skin.
I’ve been thinking a lot about bodies lately.
More specifically, the art and responsibility of embodiment.
I recall a recent conversation with a wise, thirty-something, ex-heavy-metal guitarist. We discussed the productivity-obsessed, self-abusive nature of our environments—-mine a high-achieving, image-driven college campus, and his, a competitive and impersonal professional world. “The thing is Sarah, it’s simple Gnosticism,” he told me.
“They treat us like a brain on a stick. But you can’t deny the other parts of you—including your body.”
My body.
How many of us have a love-hate relationship with our body? It seems that we expect it. Quips about our imperfections, self-deprecating comments about our looks, half-joking comparisons of our unsatisfactory figures…this constitutes acceptable small talk. Whether we’re fighting wrinkles or belly fat, we’ve somehow started to understand ourselves as alienated and even hostile to our own physicality.
Our bodies are not really a part of us–more like a necessary but unwelcome piece of baggage to scrutinize and manipulate, only as good as our ability to pinch, pluck, and pare them into the shapes and colors we desire.
I don’t know about you, but this unholy schism has taken its toll on me. In high school, it was total war. I flirted with anorexia, a battle in which there only losers (no pun intended). Even in more recent years, I still fall victim to a language and culture shaped around this combative, misguided relationship between “body” and “self.”
But I am coming to see I am more than the sum of my parts—and, more brilliantly, that the thought of such “parts” is a myth. This body is every inch a part of me, and as beautiful and vulnerable and miraculous as the most transcendent corners of my spirit. I am my words, my dreams, and my heartaches, but I am also my knees, my lips, my pinky finger.
I examine my hands. How often as a regal, enlightened, six-year-old did do this very same thing, and how long has it been since I spent time lovingly acknowledging my body?
Every tiny crease, every delicate swirl, so perfectly chiseled in this marvelous flesh—my fingertips speak of God. These legs (one stretched out, one tucked under my chair), these stems that have carried me across scores of cities, sands, and streets—have I ever once thanked them for their faithfulness? And these eyes—there can really be no measure of my gratitude for these eyes. Endless burning lights, they illuminate my mind with imprints of the wild beauty of this Ordinary, Inexplicable World—and with pools of silver they tell me when my heart is bleeding.
These are constellations in the galaxy of Me, a dizzying and delicate, inextricable, romping, blonde-haired overgrown child, half-lost and half-asleep, but beckoned back to Wonder in this moment.
Much of this wonder comes from my faith. And although so many Christians would have us believe that the body, and its desires and functions, are unclean and unholy, I find quite the opposite in Scripture. One of the greatest scandals of the New Testament is the teaching that “Our bodies are Temples.” That is, if Heaven is on Earth today, the point of this intersection is your body. Words like sacred, precious, and glorious ought to describe our experience as body-spirit-souls, tapestries of eternity and skin, red-blooded other-worldly monuments to the Miraculous.