Intentionally taking up space. Stretching my arms over the backs of chairs. Using the damn armrest. Legs crossed like a dude. Stretching. Breathing. When space doesn’t fit me, I do what it takes to be comfortable. I quit apologizing for having mass.
Because here’s the thing: the space outside my 2-foot radius doesn’t belong to *everyone else.* It belongs to *everyone.* And there is enough of it to go around, and enough for *me* to go around having whatever size body I have, in whatever size area I need to be comfortable…
Maybe you don’t mind sitting prim and proper and staying in the box. But this world needs you to take up your space. To advocate for your body and its needs. And the person “behind” you—the woman with less privilege than you have? She’s waiting for you to become someone who takes up your space—someone with the courage to fight with her to take up hers.
When the comments began flooding in on the Instagram post, I had to laugh at myself. I had wondered if I was saying something a little obvious, something others had said before. More than one person can say the same thing, I reminded myself. Go ahead and take up the space.
The chatter and excitement reminded me that we don’t get to talk enough about how loving ourselves subverts patriarchy. We’re all still learning how to develop joyful and life-giving practices of resistance.
Maybe some of us read or learn about “the patriarchy” or share serious stories about gendered violence. But maybe we forget to put the same amount of energy into discovering a new way of being. Amidst our (completely legitimate) anger and frustration, when do we get around to celebrating equity?
Is activism a dour thing we do, then take breaks for guilty moments of “self-care?” Does having fun and feeling good mean you’re unserious about dismantling patriarchy? Is imagining a new world something we can only get around to once we’ve already conquered sexism (and racism and homophobia and ableism and ageism and…)?
Or can something as simple as a stretch, as joyful as a dance, begin to usher us into a world where everyone is free?
This world is hungry for a different story, and we need a lot of practice to live into it. This work of changing the world is about embodying a better way of life—so part of the work is to share our practices for living the truths of our own dignity and worthiness.
I believe this with all my heart—I wouldn’t do this work if I didn’t think it was fun!—yet still I sometimes struggle to know how to begin a piece with a story of life instead of death. I forget to offer the vision of love and freedom that lives beyond today’s sorrow and rage. I forget that my experiences of joy are as unique and as important to tell as my experiences of pain.
At Pentecost, I preached about the Holy Spirit—a force as uncontrollable as fire, as all-pervasive as the wind. The Spirit, like our breath, lives within us and around us, between us and the creation, flowing through life and sustaining life, even in the moments that seem tired and ordinary. The Spirit sometimes fills us with a fiery power to rise up to an extraordinary occasion—and the same Spirit transforms us in mundane moments, speaks to us about actions as small as breathing deep and stretching on the subway.
The Spirit who liberates is teaching us, day by day, how to exorcise the demon of patriarchy from our systems and societies, sure—but she is also freeing us from patriarchy’s grip on our own souls.
In a world that teaches women to view ourselves through men’s eyes, the Spirit is reintroducing us to the very good bodies God made. She is inviting us to un-welcome the spirit of objectification and contempt we so easily adopted as children, so we can recognize and dwell in our own beauty from within.
In a world that teaches men to fear femininity, the Spirit is speaking strength and wisdom over men’s emotions. She is teaching you to reconnect with God’s gifts of emotion, creativity, and connection, so you can rejoin yourself in the hidden places of your heart and know the joy of true community does not have to be so rare.
Stretching out in auditoriums and airports is not simply “self-care,” if self-care means filling up some sort of gas tank of indulgences between items on our to-do lists. Making friends with our bodies and ourselves means bringing a more centered and well-equipped presence to our work and to our rest, to our activist-y actions and our closest relationships. It means finding integration, worthiness, and connection even in the midst of moments of exhaustion or oppression. It means in times when we can’t be “out there” making change and feel like we have no power, we are still making active choices to make our corner of the world a better place. It means embodying hope within ourselves.
Taking time to know and love ourselves is also part of how we keep from burning out. When comfort, strength, and dignity come from the Spirit’s work within, no hardship or hatred can take it from us. We love our enemies, not because we “should,” but because we are living beyond their world of us and them; we are living into a new world of belovedness. We can make space for anger and sadness without being ruled by rage and despair.
When God invites us into a life of flourishing, God isn’t asking us to teeter in an anxious “balance” between our individual well-being and the shalom of the world. Just as our connectedness means the liberation of others brings me life, in the same way, my own growth and joy contribute to the life of the world. The practice of making friends with my body and God is choosing to live good news within myself; choosing shalom in the small things that are everything; discovering that the joyful, whole, free-indeed kingdom of God can exist within the space of my body.
It’s making a life of freedom and joy and love part of who we are, not something we strive for. It’s bringing the gift of our whole selves into our relationships, communities, and work.
It’s allowing the Spirit who connects us to creation, who is rattling systems of injustice down to the ground and healing the wounded, who whispers God’s voice to us and empowers us to join together in community, to also bind up the pieces of ourselves within the most sacred spaces on earth—our bodies, this right-here life—called good.
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