Embodiment and Feeling My Way Toward God (Acts 17:27)
Some of my prayers in releasing Handle With Care were that I would not lose my identity in it, that I would be restrained from checking numbers incessantly or reading reviews, and that I would be grateful for the fruit already borne of it and in me instead of looking for new fruit everywhere. Releasing a book into the world, especially one as vulnerable as mine, is a ripe opportunity for all sorts of rotten fruit to fall. I’m only two weeks out but so far the Lord is keeping me.
“Why did you write this book?” people keep asking me. Perhaps it’s a common question but since it’s my first book, it’s uncommon to me. I keep giving variations on the answer but the truest and deepest answer is not because of anything I thought or wanted, but because of what I needed. I have had a terrible relationship with my own body my whole life and an equally terrible relationship with the embodied Savior. I needed it to begin healing.
The Trinity and I have gone a few rounds before. Problematic parenting, preachers with pounding fists, a slave-driving Holy Spirit, and a felt-board Jesus—these do not a good picture of the Trinity make. I cautiously danced around the Fatherhood of God when I first believed the gospel, tentatively dipping my toes into a better theology around the Holy Spirit for the past five or six years. But Jesus? Jesus was a hard one for me. Jesus feels the most paradoxical and mysterious member of the godhead and, though I do love a good paradox, there has been something about him that felt unavailable to me.
Writing Handle With Care meant spending almost a year immersed in the gospels in a way I hadn’t before. I gravitate to the Pauline epistles because I want to be strong but always come back to the Psalms because I am weak. If the epistles represent the exercise of my mind and the Psalms the exercise of my heart, the gospels stretch my body, my physical being, my hands and feet, the ways I image God with my earthly tent. And as I said, I have had a terrible relationship with my body my whole life.
I don’t want to think about the ways my body shows up in the world. I don’t want to think about the ways it engages other bodies. Like many who grew up in the Purity Movement of the 90s, I want to be asexual. I would much rather be engaged as a mind or a heart than a body. Part of this is a natural disposition toward social anxiety, a genetically frustrating escape room of my fluctuating size, and years of celibacy beyond what most of my peers were experiencing. We learn to adapt to who we are and who we are not. I sharpened my mind, softened my heart, and disregarded my body.
Writing HWC brought the body of Jesus and my own body sharply into focus in a way I still haven’t recovered from. I’m still working through and discovering and fearing and trying and restraining. Good friends help. A good husband helps. But more than anything, the embodied Jesus, touching, holding, healing, coming close, making himself vulnerable, submitting, shouting, loving, embracing, weeping—this is what beckons me.
This is why I wrote HWC. Because my relationship with my own body was [is] so fraught and tense and full of fear and subterranean anger and no matter what I did, I could not master it in the ways I wanted. I needed a better Master. I needed Jesus.
And so I spent a year in the gospels and I tried to imagine myself as John the beloved, the woman with the issue of blood, the daughter of Jarius, the little children who came, Thomas who doubted, Mary who clung, the woman of the city wiping Jesus feet, the sleeping disciples whom Jesus roused, the blind men who followed him, and all the other humans to whom Jesus made himself available for their full healing.
Did it work? I don’t know. I wrote the book with not a few tears and some gaping wounds revealed and conviction rising up in a way I’ve never felt before. I think it’s still working. It’s working me over.
Two days ago in a conversation with an old friend who is walking through a painful experience and has a strange almost otherworldly joy in the midst of it, I wept tears for him. I told him I still struggle to weep for my own pain, but to weep for his was a gift. Yesterday a friend wept for my pain, held some space for it for an hour, more, because I struggle to have tears for my own sorrows.
This is what Jesus did, this man of sorrows, embodied, come to take away the yoke on the world. He carried the collective pain of the world in his fullness on earth. I don’t understand it, I can’t imagine it, but it helps. It helps.
What else has helped me? I’ll tell you, as long as you know I’m telling you what helped me, it doesn’t need to be the thing that helped you, but perhaps it will be.
Not simply learning I was an Enneagram 9, but delving into the particular sins, species of sloth, avoidance, numbing behavior I’d learned to deal with pain, and some handrails for the journey through. In particular, learning I was in the Body Center clicked something into place in my brain that has been truly life changing. (Please do your own research here. I cannot endorse everything you’ll read about it, obviously, and don’t, but I did my own research, cherry-picked what was helpful, spit out the pits of what wasn’t.)
Doing some deep soul work last fall, where I committed to recognizing family patterns, genetic dispositions, habits I’d fallen into simply to survive, beliefs I’d adopted to protect myself from more pain (for example, the idea that “We don’t need other humans, we only need God.”), and more. Seeing that stuff has been incredibly painful for me.
Distancing myself from relationships where I was primarily a listener but was rarely listened to or asked deep and probing questions. I learned this was a protective mechanism I learned long ago to deal with my pain: pretend it doesn’t exist, don’t talk about it, don’t emote about it ever, and don’t be “dramatic” or “emotional.”
Caring for my body. This is still an exercise for me, literally. It takes every ounce of my being, my strength, to engage my body in healing work. I am in no danger of idolatry of my body, crafting it into a specimen of perfection or the ideal form or function. To simply befriend my body is my aim. To not beat it or berate it, but to care for it as Jesus cared for the bodies of others.