Hallelujah to the grace
And the body
and every cell of us all
The Hallelujah of the body begins at birth.
I have been present at two births in my life, (other than my own) neither of them my children’s.
At the time my babies’ lungs first met the air, and the blood and mucus were wiped from their skin, in those moments, they were still in my mind, disembodied dreams, whose imagined lives would not become material realities for me until days later.
Even now, I feel in my body, the grief of not being there those first 2 days for my daughter, 3 for my son. I take some solace that they were not alone; they were held by nurses who later told us the stories, and by their birth mother, who did not.
Some days, I wonder how my life, and theirs would be different, if my body had been the one to give birth to theirs.
Not enough to wish it was so – adoption is a strange, complicated, magical path of making family, and one that epitomizes the tangled blessing we often talk about. Still, since that very first intro session for foster-adoptive parents, I have always felt that my children didn’t need to grow in my body for me to be their mom. The distance between our bodies, our obvious separateness, even while we have learned to trust our closeness, is its own Hallelujah.
This does not, however, take away from the uniquely powerful – even mystical experience of birth, the bizarre and beautiful arrival of one body through another’s. Birth reminds us that at the center of sacredness is interdependence, the undeniable and never simple reality that we are all bound up together, even as we are also, at that moment of life’s beginning, horribly, thankfully, separate.
To call our bodies sacred is to know that they are always a manifestation of our interdependence, and our separateness; from this, an ethic of the body grounded both in personal autonomy, and intentional collectivism can both be argued. That these two orientations inevitably come into conflict is at the root of some of our most complex social issues, and rather than reduce them to quick polls and clickable headlines, we would do better to treat this tension with reverence, and humility, knowing we are treading on holy ground.
Sacred – at least in some faith traditions – often implies pure, or clean, or reliable. Despite the best efforts of some arms of western medicine, this is not what birth reveals of the holy, or what we, as Unitarian Universalists, mean by sacred.
Birth is messy, and loud, and at least to some degree, unpredictable. In the two I’ve seen close up, I heard words coming from my friends that I had not before, and have not since, imagined them uttering. Strings of words blurted out in agony and ecstasy, and surprise at their own body’s power and vulnerability, felt so presently, and immediately.
Birth smells – of shit, and blood, and of all the fluids of the body. Birth is literally organic, and looks, and sounds, and smells like it.
Just like death.
Death is its own story of the sacredness of our bodies, not because they come to their end and make way for a new disembodied existence, but because at every moment, including in the moment of death, our bodies are a revelation. A promise not for some other heaven, or some other life, but a wondrous invitation to gratitude and reverence that for this time, we have this one.
Bless your body
Bless your heart
Bless your holy kneecaps
The body at death, just as with birth, is fragile, and messy, and still, unpredictable. As one example, we are told our whole lives how much our bodies need certain amounts of water, and nutrients – but at the end, sometimes they persist, despite missing all these marks. And sometimes, even though all these things have been given the body declares it is ready to be done anyway, and release comes quickly.
I know that for many people, there is wisdom and comfort in the idea that after our bodies are done, our spirits, or souls, will live on. If this is true for you, this worship series and I do not intend to try to talk you out of it.
What I do mean to trouble is that fact that too often the hope of a life after death comes with a sense that our bodies are the problem. The thing that must be discarded in order for the real heaven to begin. As if our bodies are the sin, the shame, the reason for the so-called fall – especially when those bodies fall outside of the norm, when they are fat, or disabled, or trans; not white, not male, not young, not straight.
It can be a way to justify a body hierarchy that values some bodies more than others, and to map morality on to the ways our bodies exist in the world.
This body shame and body hierarchy in turn manifests as racism, and ableism, homo- and trans- phobia and sexism, ageism, fatphobia, and classism. As Sonya Renee Taylor writes in The Body Is Not An Apology, “When we speak of the ills of the world – violence, poverty, injustice – we are not speaking conceptually; we are talking about things that happen to bodies. When we say millions around the world are impacted by the global epidemic of famine, what we are saying is that millions of humans are experiencing the physical deterioration of muscle and other tissue due to lack of nutrients in their bodies. Injustice is an opaque word until we are willing to discuss its material reality.”
To privilege the immaterial self over the embodied one can also be a way to disregard the particularities of how we each show up in the world, since after all, material differences don’t really matter.
Most often this occurs in the sometimes-well-intended approach of color-blindness, which as Taylor notes “not only makes invisible all the experiences a person has had that were shaped by their racial identity or color, it implies that to truly respect another human being, we must obscure their areas of difference.”
Like holding the tensions of interdependence and personal autonomy, the sacredness of bodies also invites us to hold the tensions of pluralism. That is, to set contradictory and complex differences alongside one another and call it all holy, and worthy of devotion, without needing to conceal or even compare those differences. To simply say – hallelujah for it all
Comparison is – after all – often a way to put one another on our own terms, or, more likely, into the terms of the default body we hold consciously or subconsciously in our minds.
What is the default body you hold? The norm you compare yourself, or others to? The right body, the good body, the body at the top of the hierarchy – the body in the “after” picture in a before and after .
Cole Arthur Riley (in Black Liturgies) describes the moment that a neurologist called her disabled for the first time. As she writes, “Until then, the thought had never occurred to me. Later, as I was walking with a friend, I used the language myself, and she stared back at me in horror. Well, you won’t stay like this, she said. This won’t be forever.” The implication was that her body had to be on the way to recovery, and fully-abled, or it was not as good, or right, or sacred.
Default bodies are often able-bodies, bodies with all their limbs and their senses intact; bodies that are healthy – by which we also often mean to imply, skinny.
In her book, Fat Church, Anastasia Kidd shares that this book is her “first public admission to being a fat person.”
She goes on to say that “this will seem like a strange statement to anyone who has ever met me. There is no doubt that my body is hugely, impressively fat. My corpulence has been the most constant companion and my most prominent defining feature; the biggest frenemy I could imagine throughout my life.”
Kidd rebelled against the label of fat, as she says, because “I was trying to avoid the attributes culturally conjoined with fat. like fat-and-lazy, fat-and-unhealthy, fat-and-ignorant, fat-and-ugly, fat-and-smelly, fat-and-selfish. I would be hard working, healthy, educated, pretty, perfumed, and selfless.” But it was never enough. She was still doing all of these things while fat.
Like a lot of us, Kidd had absorbed messages about bodies from her mom, who had been on one diet or another her whole life. After her mom died, Kidd had a big a-ha.
As she writes, “For far too long I had bought into the dieting cliché that said I was a thin person trapped inside a fat body. I thought of my fatness as a temporary state, something I intended to eliminate and thus never cared to get to know. But what if my fat was never a problematic surplus? What if it’s just me?….This mental shift itself was absolutely revelatory.”
Hallelujah
to the body
to every cell of us all
Believing our bodies are a problem we need to solve is not something we are born with.
As Taylor writes, “Babies love their bodies! Each discovery they encounter is freaking awesome! Have you ever seen an infant realize they have feet? Talk about wonder! That is what an unobstructed relationship with our bodies looks like.”
“You were an infant once, which means that there was a time when you thought your body was freaking awesome too. Connecting to that memory may feel as distant as the farthest star. It may not be a memory you can access at all, but just know that there was a point in your history when you once loved your body.”
Technically, that body you loved is the same one you are living in now. Except that this body here has since seen the passing of decades, and diseases, the survival of stresses and sports of various extremes, the coming and going of adolescence and teeth, romance and rules for fashion and standards of beauty, learning and then forgetting so many facts, and stories, and names – which means that it is also not the same body, not hardly at all.
This sacred body is the most constant throughline of our human existence, and also yet another reminder that the only thing that doesn’t change, is change.
At any given point, and likely at many points, across all of these changes, all of us will find ourselves in a not-so-loving relationship with our bodies, and feel that our “sacred selves” and our bodies are distinct, and at odds, even irreconcilably so.
Here’s one of my stories:
In 8th grade, I broke my leg while skiing, and ended up in a full straight leg cast hip to toes, for almost 5 months. I was 13. It brought a swift end to basketball season, and an extended pause in my year-round swimming training, and a serious challenge for how I would get to my classroom on the third floor in a building with no elevators.
The height of middle school awkwardness combined with the heavy cast I lugged around for those months – plus the fact that it was long before water proof casts were a thing….Makes it so remembering this time still makes me want to shrink to the point of invisibility. I was so angry at my body – basically for existing. To imagine my body as sacred, in those days, broken and awkward and demanding attention as it was – I couldn’t.
Even now, when I try to tell myself: that body, my body, was sacred – requires intentional de-programming, as I try to overcome the other messages I received at the time – disappointment from my coach, teasing from friends, and annoyance from the school administrators and my teacher. Mostly, shame at how much my body needed, and how often I had to keep asking for help. And then shame about shame. Because why should I be ashamed? And then anger about the shame.
It is not an easy path to transform all of this to holiness, especially when combined with all of the moments since where hallelujah has felt so far away.
When I first started in ministry, as a cis-woman in my late thirties, I used to joke that the most radical thing I could do with my body would be to get bangs. (The one time I did, I still remember someone saying, Sunday morning, I’m not sure I even recognize you as my minister now!)
Going on 12 years later, as a now 48-year-old woman who has lived through a global pandemic, while also parenting kids whose own bodies bear the effects of their birth parents’ trauma and addiction, within a country that repeatedly fails to treat my body, or most others, as sacred, I have come to believe that the most radical thing I can do with my body is to say honestly, and publicly:
I am on a journey with my body. It has changed; it will keep changing. Some of those changes I chose, and I will choose. Some are genetic, and some feel completely random, even unfair – Some days I still get angry with my body, and get caught in comparisons and feel the story of body shame trying to get me. But still this journey – like all of our journeys – is not incompatible with a commitment to understanding my body in all of these changes, as perpetually, and persistently gloriously – sacred.
It is one of my favorite things about the poem from Andrea Gibson, a Boulder poet who lived for a long time with chronic Lyme disease, and who is currently living with terminal cancer. That whatever the world might say about how their body should, or should not be, whatever the pain their body holds, in the middle of all its brokenness, they find their way to the hallelujah.
To affirm that our bodies are sacred, at every step of the journey, does require deprogramming from body hierarchy, and shame. It means looking at every part of our bodies and saying: “this too, is sacred, and this, and this…” even as it may change, tomorrow.
And then to build on this, extending to every other body, at every part of their journey, “this too, sacred, and this, and this….”
And then to let this affirmation lead us to imagine an entirely new economy. Think about it.
And transformed public spaces.
And a whole new legal system tha would take seriously both bodily autonomy, as well as the complex questions that arise from our interdependence.
It is – as Sonya Renee Taylor says, “to become architects of a world that works for everybody, and every body.”
It is to awaken “to who you have always been: the physical, spiritual, and energetic manifestation of radical self-love.”
It is to claim that as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “our bodies are our selves, our souls are the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and our spirits are our flesh.”
Such that “the spiritual realm is so enmeshed with the physical that it is imperceptible,” and “the chasm between the spiritual and the physical is no greater than that between a thought and a word.” (Cole Arthur Riley in This Here Flesh)
This is after all is some of the best good news of our Unitarian Universalist faith –that salvation – or you might say, wholeness – can be found in this life, in these bodies, in this hallelujah – and that everything – as Peter Mayer sings – is holy now.
Bless your heart
Bless your body
Bless your holy kneecaps
They are so smart
Hallelujah to your weather veins
Hallelujah to the ache
To the pull
To the fall
To the pain
Hallelujah To the grace
And the body
and every cellof us all
Another Possibility 