For too long I thought the physical body separated our spirit-selves from God; now I’ve learned from the Bible God gave up everything to meet me right here, in the sacred ground of flesh and bone.
I wrote a book and called it Bread, Sex, and Other Devotions: Making Friends with my Body and God.
Every once in a while, I’d look up from writing it and ask myself why I was doing it. With a new political emergency every day, people suffering, a country divided, what does it matter if I or anybody else participate in such hippie nonsense as “making friends with our bodies”? Isn’t God, honestly, busy with other things besides watching me color pictures or whatever this involves?
As these questions rush in, an answer, too: in a word, no. God is never too busy to be with us.
Maybe that’s a nice sentiment you tend to brush past, but stop and hear this good news again for a moment. God with us, the God-man man-God, a bloody birth and a bloody death and resurrected hands still bearing scars: these are the physical facts on which our faith is founded. These are God’s once-for-all declarations that these dirt-bodies belong to all the world, and all the world belongs in God. God’s material creation is very, very good. For too long I thought my physical body separated my spirit-self from God; now I’ve learned God gave up everything to meet me right here, in the sacred ground of flesh and bone.
That means that if I’m not able to dwell here in this body, I’m missing half of what it means to be human. If I try to float about, pretending that my body is less real or less me than all my invisible bits, I lose much of what connects me to other people, to the planet, and to God. Here is God, trying to entice me to actually care for the bodies and soil and people and art of creation, while I try to prove my holiness by being above those things; or to guarantee my safety by keeping away from them; or to succeed on the world’s terms, and consequently make a disaster of them. Here is this gift, this miracle of a body, I spend my days punishing, denying, shrinking, ignoring, cursing, exhausting, overindulging, because I’m not willing to simply be here.
The creation is more than a failed experiment, the physical aspects of life more than incidental to God’s plan for the world. And when I discover this, I rather quickly find myself obliged to care about others’ material well-being along with my own. When I connect to my own body’s strengths and weaknesses, needs and gifts, its very-good, very frustrating finitude, I realize others’ as well. I lose patience for “spiritual care” that neither shapes real-world action nor nurtures whole people, that pretends at compassion but never eases bodily suffering, that requires superhuman virtue from people living in subhuman conditions. But this only happens if I know how to live my own life on a human scale—if I’ve forgiven myself for failing to be superhuman; if I’ve acknowledged my own pain; if I’ve made peace with life lived right in the midst of the muck.
And dwelling fully with my body is about more than a worldview. The more I become involved in the work of caring for God’s creation, the more I need my body to partner with me. Yes, I could run entirely on passion or guilt or adrenaline for a while, maybe a long while. But those inspiring forces won’t carry me across the long haul of loving the world. I have to be grounded down in my own core to withstand all the highs and lows of caring for others’ bodies and souls. I have to be healthy, good to myself, in order to pour good out from me. I need my body’s wisdom: my feet saying we’re tired or my gut saying this situation is dangerous or my backbone saying we can stand another hour.
At the end of the day, the most important thing I have to contribute to the world is not feverish activity, however noble the cause I serve. What the world needs from me is no more and no less than my one bright, humble being: this simple, beautiful person rooted and established in God’s love. But if I only accept God’s love for part of myself, pretending that my body doesn’t matter, we all miss out on what my body could have offered. If I remain forever at war with my ugly, unwell, disappointing flesh, I can’t invite others to the wholeness of accepting, embracing, and ministering through their own imperfections and limitations.
I hope I have never pretended to be an expert at all this. On the contrary, the depth and breadth of my struggle is what compels me to look for answers. I’m reminded daily that my physical self is small, slow, chronically ill, and comically young-looking. (Also my face is extremely asymmetrical.) But I am learning to turn my attention toward my body’s beauty, its steadfastness, its incredible healing, its irreplaceable wisdom. I am making experiments in self-respect and establishing habits of self-love. I’m sitting with fear of my body, impatience with my body, disgust toward my body, and asking them where they come from. I’m learning they never, ever come from God.
The longer I kept on, the more I could look up from writing the book and already know why it matters. I am finding that being created, inhabiting matter, is an adventure and an honor—in spite of, or because of, the fact that it’s also outrageous and absurd. I look up from the screen and I see beauty, miracle, in all the boring things and imperfect people around me. And as much as the world needs some solid political policy and an anti-racism spiritual awakening, I am seeing that those things may not even happen if we cannot take seriously the material effects of governance or confront the fact of our own skin. I am seeing that the world needs great actions and grand ideas, but it also needs good bread, good sex, and other incarnate devotions.
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