Over the course of the last week, I’ve started visiting church members again. Now that I have my vaccines, and they have theirs, I’ve started sitting in living rooms and meeting rooms, talking with people I haven’t seen at all, or have seen but rarely, over the last thirteen months.
Giving them hugs. Holding their hands to pray. Patting their arms.
After a year of being so isolated, touch feels more important than ever.
But even as I sit with these dear friends, and as I slowly expand my social circle at home to include a few more people for dinners and baking days, there is still a hesitancy that flavors all of these interactions.
We aren’t quite sure, still, how to inhabit our bodies. Bodies which we have spent the last year worrying ceaselessly about, trying to protect from germs and viruses. Bodies which we have closed off in our homes, kept distant from other bodies. Bodies which maybe have grown in ways we didn’t anticipate or ask for this year (I’m looking at you, “COVID 19”), or bodies which have been a constant source of anxiety to us.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Barbara Brown Taylor’s essay on Incarnation, or “The Practice of Wearing Skin,” in her book An Altar in the World. In that piece, she reflects on all the messages society gives us about our bodies, about all the ways we’re taught to be critical of our bodies, to distance ourselves from them, and especially in the church to spiritualize our faith instead of making it physical and embodied.
We talk a lot and listen a lot and read a lot but we don’t always live and move and interact a lot with those bodies. And that has been the case exponentially more so in this past year. (Maybe you are one of the few who has learned to listen to her body a lot more this year, who has moved it in ways that felt good and nourished it with some of the extra time you weren’t using to go out and travel – in which case, I congratulate you. Now for the rest of us…)
We may not even pay much attention to our bodies until they demand it through illness or injury or even the limitations of aging. Then we complain and critique and bemoan our bodies, but rarely turn to them with gentleness and care and love.
And we are missing out, when we do that, on a major way that God reveals God’s self to us.
“What many of us miss, in our physical dis-ease,” Taylor writes, “is that our bodies remain God’s best way of getting to us.” She writes about Jesus’ ministry, which was so deeply physical, so thoroughly embodied: he broke bread and washed feet and hugged children and went fishing. “Most of us could use a reminder that God does not come to us beyond the flesh but in the flesh, at the hands of a teacher who will not be spiritualized but who goes on trusting the embodied sacraments of bread, wine, water, and feet. ‘Do this,’ he said – not believe this but do this – ‘in remembrance of me.'”
The incarnation of our faith is not an optional add-on; it is an essential piece.
God reveals things to us in our bodies that our minds can’t understand in the abstract: the feeling of cool, clean sheets on your bed; the warmth of a hot meal on a cold day; the soft touch of a baby’s cheek or the solid warmth of a dog’s belly. The soft bite of communion bread and the sweet tang of grape juice. Do this in remembrance of me.
It will take some time to get back to our bodies, and maybe even longer towards making peace with them and respecting them as, in Taylor’s words, “our soul’s address.” It will be a while yet before we can gather all together and hug each other and eat together again.
But as we begin that journey back, let us do so with a renewed attention to our bodies; to what they need from us, and what they can teach us, about ourselves and others and God. Let us remember to care for our bodies, and others’ bodies, as our soul’s address. As a temple of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
-Pastor Jen
Comments