” and the next moment she could be chasing Caesar Romero around a casino like a wildcat after a rabbit.

I realize that movie portrayals are partly fictional, but Miranda was brought into American films to largely portray herself. In her first film, “Down Argentine Way” she is featured as Carmen Miranda, Brazilian entertainer extraordinaire. Likewise in her second film, “That Night in Rio,” she also plays the role as Carmen. In documentaries about her, people who knew her say that she was very much an effervescent person. They say that when people walked into a room where she was present—even before she was famous—they were naturally drawn to her positive spirit.

There was nothing bland or gray about Carmen Miranda. She wore her feelings like a vivid rainbow. Unfortunately, many of us in Western culture do not do the same. We are taught to be reserved and stoic. We are told not to wear our hearts on our sleeves, and we learn at a very young age to control—and hide-- our feelings from others. Many of us then grow into adults who are like colorless rainbows. We are simply gray and there’s nothing attractive or enticing about a gray rainbow.

If we want to be fully alive as vibrant branches on the True Vine, we have to be in-touch with ourselves and all of our feelings. This includes those feelings we have designated as “good” or “bad.” All we have to do is ask the Holy Spirit to help us. Once we allow the Spirit to come alive within us, we will gradually begin to experience and express our unique rainbow of feelings. Feelings animate us and bring us to life. They cast out the gray of cardboard cut-out people and bring the limitless vivid colors of our personalities to light. When we are fully aware of our feelings, we come alive as the real people that God created us to be. We then become real, thriving branches on the True Vine, like Carmen Miranda was.