August 5, 2018
Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon
AUDIO
Part 1:
Part 2:
Being six months pregnant has made me a bit more aware of my body than I usually am: I’m forced to notice my body more often as it gets more difficult to bend over, or as I tend to get out of breath inexplicably, or as the little one inside me sends an elbow flying. But typically, too often, I am like most Westerners in the world, and I don’t have much awareness of my body. Or, if I do, my body is often a point of annoyance, pain, or judgment. Often, it’s only when prompted that I notice that, yes, I tend to permanently hold my shoulders like this – or, yes, I probably should have eaten lunch an hour ago – and actually tasted it instead of eating at my desk while checking email.
THE BODY IN OUR CULTURE
Our culture’s elevation of the mind and spirit above and apart from the body goes a long way back.
Our own UU tradition has its roots in Christianity, and many Christian teachings source a lot of shame and guilt in the body.
This is despite Jesus’s obvious reverence of the body – he spent all his time with bodies of all kinds and states, touching people, healing people, eating with people, walking with people. He spent his last night on earth teaching his disciples to wash each other’s feet and share a meal, and said “Do this in remembrance of me.” After all, he was supposedly God put into a body. Incarnation was his thing! But while he was Jewish, most of his earliest interpreters were Greek and divided body and soul in a way he did not.
Christian teacher Richard Rohr laments these early interpretations, saying: “Of all people, Christians should have known that “flesh” is not a bad word. [After all,] ‘The Word became flesh’ (John 1:14)” He explains that one of his teachers ended class on the last day by saying: “Just remember, on the practical level the Christian Church has been much more influenced by Plato than it has been by Jesus.”
For Plato, the body and matter were the enemies of the soul and the spirit. Then, the father of modern Western philosophy, Descartes, continued this separation, opposing nature and reason. The Protestant Reformation was deeply suspicious of physical pleasure, and Freud didn’t help things either. Then modern medicine reduced the body to just biological matter, and commercialization barrages us with Victoria’s Secret ads, the best ways to get a six-pack, and an unshakeable fear of aging and death. Add to that the trauma that many of us experience due to neglect, abuse, or violence, and no wonder most of us are uncomfortable in our flesh!
I remember a couple years ago, when I showed up to my doctor’s office – the Midland Women’s Clinic – having just miscarried. I stood there in line, still bleeding, waiting to check in, and all I saw before me in the waiting room were big floor-to-ceiling posters – and even a video monitor – advertising their liposuction and botox services. This is a medical clinic where women come for pap smears, pregnancy tests, infertility assistance, mammograms, cancer biopsies… And yet from everything visible before me in line, it’s a place telling me this body I’m in needs to be not more functional or healthy or happy or safe, but more “beautiful” – get a smooth belly and an ageless face! ((I think they have since removed most of these advertisements. Thankfully, I think many women registered their frustration.))
This denigration of the body in our culture has had serious ramifications.
Women were the ones most associated with the body because of childbirth and their caring for bodies. And so women by association became devalued as well. Indigenous people who did not have the same Puritan fear of the body were seen as savages, close to animals, and so thus could be mistreated. Black bodies received the worst of it, and still do. Add to this the way aging bodies, ill bodies, different looking bodies, differently abled bodies, and women’s reproductive bodies are treated. Much of the violence in our world, whether it be childhood trauma, sexual violence, domestic violence, etc – is often rooted in our disrespect for and distance from our bodies.
THE GOOD NEWS
So how do we heal from this separation from the body?
Well, the good news is that the wisest elements of all religious and spiritual traditions seem to teach about a deep awareness of and integration with our bodies.
Even Buddhism, which so many people think is just about changing our minds, is also about the body. The Buddha taught that noticing the body with deep awareness could lead to enlightenment. Two common Buddhist formulas teach this. The first is pain + resistance = suffering. Being with our pain, in our bodies, as they are, without resisting it or trying to change it, can keep us from increasing our suffering. The second formula is pleasure + awareness = fulfillment. This doesn’t mean the seeking out of hedonistic pleasures, but awareness of life as it is – the scent of this flower in this moment, which passes away and leaves us with the feeling of the breeze on our skin. Through the practice of these two formulas, we are on the path of equanimity and enlightenment.
Likewise, the Christian teachers I respect teach about embodiment – incarnation – that God is not above and beyond this world, but here in the moss and the mud, here in the working of our hands and in the pains that need relief.
The Christian teacher Daniel Berrigan says:
It all comes down to this: Whose flesh are you touching and why? Whose flesh are you recoiling from and why? Whose flesh are you burning and why?
The Dalai Lama says “the purpose of life is not to transcend the body, but to embody the transcendent.”
RITUAL AND THE BODY
Embodying the transcendent is the goal at the root of rituals, which are found in so many of the world’s religions from earth-centered religions to Hinduism, to Islam, to Christianity. Rituals are not just superstition. Rituals help us embody the values and beliefs that too often remain static and isolated in our minds. Rituals remind us that our values are not expressed just in what we think in our heads or feel in our hearts.
Our values are expressed in what we do with our hands, where we go with our bodies, how we touch one another or don’t touch one another, how we care for our and others’ bodies, how we respond to the things we see, feel, taste, & touch; how we act.
And so, what a JOY it is that in this church, yes, we do a lot of sitting still and listening, but we also stand and sing, occasionally we move our bodies with the music (!), and we don’t get too upset when the sounds and movement of children in the service disrupts the serenity. We sometimes even get up and move about, doing rituals and activities that I imagine some have to work harder than others at getting past their judgment about. We drop stones in water to embody our joys and sorrows, we reach out and hold hands at the end of the service. At least once a month, we have what we call an Intergenerational Service where I invite you to come do things like pile your shoes up here for a shoe blessing, or eat bread that some of the members have baked, or pour water in a common basin at our water communion, or receive a flower from a child for our flower ceremony, or throw yarn across the room to weave a web.
All of these can help us move what’s in our heads into our bodies, and thus our living.
Stanley Hauerwas says this about his tradition of Christianity, and I’d say it about any religion or spirituality worth its salt:
[It] is not a set of beliefs or doctrines one believes, …but rather it is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the worship of God is unavoidable.
If needed, you can replace the word God with whatever you hold sacred.
And so it could become:
It is to have one’s body shaped, one’s habits determined, in such a way that the living out of our values is unavoidable.
OUR BODY: SOURCE OF WISDOM
See, the body has much wisdom because the body does not lie.
The Irish poet, John O’Donohue says:
Your mind can deceive you and put all kinds of barriers between you and your nature; but your body does not lie. Your body tells you, if you attend to it, how your life is and if you are living from your soul or from the labyrinths of your negativity. . .
Your body is, in essence, a crowd of different members who work in harmony to make your belonging in the world possible. . . . The soul is not simply within the body, hidden somewhere within its recesses. The truth is rather the converse. Your body is in the soul. And the soul suffuses you completely. ((John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (Harper Perennial: 1998), 48-49.))
Let’s look deeper at just one of his statements: Your body “make[s] your belonging in the world possible.”
In his book Coming to Our Senses, historian Morris Berman says that our first experience of life as infants is not merely a visual or audio one; it is primarily felt in the body. We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us, skin to skin. This early knowing is not so much heard, seen, or thought. It’s felt. ((Quoted by Richard Rohr here.))
And here I quote at length from the Catholic teacher Richard Rohr:
Psychologists say that when we first begin to doubt and move outside of that kinesthetic knowing, we hold onto things like teddy bears and dolls. My little sister, Alana, had the classic security blanket as a baby. She dragged it everywhere until it was dirty and ragged, but we could not take it away from her. Children do such things to reassure themselves that they are still connected and one. But we all begin to doubt this primal union as the subject/object split of a divided world slowly takes over, usually by age seven. Body/mind/world/self all start getting split apart; we begin to see the basic fault lines in the world—and the rest of life will be spent trying to put it all back together again. …[W]e need spirituality to help heal the brokenness of our identity and our world. True spirituality is always bringing us back to the original bodily knowing that is unitive experience, which is why you cannot do it all in the head! ((Richard Rohr, “Bodily Knowing”))
UNITIVE EXPERIENCE
So, like O’Donohue, who said that our body makes our belonging in the world possible, Rohr says that bodily knowing brings us to unitive experience.
As more and more people study consciousness, they find consciousness is part of and rooted in the body. And so some say that through bodily awareness we can glimpse a universal consciousness: the ways in which we are all connected by something larger than ourselves.
For those for whom universal consciousness seems too “woo-woo,” you could consider the ways in which our bodies do objectively connect us with the rest of the world. The writer Andrea Jones describes it poetically. She says:
It is convenient to think of the human birthday suit as a membrane that separates, preserving the boundary between self and not-self. But from the moment your parental gametes linked their half-strands of DNA to form the zygote that would develop into you, everything you now claim as yourself has been derived from matter and information imported across your body’s external membrane. The world may be full of things that slash, nibble, pierce, abrade, infect, and sear, but it is also replete with oxygen, sunlight, chocolate, laughter, the colors of leaves in autumn, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the twining of bodies under the covers on a winter’s night. Skin differentiates but does not isolate. Your singular existence unfolds within it, but skin does not hold the universe at bay. Instead it marks the seam that joins your existence to everything else.((Andrea Jones in Orion magazine))
So, I’ll close with this: What’s the key to living more embodied lives? What’s the key to bringing embodiment into our religious and spiritual lives?
Embodiment experts – and yes, they are out there! – attest that it’s about two things:
AWARENESS & CHOICE
We bring awareness – non-judgmental, curious, loving awareness – to this bodily experience of living.
Based on that awareness, we make choices. Wise, loving, just choices about how to use our bodies, how to act.
Like I’ve said, rituals and spiritual practices can help us cultivate this awareness and make choices into habits. You don’t HAVE to start meditating or doing mindful yoga every day. You could. But you could also vow to eat at least one minute of your lunch mindfully. You could bring your attention to your breath at each stoplight. You could promise to hug your spouse for longer than 2 seconds, even if you are in a hurry, each time you leave the house.
The good news is that the body – source of wisdom, place of deep practice, crucible of interconnection – is always with us. And the body – your body – is good.
– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon