11.19 // Healing Bodies
Today we have been praying for our blistery Benson:
God , we know you dwell Ben. Help us know how to care for him. Help doctors to reveal what is happening in his body. Grant him comfort and peace. Protect the rest of us from this sickness. Be near us, we pray.
The day is filled with breath prayers, sigh prayers, tired prayers.
Benson moans as the Tylenol begins to wear off, and I can see his skin flare up bright red.
Days and weeks of mysterious illness can feel especially trying.
I think of the saintly mamas I know who spend a lot of time in the hospitals with their babies. Oh, the grace and resilience that they live in each moment.
May we never cease to be grateful for health.
May we never cease to be grateful for our bodies.
And with these thoughts on healing, I’ve been noticing our bodies— their beauty, their weaknesses, their limits, the growth.
In my examen, I begin my list of gratitude with them, too:
Thank you, God, for John Taylor’s little leg rolls.
My heart gives you thanks for Olivia’s prance-y, dance-y steps when she gets home from school— that you’ve kept her safe today and have grown her confidence through Pre-K.
Thank you for rare moments this afternoon when I could hear Ben humming on the couch, that his body has been eased enough to sing.
Thank you for Jackson’s presence after work, how he walks in and steadies us all.
I pray for their bodies.
And then I am grateful for them, too.
But later, in an in-between moment, when I sit down with Henri Nouwen and all is quiet, his words poke at the blistery parts of my own heart—where I have not prayed and where I am not grateful. I see where, I, too, need healing. Because I, like Nouwen, am not home in my body. Not truly. Not yet.
And God calls me into healing for my own body, too:
“You have never felt completely safe in your body. But God wants to love you in all that you are, spirit and body. Increasingly, you have come to see your body as an enemy that has to be conquered. But God wants you to befriend your body so that it can be made ready for the Resurrection. When you do not fully own your body, you cannot claim it for an everlasting life.
How then do you bring your body home? By letting it participate in your deepest desire to receive and offer love. Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, and repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body’s deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body’s superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.
In Jesus, God took on human flesh. The Spirit of God overshadowed Mary, and in her all enmity between spirit and body was overcome. Thus God’s Spirit was united with the human spirit, and the human body became the temple destined to be lifted up into the intimacy of God through the Resurrection. Every human body has been given a new hope, of belonging eternally to the God who created it. Thanks to the Incarnation, you can bring your body home.”
As I read this chapter called “Bring Your Body Home” from The Inner Voice of Love, Nouwen’s journal from his dark night of the soul, I realize that our healing as spiritual people is directly connected to healing our relationships with our bodies.
Looking over Nouwen’s words, I ask:
Am I at home in my body?
Is my body an enemy that needs to be conquered or a friend?
Does my body lead me to Love?
In this short examen, I look to my own embodiment, and begin— awkwardly, hesitantly— with thanksgiving:
I am thankful for a body that can carry my sick child in and out of doctor’s offices.
I am grateful that this body recovered from three difficult deliveries of three sweet kids.
I know that this body has let me see the world, run races, sing and play and dance and walk down aisles.
And I am grateful for it.
And then, with a big exhale, I remind my heart that this body is me.
Its within this body that I will know God. And it is in this body that I will know resurrection.
I am a thirty-year old mom body.
And I am enough.
I don’t need make-up or trendy clothes or scar fading cream to feel at home in it. I can show up just as I am. And I am enough.
This body does not need an ideal size or an ideal weight or an ideal look. It simply needs to be lived in well, full of joy and appreciation and rich experiences.
And that kind of living is enough.
I am practicing resurrection now in this body— joining it with Jesus, the Incarnated One, and finding it holy and good and a temple where Presence dwells.
And this body is enough.
As I wrap up another short examen, I pray for Benson’s healing, and, now also for my own:
Jesus, teach me find You in every part of me— not just my mind, not just my heart, not my just my emotions or passion. But in my body, too.
Teach me how to live fully in this body. For I am a body, just as you are the embodied God. My I become whole. May every part of my being be important and significant, for all of me matters to You. May I bring my body home by finding my home in You.
Amen.