The first draft of this essay was finished just a week before the US Supreme Court decided to strike down that fundamental human right: the right to self-determination. Enough said. Fortunately, I’m no longer part of the American circus, but the place I live in now passed similarly restrictive laws a few years ago. What can I say? I know if I lived elsewhere, I would have kids by now. It’s a funny, pointless, matter-of-fact, heart-exploding thought.
The contents of this essay seem very fitting in this situation. The role religion, and more specifically the “Christian” church, has played in that despicable plot to debase us is evident to all. Somehow, as written below, the church just loves to trespass on the ground that should be considered off-limits and holy. I believe it will be held accountable. But it’s cold comfort—and a little too late for many.
In the meantime, reclaiming the body remains the ultimate act of everyday subversion.
Even to your old age and gray hair, I am the one who will carry you.
I am the one who will sustain you.
I keep count of your tossings. I store up your tears within me. Are they not all here with me?
I know when you sit down and when you rise up. I discern your thoughts from afar.
I will never leave you nor forsake you. I am with you always, till the end of days.
Your eternal I am.
Yours forever. Your body.
One of the first strongholds the church sets out to detonate in our lives is that most important connection of all—the connection we have to our bodies.
The church needs to target that bond from the very start. The younger, the better. Because it knows that if that relationship were to flourish intact, then people wouldn’t fall so eagerly on the swords of its outlandish theories.
The body is faithful. The body is fast. The body knows. The body senses danger. The body keeps score. The body never fails.
When we so much as touch a hot plate, the body pulls back immediately. The pain comes later—our brain moves at a snail’s pace in comparison. And it’s even longer before a makeshift diagnosis of what has just happened appears, tentatively, on the screen of our consciousness.
(This, of course, in the case of relatively straightforward stimuli. How long does it take our brain to produce feedback on abuse that’s less obvious, more sophisticated, a work of a skillful artist? Sometimes life itself is not long enough to process that.)
Victims of violence don’t always know that something is wrong with the way they’ve been treated. But their body knows it immediately. It freezes. Huddles up. Stiffens with tension. Contains the pain, anger, and fear. All the while, we flog ourselves for not being as efficient, as tireless, as bursting with energy as some stranger would want us to be.
The body knows when it’s hungry. The body knows when it’s thirsty. The body knows when it’s tired. The body knows what it needs. The body knows what it wants. The body knows what it needs to stay away from. The body knows what causes it harm. The body knows its limits.
And this knowledge translates into colossal independence. A person in sync with their body will not be easily moved. They will take their time with any new-fangled theory. They will sniff at it from all sides, bounce the idea this way and that way, no pressure, sleep on it a dozen times or more, look at it in the light of many days.
Then, maybe, just maybe, they might allow that particular program to make changes to their computer.
And when they do allow the new element in, they can rest assured they have the best antivirus there is, fully customized to their needs and constitution—the intuition that’s sharp enough to pierce to the division of joints and marrow. It will separate the wheat from the chaff in no time. This makes sense, and that doesn’t; this is reasonable, and that is absurd; this is working, and that isn’t; this is helpful, and that will cause me harm.
Of course, if a believer were to have such independence, it would be a severe blow to the church’s bid for all-encompassing authority. At the very least, religion could not tread so boldly where it just loves to trespass now.
That’s why from the very beginning, the church makes it a point to hiss gently in your ear, Can you really trust yourself?
How can you be sure what’s best for you?
Come closer. Why are you moving away?
Are you sure you can’t go further?
Don’t listen to your feelings and your body. (Enough with being human already.)
Are you feeling what you’re supposed to be feeling?
Are you thinking what you’re supposed to be thinking?
Be realistic—plan for a miracle.
Not by power, not by might, but by my Holy Spirit.
Those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will run and not grow weary. They will walk and not be faint.
I remember way too many people in church who have told me proudly, “You know, I think it was God who wanted me to break my arm / my leg / have this accident / have this nervous breakdown / end up in the hospital. He just wanted me to rest!”
The capitalist reframing of a human being as a human doing gets fresh anointing from modern Christian ethics. “I’m an ‘instrument’ therefore I am—I act, ergo sum?!” (after Oz, 158).
At this point, if you’ve received any training from the church at all, you should hear a mitigating voice cautioning you about the treacherous lusts of the flesh and the body beholden unto sin.
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
Isn’t that what growing up is all about, learning to rule over your body?
(That’s a good question, actually. Isn’t that what growing up should be all about, learning to cooperate with your body?)
The validity of these reservations aside, it’s a fact that the admonitions about the lusts of the flesh are up there in the top 10 on the Billboard list of go-to sermons. It’s enough for the pastor to hit the first notes, we’re already signing along. If God forbid he had a stroke behind the pulpit, we would have no problem joining in for the chorus.
Meanwhile, the admonitions about how life-shattering it is to neglect your “flesh” are not played on the church radio nearly enough. Losing the connection to your body will drastically affect your overall health, but you’re unlikely to hear about it in church.
And it’s really a stunner, isn’t it? You’d think that with so many lives lost over the centuries just because the church wanted to field test some new cockamamie theory (who gets to be called human, for example), it would maybe show some restraint in its micromanaging drive.
Why do we need to draw outside the lines of the Apostles’ Creed, for instance, if the majority of people showing up in Christian churches would not be able to explain with their own words the basic doctrines that appear in that short confession of faith.
(To be sure, dissecting mysteries is a humbling experience, and stone-throwing does have the advantage of boosting the thrower’s ego.)
The church’s behavior is calculated, of course. “Losing your self-respect, your common sense, your sense of importance proportionately magnifies, empowers, glorifies your religion, your nation, your race, your ideals or the political party you’ve sworn loyalty to” (after Oz, 156).
If the church doesn’t discredit the body’s value, it will not be able to gain control over the soul. And that would horribly undermine its position in society.
And so “fellowships of believers” become full of people who have forgotten they have bodies—and of oppressors who can sense full well that the alarm system of their victims is malfunctioning. When everything in them cries out, No, they say, Yes. When everything in them cries out, Yes, they say, No. (“Let us put to death the deeds of the body so that we may live”).
This essay came about spontaneously when I was brainstorming for a post about the methodology of doubt. I simply wanted to give my take on where to start the process so the journey is made in happiness, not in misery.
Because when you set out to free Christian thought from the suffocating layers of cultural mores and outside interpretation, it’s easy to feel that you’re in for a purely intellectual task.
Surely you need to arm yourself with a battery of books and a couple of dictionaries or at least turn to someone who can decipher these. Surely you need to be a language buff or a science buff and of course get good at debate and mediation because everyone around you will have an opinion about your process or, worst of all, as LM Montgomery would put it, will worry and pray about you.
Due to the church’s machinations, both faith and doubt have become an exercise in introspection. This clever trick deserves a separate essay all on its own because there is some interesting history behind this development.
But even within the realm of the present discussion, it’s easy to see how sentencing believers to endless languishing in the introspective labyrinth fits in perfectly with the church’s policy of demeaning the body’s reactions. The logic is, you have to ground the faith (the control) in something, if not in the believer’s well-being.
So whether we believe or doubt, our knee-jerk reaction tends to stay the same. We make a project out of it. We write a to-do list. We begin to analyze every thought, weigh every intention, enter into a full-blown crisis of conscience, wall ourselves in (and wear ourselves out) with reasoning and deliberation. “Not to see the earth, not to see the sun, nothing left to do but run, run, run.”
We might throw ourselves headfirst into the vicissitudes of election, the historical Jesus, the reliability of manuscripts, or the cultural realities of the ancient Near East. As illuminating as these issues may be, if we continue with the church’s ethos of neglecting the body, the quest will change nothing in the quality of our daily lives. It’s the same old hamster wheel. We’ve only switched the program.
And our doubt will turn out to be very much like our belief—humdrum, joyless, and inauthentic.
The thing is, the deconstruction will fall flat if the agent doing the deconstruction is ailing. A corpse does not get curious. Sure, book knowledge can be useful. But not as useful as the knowledge we gain from making ourselves at home in the tent entrusted to our earthly care. The one till death do us part relationship we can count on.
We can get many answers from books, but we’ll still need to engage with the fundamentals all on our own: Where is the pain coming from? What is triggering me, and why? What is making me tired? What is making me curious? What do I need? What am I drawn to? What do I recoil from? How long can I go on this way? What can I do to help myself?
As much fun as Ancient Near Eastern studies can be after hours, sleeping in is OK, too, sometimes.
And you can get a lot of mileage out of a simple No. Of good enough rather than perfect. Of making a warm meal from scratch. Of getting there last instead of soon.
So you feel you haven’t been reaching your full potential lately? Spoiler alert: nobody cares.
Let’s make dawdling great again. Rushing is out. Lingering is in.
River running free—do you know how it feels? Dragonflies out in the sun—you know how it feels, don’t you know?
You know the usual pacifiers? The stimulants, the social media, the busyness? They’re popular for a reason. How often do you find yourself reaching for them? What will you hear if you don’t?
Eternity calls in the inner workings of our bodies. So many messages left unread. Yet we often accuse God of being silent. Out of touch. Impassive. Distant. Abstract.
He doesn’t know how it is. He’s never lived here among us.
Making yourself at home in your body will look different for different people. How it happens will depend on your personality, your place in life, where you live, your financial situation, or the goals you’ve set for yourself.
There are times when merely sleeping in is an act of independence. A luxury we can afford only rarely.
Sometimes all we can do is acknowledge our needs. Put them into words. Say them out loud. Make a promise we will attend to them as soon as we are able to.
Sometimes all we can do is manage our attention. Take note of the white noise sources: the hubbub that does nothing but sow confusion. Take note of the black holes of energy that demand so much so urgently yet give little in return, if at all.
Take note of the fact that I’ve been thirsty, and for such a long time now.
Sometimes all we can do is make sure our yoke fits comfortably on our shoulders.
It’s not a “five easy steps to a better you” kind of project. It’s not enlightenment over the weekend. It’s not a skill you can learn, put on your CV, then promptly forget.
Calibrating an antivirus that’s been compromised can take a lifetime.
The good news is we can start anywhere. Anytime. Any way we want. After all, we’re not doing anything revolutionary, convoluted, or superhuman.
On the contrary, we’re waking up to reality.
The same reality that fanaticism does its utmost to never address. The same reality advertisers desperately want us to tune out. The same reality that demons are working overtime to distract us from.
Reality calls. And it’s for us.
This essay refers to Amos Oz’s book “Black box” which I only know in the Polish translation (Warsaw 1995; quotes are translated by me). I also evoke Nina Simone, Jim Morrison, apostle Paul, Jeremiah, psalmists, and other fun writers. Seek and ye shall find.
“Don’t listen to your feelings and your body, enough with being human already” is a quote from my dear friend AK.
The thought of the demons being afraid of reality comes from C.S. Lewis, who elaborates on it in chapter 13 of “Screwtape Letters”. In that chapter, you can also learn how a taste for tripe and onions can save a person from eternal harm.
A word of caution: I am not a religious trauma counselor. If you have been hurt by institutionalized religion to the point that it is seriously affecting your daily life (panic attacks, uncontrollable anger, loss of focus, constant triggering, numbness, and out-of-body experiences), I strongly urge you to stop reading and contact a health professional near you. Your pain is real and should be attended to.