Body Reverence

I'm weeping as I think about this post. Perhaps the tears flow more freely because I just realized I forgot to take my antidepressant this morning (I'm slowly weening myself and have begun cutting each tablet into fourths, hoping to soon be off antidepressants for the first time in about eight years... but, I digress), or perhaps I'm melancholy after reading beautiful chapters in Barbara Brown Taylor's "Altars of the World", or maybe it's the dark sky, rain and thunder connecting me with God, or perhaps a constellation of all of these, but I am feeling an intense love and reverence for the Word became flesh.

Those of us who call ourselves Christian, in a nation that is predominately self-defined as Christian, so easily, seems to me, share a Madison Avenue world-view about the body when, if we understood God better, we would see our bodies and those of others as something holy. God, (hear this well)... GOD chooses to indwell these vessels of flesh... that alone gives them extraordinary value. God imparts the value. And that is why I weep today. I weep for my blindness that gave ad executives and a broken culture the power to cause me to be disaffected with my body... to loathe it, to loathe other broken bodies (out of fear), and to loathe "perfect" bodies (out of envy). I weep for all the years of misunderstanding that I did not have to be ashamed of my body but I could revere it. (In our culture, writing a statement like that can be so easily misconstrued. We have an entire nation of "body worshippers", but I'm talking about something that is deep, mysterious, lifegiving... it's about revering bodies that are twisted, wrinkled, missing limbs, mottled, scarred, wounded as well as those that are firm of flesh, pink, soft, young, and smooth... a reverence for flesh because it is the creation of God, and even more, unbelievably more... the dwelling place for the Most High God.

I weep out of gratitude for my body, and I weep that I am finally able to love my body... to have holy reverence for my own body and the bodies of others. We are beautiful beyond our limited ability to see, but one day we will see ourselves through God's eyes, and we will weep for the sheer beauty of what we see reflected back to us. And we will weep in repentance for all the ways we rejected the good gift of our flesh.

Help me, O God, to revere that which you hold dear.