Embracing the Body E-Book

Tara M. Owens

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 424

Beschreibung

- Foreword Reviews' 18th Annual INDIEFAB Book of the Year for Body, Mind and Spirit - 2015 Readers' Choice Awards Honorable MentionOur bodies teach us about God, and God communicates to us through our bodies. Our bodies are more good than we can possibly imagine them to be. And yet at times we may struggle with feelings of shame and guilt or even pride in regard to our bodies. What is God trying to do through our skin and bones?In Embracing the Body spiritual director Tara Owens invites you to listen to your thoughts about your body in a way that draws you closer to God, calling you to explore how your spirituality is intimately tied to your physicality. Using exercises for reflection at the end of each chapter, she guides you to see your body not as an inconvenience but as a place where you can meet the Holy in a new way—a place to embrace God's glorious intention.

Leseprobe

EMBRACING

THE BODY

Finding God in Our Flesh and Bone

Tara M. Owens

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web:www.ivpress.comEmail:[email protected]

©2015 by Tara M. Owens

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website atwww.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

The poem on p. 166 is from David Whyte, “The Opening of Eyes,” in Songs for Coming Home, 1984. ©Many Rivers Press, Langley, Washington. Reprinted with permission from Many Rivers Press.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple Images: esthAlto/Michele Constantini/Getty Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-9679-0 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3593-5 (print)

For she who remembered in her last losings

For he who learned to touch the world

For You

Contents

Book Epigraph

Introduction

An Invitation to More

1 Where Do Our Fears Come From?

2 How We Lost Our Bodies

3 Broken Body, Broken Church

4 Dust to Dust

Incarnation, Body and Flesh

5 Angel or Animal

Beyond False Dichotomies

6 Beauty or Beast

Living with an Unglorified Body

7 Touch or Temptation

Issues Around Sexuality

8 Desire or Destruction

Exploring Our Impulses

9 Tension Taming

Embracing Our Fears, Finding Redemption

10 At Home in Your Skin

Exploring God’s Messages in Your Body

11 Sensing His Kingdom

Encountering God’s Physical Creation

12 Flesh of My Flesh

Union, Sexuality and God’s Design

13 This Is My Body

Connection and Communion with the Body of Christ

Group Discussion Guide

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Praise for Embracing the Body

About the Author

Formatio

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

We awaken in Christ’s body

As Christ awakens our bodies,

And my poor hand is Christ, He enters

My foot, and is infinitely me.

I move my hand, and wonderfully

My hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him

(For God is indivisibly

Whole, seamless in His Godhood).

I move my foot, and at once

He appears like a flash of lightning.

Do my words seem blasphemous?—Then

Open your heart to Him

And let yourself receive the one

Who is opening to you so deeply.

For if we genuinely love Him,

We wake up inside Christ’s body

Where all our body, all over,

Every most hidden part of it,

Is realized in joy as Him,

As He makes us, utterly, real,

And everything that is hurt, everything

That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,

Maimed, ugly, irreparably

Damaged, is in Him transformed

And recognized as whole, as lovely,

And radiant in His life

We awaken as the Beloved

In every last part of our body.

—St. Symeon the New Theologian

Introduction

An Invitation to More

If you asked me if I was always comfortable in my body (and required that I answer honestly), I would have to say, No . . . No, I’m not. I’m of the opinion that there isn’t anyone alive who is at home in his or her body 100 percent of the time, and I don’t believe that I formed this opinion just to justify my own neuroses. If you’d like to test this (and some of you will), I would suggest that you place your hand on the shoulder of the person nearest you for ten seconds. Just reach out and lay your hand on them lightly, and hold it there. You can count to ten if you want. Not only will this make them wildly uncomfortable, you’ll probably want to get out of your chair and run as far as you can from them.

And yet, if you actually did what I suggested, all you’ve done is put your hand on the shoulder of another person. It may have been your spouse, your child, your friend or, if you’re amazingly brave, the stranger next to you at the coffee shop where you’re reading this book. You initiated physical contact and connected with another human being using your body. You acknowledged your existence, you acknowledged their existence and you acknowledged the connection between the two of you. And, most likely, the vulnerability that brought up in you was unsettling. (More than unsettling if the stranger consequently slugged you.)

Today, I’m a pale-skinned, freckled woman with blue eyes. I don’t look in the mirror every morning and think that I’m lovely; in fact, the moments that I feel most lovely are moments when I’m not looking in the mirror at all.  Consciously contemplating my physical exterior isn’t something I do very often, unless I’m applying makeup or noticing that I probably need a haircut. But, unconsciously, I do it every day, squinting at myself when I’m brushing my teeth, noticing another fold or crease of skin that indicates I’ve gained a little more weight when I pass by the mirror on the way to the shower, picking at my fingernails and judging the length and symmetry of my fingers as I wait for dinner to be ready at a restaurant. These are not my finest moments. I would like to fool myself into thinking that these are the moments when I am most cognizant of my embodiment, the fact that it is my very essence, my very self that I’m squinting at, criticizing or judging. But, mostly, they’re not.

Mostly those moments are when I’m objectifying myself in order to distance myself from the pain of not measuring up to some standard I internalized at an age too young, because of a voice or voices that told me my body was inadequate, and in order to protect myself from being a disappointment at the very core of who I am, I began to think of “me” as something or someone separate from the physical body that walks, talks, breathes and sweats.

As a result, the moments when I feel most lovely, most true, most whole are those moments when I don’t have a mirror in front of me, when I’m not confronted with the physical reality of being human. I should like to think that this is a good thing, just as I should like to think that I’m most aware of my embodiment when I’m looking at myself, even if I’m gazing with cruel eyes. Sometimes it is a good thing—I’m holding a child in my lap; being held in my husband’s arms; taking the Eucharist into my mouth, chewing and swallowing; or covered with oil splatters, cornmeal and spices as I prepare a meal. In those moments, I’m integrated—all the parts of me are working together and I’m present to them all. Nothing is cut out, nothing is despised, nothing is peripheral to my experience.

On the flip side of that, when I’m lost in thought at a coffee shop, unaware of the mug of tea in my hands, or when I’m caught in a good book, so disconnected from the physical object in my hands that my husband needs to literally take it from me in order to get my attention—those are times when I’m fragmented, gone astray and in need of being found by the One who is about bringing every part of us together into a whole. This whole is me, the me as I was originally designed, envisioned in the eyes of God. It’s also the whole of a part, a functioning vital part, of the body of Christ. This larger whole needs me to be whole in order for the entire body to function, to be complete and healthy. The body of Christ needs me to be integrated with my body so that we may experience redemption together, not just as individuals but as a people, a colony of heaven here on earth.

Welcome to the Mess

Bodies are messy. They secrete, they bruise, they are fragile and unpredictable. Bodies are strong. They climb, run, grow and exert. Bodies are pliable. They shrink and expand, they adapt to parts being lost; bodies heal parts that have been hurt. Bodies do glorious things and bodies do unspeakably horrible things.

I know, for the most part, I would rather tell other people what to do with their bodies than deal with the crazy mess that is my relationship with my own flesh and blood, my embodied soul. I would rather talk about the fractured way the world and the church relate to the material we’re made of than really wrestle with the way I fracture and fall apart when forced to deal with the stuff of myself.

I come by that naturally—we all do, because it’s a physiological fact that we don’t perceive our own bodies the same way other people see them.

Body schema is the term scientists and doctors use to define our physical sense of ourselves. This is different than body image, which involves all the narratives we believe about our bodies based on the cultures and stories we’re surrounded with. Our body schema is based on both visual input (the way we see parts of ourselves) and neural-motor input (the amount of sense preceptors we have in parts of our body and the way our bodies move in the world). More recently, researchers have discovered that we also take body schema cues from interpersonal input (the way other people move their bodies changes how we perceive ours, especially when we’re children).

But what does all of this scientific language mean? Why does it matter when we’re talking about our bodies and God, the stuff of ourselves and the Creator of the universe?

It matters because if you mapped out our body schema, the way we experience our bodies doesn’t match the way our bodies look to others. It’s been done before, in scientific modeling, this mapping of the way we experience the world versus the way we are in the world, and the results are somewhat shocking. The image is one of a person with huge hands and a huge mouth, but a receding forehead and small skull. The neck, back, arms and legs are small, but the genitals and feet are larger than their actual size.1 On a biological level, we don’t see ourselves rightly.

Now, we do see ourselves in a way that helps us navigate the world. If your body paid too much attention to the back of your neck, for example, you would be paralyzed with sensory input every time your hair got ruffled. And it’s important to note that body schema and body image are, as I’ve said, different things. Yet they do overlap, and in an interesting metaphorical way, our body schema says something to us about the path to a whole, holistic relationship with God. Because to see ourselves as we are in the world, with right proportions, right values, rightly ordered parts—well, that requires other people.

Unfortunately, as history and our own living, breathing, walking-around experience tells us, other people aren’t always helpful. Throughout history, societies have misrepresented other bodies, classifying some as valuable (white bodies) and others as expendable (black bodies, for example). Women’s bodies have been labeled as dangerous or inferior, the bodies of slaves as objects rather than people. Mothers sometimes feel like their whole embodied experience is of service to the children they parent, single people as if their bodies represent only unattached sexuality to others.

The church has been alternately helpful and unhelpful when it comes to a right understanding of our bodies. On the one (somewhat oversized) hand, the reality of the incarnation, the in-breaking of God into the material world, shattered and remade our body schema completely. With our broken relationship with God redeemed through Christ, we’ve been wholly restored to the level of perception we were created to operate with from the beginning—the spiritual life flows through us fully once more. Nowhere but in the community of God do we learn how to live integrated; nowhere but in the community of God do we learn the life of the Spirit lived out in our very flesh.

On the other hand, the church over the years has also succumbed to or reacted against the world’s narratives about our bodies—the culture’s misperceptions of the value of our flesh and blood—and become so deeply afraid of infection that we began to attack ourselves. Instead of bodies celebrated and life lived fully in flesh and Spirit, the body of Christ often suffers from a kind of autoimmune disease. We are so afraid of infection from the outside world we’ve mistaken healthy tissue for unhealthy, sickening ourselves as a result. And, as anyone with this kind of malady can tell you, this kind of pain and affliction throws your self-perception into wild disarray.

I bring all of these things out into the open because each of these narratives, each of these examples have real stories, real people attached to them. These are stories woven into the very fabric of our faith, stories that have leaked into the Christian narrative from our surrounding culture. They are the prohibitions and prescriptions that define how to think about our bodies.

These stories are ones that, for the most part, we don’t talk about. We live with them, and they define us, but we don’t have a language for discussing them, a way of challenging or reshaping them because we can’t even approach them. We stuff them and we ignore them and we relegate them to silence. We shuffle away awkwardly when the subject of our physicality comes up, and we eschew the idea that this uncomfortable, sweaty, noisy, unruly body of ours might indeed be the vehicle for union with the God who loves us beyond anything we could imagine. That children and dance and sex and art and body image and beauty and prayer and touch just might be encoded with something more than fear and danger. That in them we might find the fullness of life in Christ that we’ve been longing for.

And we affirm the Nicene Creed without ever dwelling for a moment on what it might mean. I believe in the resurrection of the body.

Eden and More

During service today we baptized an eight-year-old wonder. All smiles and eager anticipation, Eden stepped forward to the sacrament as if it was the most natural thing to do. Washed in the waters, anointed with oil, holding a lit candle—the light of Christ made visible—Eden was everything that we lost in the fall, and everything that has been and is yet to be restored.

Together we recited the words “I believe in the resurrection of the body.” Looking into Eden’s bright eyes, I know it’s time. It’s time to take those words seriously.

It’s time to reach for the more that God has for us in relationship with him and with the stuff of our very selves. It’s time to risk taking God at his Word when he says we are redeemed, not in part but the whole.

It’s time discover why he scooped earth to make man and breathed us into being with bone and blood. It’s time to listen to his murmurs along our muscles, his whispers in the wind and his song of delight in our sexuality.

It’s time to reach for resurrection, here and now.

A Word About Touch Points

At the end of each chapter, you’ll find something called a “Touch Point.” These sections are meant to help you wrestle with the content of the chapter in your own life and, more importantly, your own body. Touch Points include exercises, prayers and ways of making the material yours.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be tempted to skip over these sections and move on to the next chapter. It may be my own performance anxiety, but I tend to want to finish a book quickly, to move through the material and get that sense of accomplishment that comes from closing the cover on another book of spiritual insight and challenge read. Been there, done that, moving on.

I’m asking you not to do that here.

It’ll be hard, I know, to stop at the Touch Points. You don’t have to do every single exercise, and there won’t be any extra credit if you’ve checked them all off by the end of the book. (I know, I threw you with the points thing, but no one is actually keeping score.)

The thing is, this is a book about the body—my body, your body—and like any written communication it runs the risk of being another tumble of words about something rather than an encounter with that something. My hope, my desire is for you to experience your body, God and God in your body for yourself.

So please, don’t skip the Touch Points. Read them through, decide which one calls most deeply to you (or, on the other hand, makes you most uncomfortable) and take the risk of trying it. Some of them will be easier than others, but all of them are designed to get you out of your head (where you process words on the page) and into your messy, unruly, complicated and oh-so-glorious body.

You can do them alone or with a friend, you can bring them to your small group or invite your book club to try them with you. I can’t be there with you in person, stepping into the awkward, hopeful, crazy experience of incarnation, but believe me I want to be. I wish I could see your face, smile into your eyes, listen to your heart. I can’t be there in flesh and bone, but I can be here in these words. What I can give you are my hopes, my heart and my prayers.

And I have been praying. Over each word in this book, and over you (yes, you) before you ever cracked its cover. I’ve been praying God would meet you exactly where you need to be met and would speak through his glorious creation (you, me, the world around us) just what you need to hear. I’ve been praying for courage, for hope, for freedom for you, and I believe Jesus wants that for you. Not only do I believe he wants it, I believe that he will accomplish it. Because he promises:

Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. (Matthew 7:7-8 NRSV)

So I bless you with the courage to really enter in. I bless you with a heart willing to risk a transformation that will bring about the more that God wants for you—and for us all. Let’s answer it together, God’s invitation to more: more redemption, more freedom, more life.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,

Amen.

So be it.

Touch Point

Walking with God

Take thirty minutes or an hour to go for a walk with God after reading this introduction. Leave the things that might distract you (mobile devices, mental to-do lists) at home. Take a deep breath as you step out the door, and pray these words: Jesus Christ, I commit this journey to you. I want to walk with you, God. Let me feel, see and know what you would have for me in this time.

As you walk, notice in particular how it feels to step across thresholds and over obstacles. Do you feel confident stepping into new spaces on the path? Are there times your body hesitates, not sure that this is the right way to go? Don’t try to reach a destination as you walk. Simply be present to what this chapter has stirred in you. Is there a fear about your own body, or the material world, that surfaces as you journey with Jesus in this time? Is there something you are resisting or disagreeing with?

Make space for what arises on the journey. Notice whether your thoughts are churning or if your stomach is in knots. Pay attention to the way the path leads you back to the safety of home.

Afterward, take some time to reflect or journal on your experience of walking out this chapter. Did anything arise for you as you entered the material in an embodied way? Was it confusing or difficult to understand what you were doing in taking this walk? Was it natural or unnatural to notice how you felt as you stepped over cracks in the sidewalk or things in your path? Listen to the whispers of Christ as he gently encounters places in you that are afraid or unsure.

Thank God for the experience of journeying together during this exercise.

1

Where Do Our Fears Come From?

Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.

St. Thomas Aquinas

If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.

Stephen King

I’ve only had my knees give out in fear once my life. Earlier that day, I had been stuffed full of pizza and various sugary substances at the eighth birthday party of one of my friends. The festivities continued with a rare and special treat: we were all going to watch our very first movie in a real movie theater.

Now, eight-year-old girls are generally obsessed with a short list of things, often including but not limited to their friends, ponies (real or imagined), their favorite color and their stuffed animals. With the addition of an obsession with reading and a proclivity to being the “good girl,” I was a fairly typical eight-year-old girl. So, when the fluffy creatures that looked remarkably like my collection of stuffed bunnies and bears began metamorphosing into slimy, scaly, unruly and unrighteous things that not only stayed up past bedtime but, as far as I could see, killed people—well, I was terrified.

But this was my first movie on the big screen. The enormous images had me pinned to my seat, the sound sickeningly reinforcing how real this experience was. At one point, I vaguely recall the blonde bob beside me leaning in close, her brow wrinkled in concern. “Are you going to throw up?” she whispered fiercely. Wide-eyed, I was only able to shake my head once. No. I didn’t think so, anyway.

The blonde bob retreated. I sucked in the sickly sweet smell of stale popcorn and soda-slicked floors through my nose, trying not to do the very thing I said I wouldn’t.

When the movie ended and the credits rolled, everyone got up. Except for me. Oh, I attempted to get up, to follow the parents in single file out of the seats. But when I tried to stand, I found my knees had turned to water, my fear pooling behind my kneecaps, secretly eroding my ability to hold myself upright, to hold myself together even. So I fell, collapsing into a small, trembling muddle on the sticky floor. I burst into tears.

I don’t recall the details of getting back to my home. I’m also not sure if I ever knew why my mother and father let me go to that particular movie in the first place. As I look back, I get the sense that my parents were grateful for a night out. I know that I returned home to a babysitter who had already tucked my sister firmly into her bottom bunk and stationed herself in front of the television.

A bit too solidly, it would turn out.

Upon my return, the babysitter—we’ll call her Jenny—told me to change into my pajamas and get into bed. This was not a suggestion, it was a command. So, I obeyed. Well, I tried to, anyway. I changed. I brushed my teeth. I climbed up the short brown ladder to the top bunk. I crawled under my covers. But when I attempted to close my eyes, the backs of my lids sneered at me with the gleefully evil grin of the movie’s main villain, Spike. In the darkness of our room, it felt like there were gremlins in every corner, ready to grab me, grab my sister, ambush my parents when they returned home. I tried counting sheep with my eyes open, desperately wanting to be obedient. It didn’t work. I began to cry.

So I climbed back down the short brown ladder, careful not to wake my sister but afraid to leave her with the menacing darkness. I tiptoed down the stairs to Jenny, and stood at her elbow.

“I’m scared,” I told her. “I can’t sleep. Spike . . .”

“Go to back to bed,” she said. “You’re being silly.” She had looked away from her television program only once.

“I’m scared,” I said. “Spike . . .”

“Go. To. Bed.” Jenny commanded.

It was a rare occasion that I had to be told anything twice. It was even rarer that I would disobey.

I crept to the top of the stairs and paused at the landing. I could see my sister asleep, but the top bunk was shrouded in darkness, teeming with an unknown number of creatures bent on torturing me. My tears started up again, and I collapsed, only slightly more purposefully than I had at the movie theater, on the landing. There I sobbed until terror and fatigue combined to drag me unwillingly into sleep.

I’m not certain what my parents thought when they discovered me, crumpled, at the top of the stairs. I doubt they did anything other than smile indulgently at their strong-willed daughter asleep on the carpet, scooping her up and depositing her still-sleeping form onto her bed. They couldn’t have known the furrows plowed deep into my imagination by the night’s events, perfect conduits for the next fifteen years of fear. Fear of the dark. Fear of falling asleep. Fear, fear, fear.

The Roots of Fear

Most of us have a similar story to some extent or another. Whether it was an overzealous swimming coach who precipitated a lifelong fear of drowning or a near miss with a neighborhood Rottweiler that left us dripping with dread every time a poodle walked by, our fears have their foundations somewhere in our stories. Indeed, they must. Research has shown that there are only two fears that babies are born with—fear of falling and fear of loud noises. Every other fear ingrained in our psyches, consciously or unconsciously, has been enculturated by our family systems, teachings and experiences. If you think you were born with that fear of spiders, think again. You learned it.

The same can be said of the fears and mores found in the church body as a whole. As people of faith, we were not birthed into life in Christ with a requisite compliment of terror. The things that we’ve learned to fear—both rightly and wrongly (and there are both)—come from the immediate context of the world in which we live, as well as from a long history of theological tenets, cultural influence and unexamined assumptions of our faith tradition as a whole. In the same way you inherited your fear of flying from your mother’s fear of flying, the church has inherited a number of fears about the body from our church fathers and mothers.

But why focus here, on the fear? The church also started with a deep belief in the goodness of our knees and fingerprints, our sense of smell and our desire for touch. Aren’t there many, many good things that we’ve learned about our bodies from the life of faith?

Ironically, we focus on fear because it’s a lot easier to handle. (In fact, that’s part of the problem.) We’ll start with fear because fear sets up fences, boundaries that keep us safe, or at least far away from that which we’ve come to associate with being afraid.

Fear was the genesis of my ritual of reaching around a doorway and turning on the light before I entered the room. Fear is the genesis of the abuse victim’s tendency to shut people out when they get to know him too intimately. Fear motivates strange behaviors and stranger thought processes. Fear is what patrols the borders of our lives in order to minimize risk, keep everyone safe, prevent whatever happened from ever happening again. Fear is rigid, restraining and, generally, easy to identify.

Keep off the Tracks

Indeed, fear tells us well-wrought, beautiful and convincing stories.  Fear is what feeds headlines in every medium, and fear is what keeps us buying products that we don’t need and we’ll never use. It’s fear of missing out that has us trying to keep up with the Joneses and fear of losing out that keeps us in jobs and in places that we deeply loathe. When we’re on the lookout for it, fear is everywhere, but fear is also good at dressing itself up to look really lovely. Alluring, even.

When I was young, probably the same age as my Gremlins experience, we lived in a small town in the southern part of the province of Ontario. Across the street from our house was a large, vacant lot. The perfect playground for children with wild imaginations, it was home to a small stream and a series of rocky outcroppings that hid invisible castles, lands of adventure and the occasional broken beer bottle. About a mile away was the local strip mall, the place where we took our allowance money and bought strips of bubblegum and packets of Nerds. Anything sugary, really. The quickest way between point A (our playground) and point B (the mall) was the stretch of nearby train tracks—a mother’s worst nightmare.

Although we were reasonable kids who knew how to stay out of the way of large moving objects, the movie Stand by Me had just come out. Spurred by the gory images of her children finding dead bodies by the tracks, Mom set out to prohibit us from ever setting foot near this super­­highway to sugar. Perhaps it was because she knew that a simple “don’t do it” would inspire my sister and me to do just that, or perhaps it was her own poetic imagination, but my mother came up with the most fear-inducing thing she could think of to keep her children safe: invisible trains.

The story started practically enough, with an explanation of the workings of railway signals. She told us that each train on the tracks had a series of invisible train cars before and after the visible train—this was what triggered the flashing light and striped barrier and gave it enough time to be lowered before the real train came rumbling past in all its steam and power. We even sat beside the train tracks (in the car of course) watching the signals precede the train down the line. “Do you see it?” she said, asking the impossible of us. See the invisible train. Of course, invisible trains were there to keep us safe—but they were just as dangerous as the visible ones if you were on the tracks. This meant that if you saw a signal light flashing down the tracks a way, you’d better get off them pronto. The invisible train was bearing down on you faster than you knew, especially since you couldn’t see it.

What a way to terrify small children into staying away from trains. I don’t know why I bought into this fiction of fear, but buy into it I did. Fully, completely. It was ingenious, really, a fence around a fence. Something that not only kept us far enough away from trains that we wouldn’t get hurt but had us jumping one step farther than that, just to be safe.

Unbeknownst to her, my mother was dipping back into centuries of Jewish tradition in her attempt to prevent us from becoming child-sized grill decorations. Jews use the word Torah to denote the first five books of Scripture—the Law, if you will. In the Torah (which is, by the way, a verb in Hebrew), God gives his people a set of rules for living. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy are all shot through with things that get called commandments, rules and laws. Mostly, they are God’s utterances over his people, a set of guidelines that lead to a life well lived, a community well formed. Some of them seem silly and needlessly restricting to modern readers, but they cut deeply into the reality of our hearts, reflecting back to us our tendencies to scramble and strive instead of living in the gifts and provision of God.

Jews use the word Talmud to denote the centuries of rabbinic writing and teaching on the stories and statements that comprise Torah. While not being considered the direct word of God, the Talmud expounds on the mysterious ways that God sometimes puts things in the Torah. The Talmud explains, points out and seeks to make clear that which God has said.

It’s out of the Talmud that most of the restrictions on sabbath activity come. The Torah records that no melakah shall be done on the sabbath and that it should be both remembered and honored. The word melakah here is often translated as “work,” but in Hebrew it connotes the idea of creating, just as God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

This makes sense for our souls. Sabbath, or shabbat, can be literally translated as “to stop.” We are told to cease striving, working, creating for one day to receive the rest and holiness of God for ourselves. This idea of weekly rest was not common in the contexts in which the nation of Israel found itself, and God was setting up something different, something important for the souls of not only the Jews but all people. The sabbath holds the people of God together.

From the prohibition on work or creation spring the teachings of the Talmud. In place of an individual interpretation of what work might be (how close to the train can we get before we need to jump from the tracks?), the Talmud prescribes thirty-nine different activities that are forbidden on the sabbath, from kindling a fire to tearing down a building. Around the original fence that protects the soul from forgetting God on the sabbath, the Talmud creates another fence, so that we’re a safe enough distance away that there is no possibility of falling into sin.

The religious leaders in Jesus’ time took things even further than this. For the most observant (read: holiest and farthest away from getting smushed by an oncoming train), the prohibition on plowing, for example, included a prohibition on pushing your chair back from the table abruptly. Why your chair? Because in the action of pushing it back, the leg of the chair may rend the dirt floor, creating a furrow. Oops, you just plowed something.

For the Pharisees and Sadducees (two rabbinic groups in Israel at the time), the fact that Jesus’ disciples ate heads of grain while walking through a field on the Sabbath (breaking rule number three, reaping) was the equivalent of throwing the Torah back in God’s face. We don’t need any flashing lights or barricades! We’ll play chicken with the train on our own, thank you!

It’s enough to send them in to apoplectic fits of rage.

It’s enough to get Jesus crucified.

It’s enough to keep us as far away from the tracks as possible.

Fears Founded

Before we get too far in criticizing either the Talmudic scholars or my mother, let’s recognize that the things they feared happening had dire, dire consequences. For Mom, the consequences of children too close to the train meant a lifetime of grief and regret, dreams destroyed, futures cut short. It meant the one thing that horrifies you as you hold a baby in your arms—that you might somehow not be able to protect her. For the rabbis, charged with protecting the spiritual lives of the people of God, the consequences of allowing the people to dishonor the sabbath were even more worthy of fear. God’s not stingy with words when he calls his people to the carpet for breaking one of the few true imperatives of the Ten Commandments: honor the sabbath and keep it holy.

Indeed, God sent his prophets to warn the people of God when they broke the sabbath that he would let loose his wrath against them. Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea and Amos all cried out to the people of God that they were playing heedlessly on the tracks with the train bearing down quickly. When they didn’t listen, the nation was shattered and sent into exile. Of course you would set fences around fences around fences if you’d seen your people destroyed, the nation meant to be the light of the world scattered to the four winds.

Which is why our fear of our bodies is not to be taken lightly either. The church has, historically, set up fences around how we are to treat and interact with bodies—our own and each other’s—for good reason. The statistics on sexual abuse alone are horrifying enough to send us running for the rule books. In the United States and Canada, one in four women have been sexually abused in some way, and one in six men. Think about that the next time that you walk into your church sanctuary or the grocery store.

As one who has experienced sexual abuse, I understand the fear as both victim and someone who longs to protect the ones that I love. As I’ve wrestled through the effects of rape in my own story, I’ve lived for a long time in fear’s grip. He was my first boyfriend, and the obedient girl from the movie theater had grown up into a teen eager to please, to perform in order to be loved and accepted. That worked fine, too well in fact, right up to the moment when I wasn’t given a choice to perform—it was expected of me, no matter whether I was saying no or not.

Unconsciously, I kept myself as far away as possible from the circumstances in which my abuse took place, that hazy middle ground between being awake and being asleep. Although I didn’t know that I was doing it, for nearly a decade I ran myself hard into the night, working, watching television, talking to friends right up until the moment I could barely keep my eyes open. Then I would fall into bed and be asleep before my head ever hit the pillow. I used to joke that I could fall asleep anywhere, even on a concrete slab, not realizing I kept myself in a chronic state of sleep deprivation as a form of self-protection. I had put up a fence in order to keep myself off the “tracks” that bore the train named abuse into my life.

I could have kept up that pattern for the rest of my life, if love hadn’t interfered. Love, in the form of my husband, began asking gentle questions about how fear was dictating the course of my days—and my nights. Love began to ask if I could live differently, if trust in my own body might be possible, even necessary, for my healing. Love invited me out beyond the fences that fear had erected, into a field of freedom.

I won’t tell you that the process was easy. Abuse brings with it strong messages about ourselves, body and soul. Choosing trust in the face of fear is one of the bravest and riskiest things that we can do. My choice to trust brought with it evenings of tears and long discussions as those who loved me let me wrestle through the nightmares and fight lies that felt incontrovertibly true.

But these days, as I fall slowly, slowly to sleep wrapped in my husband’s arms, I don’t find myself listening for the clack-clack of wheels on steel, alert to impending doom. Instead, I listen lazily to the whisper I hear from both him and God: I love you, I love you so much. You are safe here. Love, love, love.

Worlds of Anxiety

As a people both called out of and called into the world, there’s a lot to cause anxiety when it comes to our bodies. The messages and ideas around us rush manic-depressively from one extreme to another. Cooking shows nearly deify the stomach, creating a culture of gastronomical pleasure to be pursued at almost any cost (including but not limited to your bottom line, your waist line and your social standing). Social media encourages us to measure up against unattainable standards of beauty, trickling down to our children who compete in informal beauty contests where only the skinniest and prettiest survive. Even apart from the statistics on physical and sexual abuse, the ways that we’re encouraged to manipulate and misappropriate the gift of our physicality in order win friends and influence people are in themselves a form of abuse.

So, not only is there a lot to be nervous about, there are many popular conceptions of our bodies (and exactly how they are to look, smell, feel and operate) that are worth rejecting outright, even agitating against. There is a great deal of legitimacy to the idea that separation from the world’s conception of the body is a step toward a healthy and holistic embrace of what our bodies have been intended by God to be. The reality is, there is a train. And standing on the tracks as it comes barreling toward you is neither wise nor safe.

And yet.

And yet I still find myself checking over my shoulder obsessively when I change lanes while driving. At inopportune moments, crossing the street makes my palms sweat and forces me to do deep breathing exercises for at least fifteen minutes afterward. Although the invisible trains were completely fictitious, I live as if they (and invisible cars) are real. And because I live as if they’re real, they have a life and a power that steals from me. This way of being isn’t an inheritance of freedom and life. These responses aren’t what God most deeply wants for me as I navigate the world.

Fences for Fences

To the fears of abuse and adultery, over time the church has added fears of corruption, of immodesty, of impurity. Whole cultures have sprung up around “purity,” cultures dedicated to ensuring that the risk of becoming “impure” is completely eliminated. There are rules around rules, not only for Christian leaders but for anyone who wants to consider themselves serious about their faith.

All of these rules are couched, quite rightly, in the language of safety. It’s not wise to speak to someone of the opposite gender with the door closed. It’s not wise to kiss someone you wouldn’t want to marry. It’s not wise to touch someone who is not your spouse. It’s not wise to bare your shoulders when someone could interpret this to mean you have loose morals. In all the rules, we get further and further from the possibility of danger. Our fears are seemingly allayed. We’re being safe. We’re being wise. We’re being good.

Unfortunately, when we turn around, we’re also so entangled in the rules of what it means to be “safe,” “wise” and “good” that we’ve cut ourselves off from the life of God in our bodies. We can’t hear God’s whispers through our physical senses because coming near the messages of our fingers, our eyes, our lips is much too risky. We’ve fenced the tracks so highly that we can’t even step out the front door.

Precious Pictures

Trapped in our houses, hedged in by our fears, something really nefarious starts to happen. We begin to believe that this house is all we really need. Aware of the dangers “out there,” we start to make up stories about why it’s better to be confined inside these four walls rather than out there in the world. Instead of taking considered and sometimes spectacular risks with God, we content ourselves with smallness, reasoning that our purity, our lack of corruption, our modesty are somehow things of our own making rather than conditions gifted to us because of the incredible work of Christ on the cross. We become self-satisfied with the ways that we have made the world safe, rather than seeing we’ve stepped into a cell of our own creating.

This contentment with the smallness and safety of our relationship with our body also allows us a dangerous measure of self-deception. I, for one, know that I can be the world’s greatest saint in my own head. Without stepping out my front door, I can convince myself that I have great empathy for the poor, that I have conquered my tendency to fall into envy, that I respond easily and charitably even to those I would consider my enemies. Without ever encountering another person, I can believe wonderfully contrived things about how patient I am, how pious I am in prayer, how graciously I accept disappointment or even suffering.

I may be the only one who paints these pretty pictures of myself, but I suspect that I’m not. These glowing self-portraits are possible because we tend to keep ourselves at a remove from embodied experience, preferring instead the sanctuary of the mind.

Our bodies, you see, don’t lie.

Oh, they may betray, they may act in unpredictable and embarrassing ways, they may even fail us, but they never lie. When you spend time with your wildly successful sister and your stomach turns into a mass of knots, your envy is exposed (even if you choose to ignore it). When your pulse races and you struggle to reach a hand out to the young man on the street whose body odor reaches you before his palm does, your discomfort with those who are less fortunate than you belies your belief in how responsive you are to the needs of the poor. When your jaw clenches as you listen to the person in line in front of you at the grocery store tell the clerk all about her day, your tendency to impatience broadcasts itself in the grinding of your teeth. Just as it isn’t possible to abuse the body without abusing the soul, soul sickness (however it has come to us) gets expressed in the body as well.

This is one of the great tragedies of our fear-filled, rule-bound worlds—in avoiding any hint of risk we not only miss the opportunities to experience the fullness of life, we deceive ourselves into believing that the lives we’re living are whole, holy and good.

Don’t get me wrong. These small worlds are, on the surface, safer than the alternative. Without invisible trains, my mother ran the risk of losing me under the dark weight of engine and steel. Without the rules around the sabbath, the Pharisees risked watching the people of God turn their backs on the Holy One of Israel. Without the prohibitions we put on experiencing our bodies, we run the risk of misuse, exploitation or assault. Of course protecting ourselves from these things feels like wisdom.

Sadly, caution and wisdom are two different things. Scripture says over and over that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, not the fear of the world. In Proverbs, Solomon, who so audaciously asked and received wisdom from God, writes,

Trust in the LORD with all your heart

and lean not on your own understanding;

in all your ways submit to him,

and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6, emphasis added)

This life with God is meant to be a relationship, not a set of rules. While our fears drive us into control and circumscribe our lives with prohibitions, the One who died for us invites us into love and a freedom that comes from trusting him not only with our salvation but with our whole embodied lives as well. Instead of leaving us in the small stories we create for ourselves, God invites us out into spacious places, lavishing us with his delight and fiercely insisting that our delusional self-images be replaced by truth in the inmost places. In this context it’s not surprising that the most frequent command in Scripture is “Fear not!”1—an imperative that’s impossible to obey without the grace and strength of God living in and through us.

Touch Point

How Did I Get Here?

Recognizing the places where fear has taken over our relationship with our bodies isn’t a simple task. Fear is slippery and can look a lot like reasonable precaution (except for the fact that it’s divorced from a relationship with God). While coming at our fears straight on sometimes surprises them enough that they show their hand, most of the time our fears are cunning enough to hide in other disguises. Take a step into these exercises without trying to force your fears out into the open. Be open to surprises and the gentle revelations of Christ.

Read through the story found in John 5:2-9. Ask Jesus to guide your imagination and speak through the story to your heart.

Begin by imagining in the scene at the Sheep Gate. What are the surroundings like? What about the pool? How big is it? What is the water like? This is the place that people go when they want to be healed. They believe that an angel stirs the waters, and the first ones into the pool will have their physical ailments removed.

Imagine the types of people who have come to find healing. What are they wearing? What are they like? Why have they come? Notice that all of their illnesses are physical. What might it mean that all of these people are seeking restoration in their flesh and blood? What hopes do they have about their own bodies?

Now, invite the scene to come to life. The invalid who as been unable to walk for thirty-eight years is here. How did he get here? Did people bring him to the pool, this supposed place of healing, and then leave him without any way of getting into the waters? How does this relate to how you feel about your body, your way of relating to the world? How does this mirror how those around you (your family story, the story of the church) have brought you to a place that seems so close but so far away from actual healing?

Notice Jesus enter the scene. What are you feeling as you imagine him coming toward you? What hopes or fears are stirred as Jesus approaches?

Jesus speaks to the man beside you. What does he say? He asks the man, “Do you want to get well?” What rises in you when you hear that question? What is your first response?