In the 12th century, in the region that is now Belgium and northern France, something extraordinary was happening among the women of the region. Laywomen were forming new communities that sought to live a Jesus lifestyle. They continued to do simple work, but they also held meetings together, followed common spiritual exercises and rejected the paths that would have been chosen for them had they remained in the world they had come from.
We don’t often think about women religious leaders of the 12th century, but there were some charismatic leaders who began to attract followers into big movements. Jacques de Vitry was unique in that he was a man who became a disciple of these women whom he felt had the potential to reform the Church of his day. He left his position at the University of Paris to go and write the life of Marie of Oignie.[i]
There are wild and wonderful tales to tell about Marie of Oignie and about other women of the time. Ask me sometime to tell you about Christina the Amazing. But one thing that is disturbing about these women is how they treated their bodies. Jacques writes of Marie that “when her sainted little body was washed after death, it was found to be so frail and shriveled from illness and fasting that her spine touched her belly and the bones in her back seemed to be lying under her stomach as if under a thin linen cloth.”[ii] Something went horribly wrong with the Christian theology of the body here if this was seen as good!
We have come a long way in our understanding of the relationship between body and soul since the Middle Ages. Or have we? Lauren Winner, in the book Mudhouse Sabbath, which we are reading in some of our small groups during Lent, talks about going into a boutique to try on dresses and the self-loathing she felt when the store didn’t carry her size because it was the sort of store that did not carry large sizes. She burst into tears as she left, saying to her friend, “I’ll never be thin again.”
What her friend helped her realize, though, was that the store had just fed into her anxieties about what a healthy body looks like. Medieval mystics and Kate Moss-size models might get into those dresses, but they are not our best models for what healthy looks like. Winner goes on to say:
“The shopping expedition was good proof that, though I believe God has something to say about bodies, I generally tune God out and listen to Cosmopolitan instead. I’m pretty sure, if God called me to chat about my body would say things like, ‘I like your body. I created your body and if you read the first chapter of Genesis lately, you might recall that I called Creation good.’ Still, when I’m staring in the dress-shop mirror, I generally wish my body – or at least a few pounds of it – would vanish.”[iii]
Men have a different relationship to their bodies. We can be just as concerned about appearance, but most of us have been socialized to think about our bodies like pick-up trucks. And not just little pint-size pick-ups that you just use to help your neighbor take a few things to the landfill – I’m talking tough, working trucks that they show on TV going through mud holes and having tons of bricks dropped in the back of them. That’s us. Our bodies are made to be Ford tough – like a rock. Most of the time we ignore them and we downplay anything that damages them. Lose an arm? We’re like the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail – “It’s just a flesh wound.” And that’s why it’s such a huge transition for men when our bodies really do start to break down and we have to learn to live with limitations.
The great preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor says:
“I think it is important to pray naked in front of a full-length mirror sometimes, especially when you are full of loathing for your body…Whether you are sick or well, lovely or irregular, there comes a time when it is vitally important for your spiritual health to drop your clothes, look in the mirror, and say, ‘Here I am. This is the body-like-no-other that my life has shaped. I live here. This is my soul’s address.”[iv]
Taylor says she scandalizes people sometimes when she says this. Maybe that sounded scandalous to you – like maybe confronting our naked bodies is not spiritual enough. But maybe we’re not spiritual enough because we’re not confronting our bodies. We’re neglecting the very thing that Paul tells us is the temple of the Holy Spirit. “You were bought with a price,” Paul tells us. “So glorify God in your body.”
All of my highest and holiest moments have come though this body. I imagine that most of yours have come through your body, too. I remember getting off the bus on a warm afternoon and running to get my bike and riding at top speed up hills and down. The feel of the sun and the wind and the smell of the air. It would be several miles before I realized I was even tired. It was like flying.
The awkwardness and yet thrill of dancing with a girl at those ballroom dance classes my mom made me take. The feel of her hand in mine and the feel of the strong muscles in her back.
The good exhaustion after a game of half-court basketball on the driveway of someone’s house. We played to a hundred so the game could go on for hours. Then we’d just collapse and it felt great.
The thrill of a kiss. The warmth of a hug. The smell of the church and the scratchy burlap of Christmas pageant costumes. Kneeling at the altar to receive bread and juice.
The messy wonder of birth, watching Suzanne’s body do this amazing thing, and then holding Joel and then Rachel in my arms. The mundane messiness of feeding and changing and rocking and hoisting a child on my shoulders.
Feeling the holy weight of hands upon me at my ordination as I knelt at an altar rail. Knowing the bishop was just a man, but knowing as well that something happened in that moment – some claim had been made on me that I would only come to understand over many years.
Standing at the bedside of my grandmother following her stroke and holding her hand. Sharing silence because she couldn’t speak, but knowing that those hands had shaped me in ways that spoke of God’s love more powerfully than any words she might have said. Watching her as she took her last breaths and went peacefully on.
Clogging. Hiking to the top of Ben Lui in Scotland and throwing up. It couldn’t get more physical than that. Singing in the choir. Kayaking through the marsh cathedrals of the seaside. And yes, that thing you’re thinking of…all of these high, holy moments are in my memory because of this body.
We are sometimes guilty as Christians of believing what the Gnostics did. Gnosticism was one of the earliest heresies in the Church and it had many forms, but at its heart it was the belief that the only part of us that God is really concerned with is our immaterial souls. The body, they felt, was a hindrance – maybe even evil.
After all, the pleasures of the body can lead us into trouble. We follow those pleasures into all sorts of trouble. We sleep with people we shouldn’t sleep with. We take substances – like drugs or deep-fried Twinkies – that we shouldn’t take. We drink to excess. We smoke. We eat too much. And it gets us into trouble. So the body must be evil, right?
The Christian Gnostics believed that Jesus came to liberate our eternal soul – the inner light – from its fleshly cage. They looked to passages like the one where Jesus says not to fear those who can kill the body but only the one who can cast your soul into hell [Luke 12:4-5] and they saw there a justification for their beliefs. They also saw how Paul often talked about the struggle between the spirit and the flesh.
Christianity rejected Gnosticism, though, because it fundamentally ignored the fact that God has loved and used bodies since the beginning of beginning. Men and women were created in the image of God and that means more than just we have a soul that is in God’s image and, O, yes, we also have this body. No, the body bears some of that image, too.
Fundamentally, Christianity rejected Gnosticism because of that great Christian word we use far too little – incarnation. God became human to show us that matter matters. God came to save us in this world, in this flesh by becoming a fully human human being. And Jesus, who was fully human and fully divine, enjoyed this world. Enjoyed being embodied. He went to wedding feasts. He ate at the table with friends, sinners and Pharisees. He healed hurt and broken bodies – like the bent-over woman in the gospel story for the day. He wept at the death of friends and he washed the feet of his disciples. Jesus loved the bodies of this world and who he is for us is inseparable from the body through which we knew him. It is through Jesus’ body on the cross that the way to salvation was opened for all people.
This is why we say, when we say the Apostle’s Creed, that we believe in “the communion of saints, the resurrection of the…body.” Because even when these worn-out bodies of ours have drawn their last breath, God promises us an embodied future. What those resurrection bodies will be like, we don’t know, but we don’t lose the body.
So what’s a body to do with the bodies we have? It’s obvious that God loves all kinds of bodies. Big bodies, small bodies, tall bodies, short bodies, disabled bodies, suffering bodies – they are all alike made by God so we should love what we’ve got. Bodies can do amazing things. They are incredibly resilient. I look at some pieces of machinery or appliances that were made in 1963 – same year I was made – and I think – “Man, I’m in a lot better shape than that!” Think of how amazing that is that these bodies can endure so much and still keep going.
Yes, love what we’ve got and realize that the world often gives us unrealistic images for what our bodies should look like. But then take care of what we’ve got. It has only been in the last five years that I have started to atone for all the years of Tex-Mex food that I ate in Texas. That wasn’t the only culprit, but it was a major contributor to my getting up to almost 275 pounds a few years ago. It has been a slow process, but I have been trying to do better by what God gave me. I will say that it is a major benefit to have someone to be accountable to in doing this. For the last eight months you’ve heard me mention several times that I have been working with a trainer – Matthew Henry – and it makes a huge difference. Care for your body is not a nice option for Christians – it is a spiritual practice like prayer – a training for offering your body to the glory of God.
What, then, do we do when our bodies don’t work like they used to? What do we do when cancer strikes or we lose abilities that we used to have? Ironically, it may be in those times that we are most aware of our bodies. Instead of taking our bodies for granted, when we are ill or sore or wounded we know that we are really more dependent than we think. And ultimately it is our limitations that bring us to others who must do for us what we can no longer do for ourselves. We hate this. We hate to be dependent on others – to feel that we are weak or needy. But it is in these times that we may discover the necessity of the other body that I want to end with – the body of Christ.
The poet Scott Cairns, in a book titled The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, talks about friends of his who have left church because, they say, they are still spiritual, just not religious. In its own way, this is a kind of Gnosticism, too. Cairns says:
“I comprehend the unfortunate distinction being made by their parsing of terms and that distinction continues to strike me as the result of an insidious and ongoing failure – theirs, ours and mine…These beloved friends must find their way home. They must find a way to reconnect their faith to their communities and their communities to their faith. They must find a way to reconnect, as it were, the spirit with the body. Satan, our tradition tells us, looks for any vessel sailing without a fleet, and it seems to me that an individualized, isolated ‘spirituality’ is almost by definition satanic.”[v]
Who are we? Are we individuals set out on our own to navigate the world under our own strength and power? That’s surely a recipe for disaster. Aren’t we a body – the body of Christ? And it is in this body, sharing frequently of the body and blood in bread and cup, that we learn the things that will take us to the kingdom – body and soul. Thanks be to God.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20 [NRSV]
Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body.
[i] Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986], p. 173. Referred to hereafter as Petroff.
[ii] Jacques de Vitry, “The Life of Marie d’Oignies,” in Petroff, p. 183.
[iii] Lauren Winner, Mudhouse Sabbath: An Invitation to a Life of Spiritual Discipline, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2003], pp. 66-67.
[iv] Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in This World: A Geography of Faith, [HarperCollins ebook, 2009] location 621-630.
[v] Scott Cairns, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain, [Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2009], p. 77.
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