Body Love

I have been reflecting on the body a lot lately. I have been wrestling with my own body image issues as I try to get myself back into the gym for the hundredth time. I wish I loved it. I wish it made me ecstatic. It doesn't. Mostly it just makes me tired, but maybe I just need some time.

Right now I am somewhere in between angry and motivated. I got a flush of anger at a cafe this week as a woman sat with her legs crossed twice, like her legs were little vines intertwining each other. Is that really comfortable? I also got perturbed with the guy that was double stepping the stairs to the grocery store. Is that really necessary? So your skinny, so you are athletic. I am tired of fat jokes and open scrutiny of other people's bodies. Do you see me? And I am really sick of the nation's new found focus on child obesity that blames the children and let's the parents in charge of feeding them completely off the hook. I wish there was a study of those parents. I would put my total savings on the outcome being those mothers and fathers having serious eating disorders or at least seriously disordered eating. Why don't we get that behaviors are learned, even if it is an opposite behavior? This is a portion of my anger.

I wonder how much of our body issues truly are mental. And by mental, I do mean psychological. Like the Indexed image above, our minds are getting played with all the time about what we should look like. The crazy thing is, most of us know this to be true, and yet we still judge ourselves and each other by magazine cover standards. Psychologically, these are issues of self worth. But I think after exploring the psychological aspects of this issue for a couple of months, I am still left wanting for more.

This has led me to the concept of honoring the body as spiritual discipline. From Lauren Winner's Mudhouse Sabbath, here are some thoughts along this line:

Attending Christianly to our bodies is a matter of some urgency, because there is no neutral way to be a body...What I want is to pay more attention - and more explicitly theological attention - to my body and the things it does every day and the connections between the work of my body and the daily service of God.

...the church fathers labeled Gnostism, with its insistence that spirit was separate from and superior to matter, a heresy...Even the most faithful Christians can sometimes catch themselves in a Gnostic mindset of wanting to deny, rather than rightly order bodily desires for sex, food, even sleep.

I also started reading Honoring the Body by Stephanie Paulsell. So far, she is speaking to the dichotomies of the body. Integrity (our distinctness) and relationality (our connectedness with other bodies), freedom and constraint as "practices that seem to constrain the body often have freedom as their motive," and lastly sacredness (deeply blessed) and vulnerability (fragile).

I wish I could soak this all in. I wish I could have such a vision of the body, a vision that internalizes the goodness of God and the beauty of my created self...body and all. I wish that as I go to the gym tomorrow I could maintain the perspective that caring for my body is one small practice of worship to God, and that God does not require self mutilation or condemnation in this practice in order to make it holy. I hope that I will soak up the belief that God actually cares about what I eat. That the God who instituted feasts, dietary laws, Lord's Supper and the tree of good and evil actually still cares about how, and what, and when, and with whom I eat.

Is this possible? This mix of freedom and constraint, this tension between sacred and vulnerable...are they neat categories, or could I really learn to "rightly order" my body?