Honoring our sacred and vulnerable bodies for Lent

Last Sunday I started a short Lenten series concerning “honoring our bodies” – and let me tell you that it has opened up a host of important questions for our faith community. Whenever you gather four generations of women and men – and their children – and start talking about living in ways that honor the image of God within and among us, sparks start flying. Some of us have been trained to neglect our bodies, others have been encouraged to indulge them and all of us have learned to hate our bodies when they fail to look like the latest sexy models – and this includes men as well as women. Think the FX-TV show, “Nip and Tuck.” Think of young women cutting themselves just to know they are alive. Think of women perpetually dieting and men regularly ignoring their wounds and stress only to die the day after they retire of a heart attack.

And just to make life more complicated, we Christians have to wrestle with our twisted spiritual legacy that on one hand celebrates the flesh – we are made in God’s image, Christ is God incarnated in the flesh whose body was resurrected – and on the other fears and denies it. Dear St. Bruce of Asbury Park, NJ captured this dilemma between flesh and spirit – to say nothing of the battle between the spirit of Jerusalem and the spirit of Antioch – best in his song, “Pink Cadillac.”

Well now way back in the Bible

Temptations always come along

There's always somebody tempting

Somebody into doing something they know is wrong

Well they tempt you, man, with silver

And they tempt you, sir, with gold

And they tempt you with the pleasures

That the flesh does surely hold

They say Eve tempted Adam with an apple

But man I ain't going for that

I know it was her pink Cadillac

Crushed velvet seats

Riding in the back

Oozing down the street

Waving to the girls

Feeling out of sight

Spending all my money on a Saturday night

Honey I just wonder what it feels like in the back of your pink Cadillac?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD5Vythvxig

(NOTE: you may recall that Elvis bought his momma a Pink Cadillac after hitting number one. Springsteen loves to play with Elvis iconography as he explores life, faith, sexuality and politics in America. Also see "Johnny Bye Bye" on Tracks.)

So what’s a congregation to do? Stephanie Paulsell suggests three healing and hopeful alternatives to the status quo in her book, Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice. First she reminds us that no matter how hard we try to be strong, our bodies are fundamentally vulnerable: we know pain, we are wounded easily, and we can be broken in body and soul. Second, in order to truly care for our vulnerable bodies, we need others. “Fragile bodies require communal care… Young people encountering the pleasures and pains of sexual desire for the first time need a village just like small children. They need guidance and support from communities that openly articulate sexuality is a good gift. People who are so sick that they feel their bodies have betrayed them need to be touched by those who believe deeply in the goodness of the body.” And third, as we embrace our own vulnerability, we are called into solidarity with others – especially the poor and those suffering injustice.

I concluded my Sunday message with a homework assignment (as I am want to do): take a meditative bath sometime this week and see what you discover. Well, I actually said, “Here’s what I want you to do as this week’s Lenten discipline: take a bath! Not because you are dirty or need additional personal hygiene. But rather take a bath as a prayer – a body prayer – that invites you to be sensually in touch with God’s temple of the Holy Spirit for you.” Well, after the laughter, people told me what a great prayer that might be (we’ll see how many really do it) because, young and old alike said, mostly they have been too busy to take a bath. One woman even said, “I haven’t used my bath tub in 30 years!”

In a culture obsessed with body image and sexuality, the Christian community has a great opportunity to restore some balance and health if we can relearn to honor our bodies. There is so much body pain in our time – so much abuse and conflict and self-hatred, too. While in New York at an arts conference last week I came across this poem by Julianna Baggott that made me weep. It is called, “Ethel Water’s Mother, Louise – Raped at Twelve – Cannot Listen to her Daughter Sing ‘His Eye Is on the Sparrow.’”

Lord, I know that the hem of your robe
could fill a temple – a flood of ribbon,
and now your hem pours from her mouth?
It is you, Lord, called up from her,
a song to teach me a lesson
for not raising my own girl.
I would rather listen to barking dogs,
the gagged utterances of the mute,
my own mother crying
over dirt, a grave.
It is my sadness that Ethel sings, Lord,
my grief riding your hem.
(This hem will not cure me.)
She may think it is her own sorrow,
but each note, so whole, so unbroken –
so lush it is from your robe, born
of your hem that could fill a temple,
that once filled me
(temples can be destroyed)
and that hem
has always been made of song,
the kind too tender for the world,
the kind only a little pregnant raped girl
can call back into her mouth
and swallow,
and Ethel was the baby inside
who, there, within my slender ribs – a cage –
first pursed her lips learning
to suckle and sing my grief.

I give thanks to the women and men and children of this congregation – and the artists among us, too – who with fear and courage are willing to find new/old ways of honoring our bodies. It may be one of the only ways to make the hope of the Lord flesh in our time.