Bodies

As I get started this morning with my chapel talk, I just want to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Maybe I can ask it in the form of a question. How many of you are at least slightly uncomfortable that the topic for this chapel talk is “my body”?

Okay, I thought so. And so I want to explore that discomfort with you for a few minutes today. I want you to think about some things with me.

I have had a contested relationship with my body over the years. I'm skinny; I've inherited these genes from my dad, and it's simply the way my body is constructed. My body made me uncomfortable for a long time. I can’t count the number of times I was told to “just eat,” to “put some meat on my bones,” or when I was in the locker room and got typical teenage comments about my body, especially my sunken chest, about which I still remember someone asking me if I had a hole in my heart. I wore undershirts consistently in high school, even under t-shirts, so that I could fill out my chest even just a little bit.

I would submit that the first reason you’re uncomfortable with me talking about my body, however, is that all of us are generally uncomfortable talking about our bodies, especially in public, especially in a room of 400 people. We have been taught, either explicitly or implicitly, that bodies are not proper topics for polite conversation. Maybe not all of us; maybe this is partly a generational thing.

But let me give you an example.

My grandparents, who were born in the 19-teens and 1920s, would not allow the word “pregnant” to be uttered at the supper table. They used the euphemism “PG.” After all, even the mere utterance of the word “pregnant” implies . . . certain . . . things . . . not only about how pregnancies get started, but about the female body and the ways that it changes during pregnancy.

But why are we uncomfortable talking about bodies? I guess they are kind of gross, after all. Bodies make noises and smells, and we use them for all sorts of things that we probably shouldn’t talk about in public. Bodies grow and shrink, bodies decay and age. Some of us, frankly, get uncomfortable around older people or sick people because of what their bodies look like and what their bodies are doing.

But bodies carry with them everything that we are, and our memories, in particular.

For example, I can show you the stretch marks on my knee from the summer that I grew five inches, from my eighth grade to ninth grade year. I could show you the scar from when I wrecked my bike badly when I was about 9 because I had finally spat on the dead frog my brother and I had been trying to spit on and I was so excited that I was flying home as fast as I possibly could. Scars, moles, various things I’ve had removed--all of these are testaments to the home that is my body. No matter where I go, where I move, how my political or religious beliefs change, this is the thing that is sticking with me.

One of the moments I remember from my pop’s funeral was looking at his hands. He was a carpenter and a boat-builder by trade. He had wonderful hands. They were strong and bruised from years of carpentry work, and after he died, they were the only part of his body that looked the same to me. Looking at his hands, his body, was a way of reading his story, a story that involved the poverty of the Great Depression, World War II, being the first person in his family to receive a high school diploma, living through countless years of service in the churches he pastored. I loved him so much, and his hands are the thing I will always remember.

We are probably uncomfortable talking about bodies because of Christianity, I will fully admit. You see, Christianity was born of many influences, but its two greatest influences were Judaism and Greco-Roman culture. Judaism has a beautiful, healthy, and deeply faithful way of viewing the body. There are all sorts of Jewish prayers related to bodily functions, because Judaism recognizes that the body is good, that it is our very means of living and breathing and that it has been blessed by God.

This prayer, for example, the Asher Yatzar, is meant to be said after going to the bathroom:

"Blessed are You, Adonai, our God, King of the universe, Who formed man with wisdom and created within him many openings and many hollow spaces. It is obvious and known before Your Seat of Honor that if even one of them would be opened, or if even one of them would be sealed, it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You even for one hour. Blessed are You, Adonai, Who heals all flesh and acts wondrously."

Judaism blesses God for literally everything we are and everything we do, because all of life is holy. As one Jewish writer puts it,

"North American culture divides human activity into simple oppositions. We are either at work or at play, on vacation or on the job, in school or at recess. We instinctively treat prayer, therefore, as what you do when you are in synagogue (or church) but not in the office, the garden, the playground, or the car. Judaism takes just the opposite point of view. Though not all of life is holy, the holy can come bursting through the everyday at any time."

And so: the body is just as holy as the soul, or the immaterial, non physical part of ourselves.

While Christianity inherited many of these understandings from Judaism, it also inherited gnostic beliefs from the Greeks. These beliefs stated that the body was a prison, a cage, weighing down our spirit. In gnostic understandings of life, the spiritual world is the most important world, and the flesh just corrupts and dies. Some Christians adopted this understanding and taught that the body was bad--and that the only thing that mattered in life was getting your soul to heaven, after all. So why worry about the body?

The irony in all of this is that Christianity teaches that God decided to show up in the body of a first-century Palestinian male. So of course bodies matter. Many Christian churches have the body of Jesus and/or his family displayed constantly, such as in statues and crucifixes. Christians believe that the son of God God’s self was in a body for 33 years on this earth and--even more importantly--that after that body died and rose again, it was still a body! Jesus eats fish with his friends in the post-resurrection stories in the Gospels. Jesus had a body and it did all of the things that a body does.

This is called incarnational theology in Christianity. It claims that the soul and body both are good, and that both are created in God’s image together. It stresses that our bodies are important, and not just as a receptacle for our soul, but that because Jesus had a body, we can love and honor our bodies just as they are as well.

Believe it or not, this is also why we can have Episcopal schools. Because incarnational theology says that the things of this world are blessed, holy, and good, we can and should study them. We shouldn’t just study the things that prepare us for the next life. We can and should study the world around us, because God is in this world, not just in heaven. God is in our bodies and our experiences and values and honors them. Incarnational theology is why we can build cardboard boats, or read The Catcher in the Rye, or study evolution and talk about Darwin’s finches.

Thankfully, some strands of Christianity have preserved these ideas that point to the body as blessed, holy, and good. And I am all in for this idea. Because the body is blessed, holy, and good, it is blessed, holy, and good in all its variations. It is blessed, holy, and good in all shapes and sizes. It is blessed, holy, and good even if it is missing limbs. It is blessed, holy, and good even if it is sick. It is blessed, holy and good even if it is differently abled. It is blessed, holy, and good even if it is not considered attractive by the extremely harsh and narrow twenty-first century American standard of “beauty.” It is blessed, holy, and good, period.

Your body is blessed, holy, and good. And mine is as well. Thanks be to God for our bodies. I’d like to close with a prayer.

God of all creation:

You have blessed us by giving us bodies and souls,

Parts of ourselves that are both created

In the Divine Image.

Help us to treat our bodies and souls with respect,

And those of everyone around us with respect.

Let us remember that you are not “up there,”

But HERE, with us, and in us,

Every second of every day.

AMEN.