As a preteen girl on the frantic cusp of puberty, the worst thing to shop for was pants. I grew to my current height of five feet eight inches at the age of twelve, with nary a fat cell to soften my bones. In the era of low-rise jeans my hip bones jutted into my waistband so aggressively that I often had friction burns. Pants designed for girls my age gapped and bagged in all the wrong places, while anything from the little girls’ section came short of covering my skeletal ankles. One disheartening shopping trip ended when, staring at myself in the mirror of the Walmart dressing room, I said to my mom over the lump in my throat, “I’m tired of looking like a bag of doorknobs.”
I wasn’t the only one disappointed with my body. A few years after the doorknob incident, when I’d discovered push up bras and gained a whisper of curve around my hips, I squirmed under the disgusted gazes of the other girls in the gym locker room. “Ugh, STEPH!” one of them huffed. “You could be like a Victoria’s Secret model or something!” Maybe she was referring to the way my skin stretched over my visible rib cage, but she’d clearly forgotten about the other physical attributes a job like that requires, all of which I lack.
Throughout high school and college, my mother often asked for my input when she shopped for new clothes. A try-on session never passed without her making some comparison between the two of us. “It’s one thing for you,” she’d sigh with resignation. “With your frame you can wear anything.” My aunt, who inherited my grandmother’s more voluptuous figure, did the same. Her body wasn’t the shape she wished it was, and my presence seemed to make that worse. “How’d you get to be so skinny, Steph? Must be nice.” Must be nice for you to wear basketball shorts and a baseball cap on a Saturday and not have people mistake you for a boy, I thought, but never said. It was easier to just ignore it—my body, and the outside commentary.
In this way I passed through childhood and early adulthood with a determined disregard for my body. I cared for it the same way I care for my stand mixer: wipe it down after heavy use and oil when needed so it can keep serving my needs. Like my other tools, I took it entirely for granted unless it failed to perform.
Every now and then, in a church service or a theology class, I might remember that I’m supposedly getting a new body someday . . . and that one will be cooler? Have special powers? Never get stinky? But who has time to think about something so far away? I just need this body to do its job today, so I can get on with the serious business of Christianity.
I can’t recall exactly when I first heard the term “psychosomatic,” but I assume I came across it during my pop-psychology phase. Stories of horrific suffering drew me in as only a person who has yet to suffer horror can be drawn. I was fascinated by anything written by Torey L. Hayden, along with Sally Field’s performance in Sybil. I thought of “psychosomatic” as a word that described someone with a certain pathology: in short, someone whose mind was unwell.
So imagine my surprise when, after years of collecting dust on the “early 2000s” shelves of my memory library, the word jumped off the page of my assigned theology reading. In her hospitable book Practicing Christian Doctrine, Beth Felker Jones writes, “Scripture witnesses to our constitution by God as psychosomatic unities, creatures who are always both physical and spiritual.” I was shocked. Surely my physicality is not something I am, but something I have. My body is a possession, but not part of my being, not essential to my humanity.
Considering my body as part of me was so… so secular. Yet bodies resist being possessed, used, and ignored, for that is not what they are made for. It was easy to suppress my body’s resistance when I was the only one intimately acquainted with her, but marriage and motherhood amplified her protestations. My body isn’t the real me falls flat in the shared nakedness of the marriage bed. The assumption that my body was a machine disconnected from my soul was shattered by the first press of movement in my womb and the responding squeeze of love and fear in my throat.
Suffering, too, waved banners and blared horns. Recurrent upper respiratory infections that laid me out for weeks at a time forced me to wonder why this bodily sickness also wearied my soul. I returned home from a church event where I had been with safe people who loved me well, and fell to my knees on my living room floor. My body remembered a similar event, in a similar space, where I was not so safe. Sobs shuddered through me with grief and panic—my body surfacing the suppressed wounds of my soul.
“The human being,” Felker Jones continues, “is not a soul in hostile relationship with a body. The human being is always one thing, one creature, in life before God.” If creator God designed humans as psychosomatic unities, what does it look like to treat my body not as the sum of her functions, but as an integral part of my humanity? What does it mean to live as one creature?
My Sunday school teachers would be proud, because the answer is Jesus. Jesus entered into every part of humanity. He had to, for no part he did not enter could be redeemed. If body-soul oneness is part of what it means to be human, then Jesus too lived “as one creature in life before God.”
Jesus’ body was not in standby mode for thirty-three years until it was go time for Holy Week. He was human not only at the moments we view as most theologically significant. He was human, as a dear friend would say, “on a Tuesday.” Every obscure moment of the life he lived before anyone put pen to paper, he lived bodily. The uncoordinated injuries of toddlerhood. The gangly awkwardness of adolescence. Splinters. Hugs. Vomit. Fevers. The ache of hard labor and sting of blisters. The joy and discipline of worship. The daily, bodily submission to God’s will. He did not just sit piously on a hill and read the scriptures. He worked. He ate. He slept. He grew. He was a whole person living a whole life.
Jesus did not experience his emotions from a distance. They are in his body, as mine are in my body. Laughter squeezed tears from his eyes. Anger tensed his jaw and flared his nostrils. Anxiety forced drops of blood from his sweat glands. When his lungs drew breath again that first Easter morning, they were the resurrected version of the same lungs that had exhaled from the cross. He was glorified, fresh, whole, but still scarred.
This same-but-resurrected body is the one he ascended with. He sits at the right hand of the God the Father in that body this very moment, advocating and praying for us as we live in our bodies. According to the Apostle John, when we see him as he really is, we will be like him. The body that will carry me through an eternity of unfettered, fully sanctified worship will not be a totally different make and model, but a resurrected, fully-restored version of the one I have now.
Without participation from my body, I cannot be obedient in worship. In Romans 12:1-2, Paul gives specific instructions to the church on our manner and means of worship. Every believer—of every kind of body, every ability and sex and race—is commanded to worship by presenting their bodies to God. Fortunately for us this is not a typo. Paul did not say “minds” or even “souls.” God asks for our bodies, because we are unified beings and bring our whole self to worship.
We need only consider one or two body parts and the tasks they perform in the course of the day to see the practicality and immense scope of this command. Take the hands, for instance. Whom do they touch, and in what spirit? What words do they type and text? What images do they enable our eyes to behold and our minds to meditate on? What foods do they prepare, and with whom do they share them? When we present our bodies, we are not dead sacrifices that burn to ash and drift away on the wind, nor poured-out sacrifices left empty and dry. We are alive with holy purpose, well-pleasing to God. And in this obedience, our whole person is formed into the likeness of Christ. In this daily, bodily surrender we are renewed and transformed.
This is not merely for our own individual good. Nor is it only to please God, though God is certainly pleased. Paul goes on to explain how this bodily obedience leads us to confidence in discerning God’s will. From this confidence flows an awareness of the Spirit’s gifts, and the faith to exercise those gifts faithfully for the good of the whole family of God.
My body is me. Any attempt to ignore and suppress this body-soul oneness is to cause harm, for it is to live in opposition to the good work of my creator. In the thousand quotidian acts I carry out in the course of a week, my body is the object of Divine Love—created good and destined not for disposal and decay, but resurrection.
I’ll try to remember that next time I need new pants.
One Response
In the book, Tending Soul, Mind, Body: The Art & Science of Spiritual Formation (IVP, 2019), Todd Wilson says the following about the need to take our physical bodies much more seriously:
Augustine’s dualistic anthropology naturally leads to a dis-integrated spirituality, an approach to spiritual formation that focuses on the inner person, not the outer person; on the spiritual, not the physical. But if we want to move toward an integrated approach to spiritual formation, then we need to seriously scrutinise our dualistic anthropology. We are both spiritual and material. We are humans, not angels. We have a body that we need to take more seriously. It affects us in more ways than one. Your essay and thoughts about our bodies and our glorified bodies is a reminder of this.