In the Womb of God

“In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)

A friend reminded me of these beautiful words when I confessed to her some fears about my newly discovered pregnancy. Even as I write, these fears flutter up. The little life inside me is the size of a kidney bean, so tender, so fragile, so vulnerable. Will s/he survive? What if I eat something wrong? What if I breathe in too many noxious fumes? There are so many factors outside of my control!

Bubble of a Womb, by nwinn

These fears that spring up right at the start of life follow us through our entire earthly existence. What shall we eat, drink, wear? What if we make a wrong decision? How can we minimize our risks and reduce the impact of all those unknown outside variables? We are in a constant state of unease about this breathtaking yet fleeting thing called life.

As I pondered Paul’s words to the people of Athens, “In him we live and move and have our being,” it struck me that just as a newly formed life is knit together and held firmly by God in the mother’s womb, so we, as fragile creatures on a brief and exhilarating sojourn through planet Earth, are being formed in the womb of God until we are one day delivered into the broad daylight of everlasting union with our Creator.

As babes yet unborn into the full likeness of God, we now endure a dark and often grueling process of being knit together, according to a mysterious design, into a reflection of the Son. In the darkness of the womb, we hear his voice, but one day, we will see his face. We hear inchoate murmurs of the world beyond, so vast that our little hearts cannot take it in. We incubate in a twilight of semi-conscious spiritual awareness, seeing through a veil darkly, until one day the veil is torn, and we behold the Son in all his glory.

One day we will use to full capacity these lungs, feet, hands, mouths, hearts, that for now seem limited in their range and power. One day we will open our mouths and the fresh air of God’s kingdom will flood our lungs. One day we will run with abandon into the arms of the One who is both father and mother, lover and Spouse.

For now, all creation groans in the pains of childbirth, waiting with eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed (Romans 8).  For now, we rest in the womb of God. We await the day when we will be delivered from our fears into a perfect everlasting love, one that has enfolded us since before our life began.

Being One Flesh

What exactly does it mean to be one flesh? Okay, besides the obvious. I mean, when one is married, how exactly is it that your flesh is that of another person, and vice versa? I understand that you belong to each other, that your bodies belong to each other. And certainly, a couple consummates their marriage by sharing a bodily intimacy that beautifully manifests the literal reality of their unity. This love often brings forth a new human being, a symbol of and blessing on a couple’s union of body and life.

Yet, it’s not as if my husband lives in my skin, or that his brain waves can trigger responses in my own body (well, maybe through pheromones, but that’s another story). And it’s not like I can literally feel the headache pulsing in his temples or the chewed up carne asada tacos traveling down his esophagus. The limits of my bodily sensation are my own skin. Beyond that is another person, another body. A territory that as much as I claim in word and spirit, is still somewhat beyond my reach. Or is it?

As a result of my chronic ankle pain, Matt and I have gotten another view into what it might mean to be one flesh. When the pain was most grueling, I could barely move around the house, much less carry any kind of load or walk significant distances. While I lay helpless on the couch, Matt carried the laundry and groceries in, washed dishes, and picked up around the house. We joked that he was an extension of me, another set of arms and legs and back for me to use when my own were not functional. In an unexpected way, though pain, his body became my own.

A dear college professor once shared with us his interpretation of marriage. Marriage, Em said, compels you to draw the lines of your identity outside the bounds of your own skin, so that it encompasses another person. When something good happens to your spouse, it’s happening to you too.  And when one of you suffers, the other takes that suffering upon him or herself, even into his or her own body.

The lessons we learn through being one flesh in marriage don’t end there. Human marriage points to the greater mystery of Christ’s union with his bride, the church. As members of the church, I think it is God’s intention for each one of us not to draw the lines of our selfhood just around ourselves and our spouses, if we have one, but around the entire body of Christ. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26). Human marriage is just a beginner’s lesson in preparation for the infinitely more glorious and endless communion we will partake in at the marriage banquet of the Lamb.

Between Chronic Pain and Healing

My article for Catapult Magazine’s Health and Wealth Gospel issue tells the story of my journey with chronic pain and the questions I asked along the way. Disease, dying, decay…how did these realities make sense together with the healing, restoration and rebirth that Christians speak of as signs of God’s presence among us?

Read the full article here: https://www.catapultmagazine.com/health-and-wealth-gospel/feature/living-in-the-tension

iPhones as Liturgy

iPhones and other forms of technology function as alternative liturgy, James K.A. Smith suggests.[1] They are “covert incubators of the imagination, because they play the strings of our aesthetic hearts.” But instead of stretching our imaginations to encompass an irresistible view of God’s kingdom, the habituated bodily practices of such technologies “implicitly treat the world as available to me and at my disposal, to be selected, scaled, scanned, tapped, and enjoyed,” Smith writes.

Smith’s claims raise important questions for us. If we, like Smith, believe that “the way to the heart is through the body,” then it matters for our spiritual well-being what rituals we are practicing with our bodies. What does it do to our spiritual imaginations to be regularly hunched over gadgets that presume to place to world at our fingertips? Does walking around with earphones blocking most outside sounds in any way affect our ability to listen for God’s voice in the world? How does something like masturbation, which presumes that we can somehow meet our own physical desires, condition our hearts to respond to other unmet longings?

I’m not sure how to answer these questions. I think it’s crucial to ask them, though, because the habituated postures of our bodies affect the postures of our souls. This goes for all kinds of body habits, including how we handle technology, how we eat, and how we live out our sexuality.

I don’t think we will be able to escape using technology, but at least we can be aware of the psycho-spiritual effects that our iPads, laptops, and Kindles have on us when we cuddle with them in bed and when we touch their screens so intuitively. We can also intentionally immerse ourselves in liturgies that do call us out of ourselves and into God’s kingdom.

One of the most powerful liturgies in which I regularly participate is a monthly Taizè gathering. After a few meditative songs, children are invited to go forward and light their candles, which they then use to pass on light to the rest of us. I love how this simple act of receiving light from the tender hand of a child sends a message to our souls about what it looks like to enter the Kingdom of God.

During the Alleluia chorus, we raise our candles high, proclaiming with our arms and eyes and hearts and voices the truth that God’s light overcomes all our darkness. Later, we kneel and plant our individual candles at the foot of the cross up front in an embodied act of surrender. During the Lord’s Prayer at the end of the service, we join hands with our neighbors and form long rows of the people of God connected in body and spirit.

Our lives are filled with liturgies, whether the intentional liturgies of worship services or the unintentional liturgies of technology. How are these liturgies training our bodies? How are they shaping our souls?

For a powerful meditation on the spiritual effects of technology, check out Derek Webb’s latest album, CTRL.

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[1] “Alternative Liturgy: Social Media as Ritual” (The Christian Century, Vol. 130, No. 6, March 6, 2013, p. 30-33).

Doctors, Your Patients Are Human Beings

I’ve seen a lot of doctors in the past three years – too many to count on my own two hands.  The number of doctors by whom I felt heard and truly cared for, though, is less than a handful.

Maybe my expectations are too high, but after running the gamut of doctors, I’ve come to believe that a doctor’s responsibility runs much deeper than simply diagnosing a physical complaint and running a treatment protocol. That’s because when we go to a doctor, we go not just as a bundle of body parts and malfunctioning cells sitting in an isolated exam room. We go as living human beings connected to families, communities, religious traditions, and a reality beyond the material.

All too often, doctors seem to miss this reality. Admittedly, we aren’t going to them to get our souls treated; doctors are tasked with treating our bodies. But then again, bodies are much more than anatomical parts and processes. Furthermore, western medicine is not the end-all-be-all authority on diagnosing what’s going on in our bodies. Reading physical symptoms, taking medical images, and running tests only reveal a partial truth. The truth of what the patient is experiencing, in my opinion, is just as weighty.

Melanie Thernstrom, in her book The Pain Chronicles, describes that in recent centuries, the question that doctors ask their patients has shifted from “What happened?” to “Where does it hurt?” It’s a subtle shift, but one that reveals a dramatic reorientation of perspective. No longer is the doctor asking the patient to tell their story about how they’ve ended up in the exam room, with all its starts, stops, hesitations, and implied meanings. Doctors now completely bypass patient understandings and instead hone in on the physical problem, minus patient narrative.

My own countless doctors’ visits attest to this fact. I would go into the exam room prepared to explain to the doctor when my ankle pain started, how I think it started, what I’ve tried to do for self-care, and my questions. Oftentimes, before I got a chance to get out more than a few sentences, the doctor would jump in. “Okay, take off your shoes and socks. Does this hurt? Can you rotate your ankle this way? Resist when I try to push your foot this way. Okay, now get up and try to stand on your toes. Hm…okay, take two ibuprofen three times a day for two weeks and it should be fine.” Before I could re-gather myself to ask questions, the doctor would be gone.

This description is only a slight exaggeration of my experiences. In short, the treatment of many doctors has left me feeling voiceless, like an inanimate object squeezed into a too-short time slot, cursorily poked at, and then ejected from the exam room right in time for the next inanimate object to arrive, and not a minute over.

My friend in her second year of medical school pointed out to me that a lot of the problem is the whole health care system in the United States. Unless they run their own practice, doctors don’t have a lot of say over how much time they are allotted to spend with each patient, and they are required to see a certain amount of patients a day in order to satisfy the group or hospital requirements. The system of which doctors are a part, willingly or not, simply doesn’t give them much wiggle room to take a more personal approach. I agree. I think the system needs to change.

Beyond the logistics of the system, however, lies a deeper issue of epistemology – that is, how knowledge is arrived at. Western medicine has evolved such that knowledge is believed to lie in concrete physical facts which can be measured, compared, quantified. Pain is rated on a scale of 1-10. (I’ve always disliked having to reduce my experience of pain to a number.) To be sure, numbers are helpful, and without such cut and dried measurements and processes, we might still be getting bled and leeched every time we saw the doctor.

The problem with numbers and cold measurements, though, is that human experience often gets cast to the wayside. How has the stroke affected Mrs. Farhad’s life? Does she see it as an act of God, something that she should resign herself to, or as a result of diet and lifestyle, something that she can gradually improve upon?

What patients themselves make of their ailments matters, not just for treatment, but also because how they interpret their experience through the matrix of their own cultural and metaphysical understandings of the world is a kind of truth. It is the truth of their everyday existence, of how they live their lives. Even if it is not the lens a medical professional uses to diagnose and treat maladies, this does not mean that it is irrelevant.

What am I asking for, then? I am asking that doctors listen to their patients. Not just listen to the number at which they rate their pain, but listen for what their pain means to them, how it has changed their lives, what it does to their sense of self. I am asking that doctors step down from their pedestals of lofty, scientific training and approach their patients in a collaborative eye-to-eye relationship. I am also asking them to take into account different kinds of knowledge – personal experiential knowledge and not just abstract textbook knowledge. Bottom line, I am asking that doctors treat their patients as human beings whose voices matter.

Yoga: Bringing Mind into Body

Sometimes I live completely in my mind. It is as if my mind said sayonara to my body and hopped on a high-speed train to zip around my fidgety world of problems and ideas (which all seem monumental, of course). Suddenly I realize that I have no idea what’s happening around me. I am not at all present in my physical body. This is why yoga can be so difficult, but at the same time so needed.

Practicing yoga encourages us to come home to our bodies. Yesterday, as I was lying in “corpse” pose, my instructor guided me to “bring my mind down into my body.” Become aware of the places where your body meets the ground, she said, where parts of your body touch each other.  Feel the earth supporting your body. Attune yourself to the here and how. Listen to your breath, feel your breath flowing in and out. Take note of the temperature.

As I did what she suggested, my bodily senses came into clear focus and all the monkeys jumping around in my head started to quiet down. I started to move my awareness away from the world of problems and plans in my mind and down into my arms, my blood, my legs, my breath. It’s hard to describe, but it’s as if the zippy problem train came to a slow crawl and then released my consciousness into the gentle river of my breath and pulse.

This practice of bringing mind into body reminds me of something my mom used to tell me to do when I couldn’t fall asleep as a kid. “Think about your stomach,” she urged at my bedside. Okay…so what? But now I see her point. Thinking about my stomach (or any body part, for that matter) forces me to disconnect from the other thoughts that are pulling me away from the here and now. And often those other thoughts are what keep me from giving in to my weariness in order to drift asleep. You’ve probably had moments too when you can’t turn your mind off even though your body is dead tired. Trying taking my mom’s advice . It’s a good excuse for navel-gazing, anyway.

Yoga is only one avenue for bringing the mind into the body.  Some forms of meditative prayer also serve the same calming, centering purpose. The Jesus Prayer, for example, focuses on repeating one simple phrase on each inhale and exhale, over and over again: Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me. Another form of contemplative prayer involves bringing the mind “down into the heart.”  While prayer can often seem disembodied, having nothing to do with our physical existence, there are ways to bring our bodies into prayer, or, better said, to allow our bodies to bring us into prayer.

Whatever works for you to bring your mind into your body and become fully present, take a while to do this today.

A Woman’s Lent

What does Lent, the annual Church season of fasting, repentance, almsgiving, and prayer which we enter today, have in common with a woman’s monthly cycle? It seems an incongruous analogy, but as I was pondering a post on menstruation (and I hope that by talking more about it, it becomes less “icky” and more meaningful), the similarities between it and Lent became striking.

As I understand it, Lent is a season of slowing down, of detaching ourselves from the frantic rhythms of high-speed internet and media spin and tuning in our senses to the deeper, all-encompassing pulse of God’s life in the world.  A woman’s period, I think, is also an invitation to slow down and recalibrate our sense of time not to man-made rhythms but to the creaturely cycle of life and death.

As I wrote in my last post, the pain and discomfort our bodies experience in illness can be a wake-up call, reminding us that we don’t have the unlimited resources of God. Likewise, for women, when our insides cramp and bleed each month, and we feel the need to curl up and sleep more, we can welcome this time as the body’s invitation to slow down and remember our vulnerability in light of God’s sufficiency.

In Anita Diamant’s novel The Red Tent, she paints an imaginative picture of how Jacob’s wives embraced their cycles. I’m not sure how this worked or if it’s at all realistic, but in the book, all the women in Jacob’s tribe got their periods at the same time. In the red tent, they leave their everyday duties and come together as women, using the time of their periods to rest, tell stories, and deepen their sisterhood. Okay, so we don’t have instituted “period” time off as contemporary women, and I somehow doubt that Jacob and his sons would have been very happy with all the womenfolk taking a three- to four-day break from cooking and cleaning each month. But I do think there are ways to embrace and celebrate menstruation instead of wishing it were over faster and feeling gross during it, and Diamant’s story points us in the right direction.

I also love how women’s cycles, like Lent, hint at something more important – new life. Month after month, the womb sheds its lining (which to women who are hoping to conceive, can seem like a disappointing “not-life”) and prepares again for the possibility of nurturing another life within. It’s almost sacramental, this bodily ritual that parallels the Church’s annual custom of inhabiting Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Though foreshadowing the resurrection, Lent is a somber season. We ponder our brokenness and the world’s suffering as a way to prepare our hearts to truly receive God’s gift of life through the resurrection. We practice the spiritual discipline of fasting during Lent as a way to embody our repentance. One of my pastors reflected beautifully on the role of fasting in the spiritual life. The voluntary hunger that we go through during a fast, he said, serves to alert us to a deeper spiritual hunger. These pangs become not a distraction from the spiritual, but rather a physical means to enter into larger spiritual realities.  Our bodily sensations bring home in marrow and blood what it means “hunger and thirst for righteousness.”

A college roommate told me once about how she was letting the bodily sensations of her period usher her into deeper spiritual awareness. As she pressed into the pain and discomfort she experienced each month, it became a way to connect with the pain and suffering of others. She made her period a regular time to step back and reflect on life. Her physical cycles led her to a greater emotional and spiritual receptivity and expanded her ability to “suffer with” (the root meaning of com-passion).

Does it seem crude to liken the messy, bloody experience women go through each month with the holy, sacred season of Lent? I don’t think so. The dictionary defines sacrament as “a Christian rite…that is held to be a means of divine grace or to be a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality.” While I would never say that menstruation is a sacrament by any means, it does have sacred qualities. If we are open to it, our cycles can point us to holy rhythms of life and death, remind us of our humble, creaturely origins, and lead us to a new level of compassion with those who suffer. That’s quite a divine grace, if you ask me.