The body as a house of belonging
Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash
“…This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.” David Whyte
In Advent, Christians around the world collectively anticipated the arrival of Jesus as embodied hope. We waited for the coming again of the “Word”, in the flesh. And, at the playing of David Wilcox’s startling and profound chord marking that moment in the famous carol, “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” sitting on Christmas Eve I realized that I had been holding my breath. Sitting next to my sons, my spirit soared as I heard those notes, remembering that Christ, fully human and fully divine, came to live with us. The story of the Incarnation is the story of divine desire to be with and belong to humanity and answers our longing to be with and belong to the Divine. And, perhaps most profoundly, Jesus’ birth in a particular human form shows us the powerful role bodies play in the work of belonging.
Last December my office held a Secret Santa gift exchange. In preparation, each participant was asked to write one sentence that would describe what they might want for under $20. I instantly knew what I wanted. More than the typical requests for candles, mugs, or funny calendars, my heart knew it needed beauty. To understand my desire, I should describe my context. I live in the Twin Cities where winter can drag on long after Epiphany’s magi have found the Christ child and set their sights to return home by another route. I find that sometime in late February and early March, my soul begins to long for colorful, beautiful things. My body longs for green grass and leaves on trees and sunshine.
So, when asked what I would like as a gift under $20, I wrote, “something beautiful to look at to get me through the long winter.” A few weeks later a package arrived from my Secret Santa. I could feel from the package that it was light and oddly shaped. I thought perhaps it was a picture of something inspiring or a piece of art created by the giver.
Imagine my surprise when I opened it to see my own face looking back at me. My colleague’s gift was a mirror, shaped as a cloud, in a wooden holder.
The mirror took my breath away and I sat quickly down, touched by the thoughtfulness. Rituals and practices, whether serious or silly, hold the potential to shape our individual identities and those of the communities we belong to. Practices like sharing meals or exchanging gifts create the connective tissue of belonging. Moreover, within this particular practice of gift giving, there was something about receiving a good gift—one that reflected my desires and hidden prayers, that created a sense of being seen – of being known. It was an act of belonging.
Here, by extending belonging, my colleague “saw” me and was also naming that I could give myself permission to look in the mirror and call my body beautiful. In my colleagues' friendly gift was a powerful theology: one that names our bodies as far more than categories, boxes, and checkmarks. There is a deep connection to what it feels like to be seen in bodily form and to belong.
My body, marked with age, shaped by childbirth, and carrying within it the trauma of a pandemic and my own bouts with Covid, has not always been my first thought when I think of beauty or belonging. Formed by a culture that holds out impossible images of bodies, which tell me that in order to belong I must look and be a certain way, reminds me that my body is the site of colonizing forces often well beyond my control. But, as a cis-gendered, straight, white woman, I know my body has also served as a catalyst, gatekeeper, and barrier for others’ belonging. My body reflects both the sins of the colonizer and the colonized. Yet, here was beauty, never further away than the nearest reflection.
With the mirror came a small card that simply said - “From your Trans Santa”. I should note here that my colleague is a trans person, and without him saying so, his gift reminded me that despite my own struggles to find beauty in my own body, to find a sense of belonging in and of myself, there are many communities, not least of which are trans folks, whose very identities and bodies are often the location of rejection, disconnection, and alienation. In coming to know the trans and non-binary community, I have experienced how LGBTQIA+ individuals often receive messages from the broader culture of what bodies should be, what boxes they should fit into, as well as the emotional and physical cost when they don’t. In all of this, my colleague reminded me of the embodied belonging Christ demonstrated in his birth and life. In my request for beauty, he gave me the beautiful gift of embodied belonging.
In the work of Jesus’ liberating and life-giving love is the act of claiming that our full bodies, the full expression of our beings, are seen, known – that we belong to God, to one another, and to ourselves.
This is not some new realization of modern day politics. Our forebears in faith wrestled with belonging and identity, too. I am reminded of the Israelites in Babylon, seeking to claim their own identity, naming the practices and stories that would help them retain a sense of self and community even while in exile. Or consider the stories of the early patristic period as the church mothers and fathers, seeking to prevent heresy and schism in the embodied community, wrestled to articulate creeds and doctrines centered in the very body of Jesus, who he was, and what his life meant for the world. Humans are drawn together by our need to share stories and shape practices that express how bodies are deeply and intimately connected, how we are woven together, and how we belong to each other.
And, so, the question then becomes, what barriers keep bodies from belonging? Or, going one step further, what barriers keep us, in our bodies, from belonging? Why do even our faith communities often struggle to create and hold spaces where bodies know belonging?
“Our bodies know that they belong; it is our minds that make our lives so homeless. Guided by longing, belonging is the wisdom of rhythm. When we are in rhythm with our own nature, things flow and balance naturally. Every fragment does not have to be relocated, reordered; things cohere and fit according to their deeper impulse and instinct.”
–John O’Donohue, Eternal echoes
Now, after the season of the Incarnation, after Christmas and the Epiphany, I am struck by my own need to keep to a rhythm, to continue practices like the giving and receiving of gifts, where I can continually be reminded that just as Jesus came among us, the divine Word, in a body, so too, I can find divine beauty in my own body. I will give myself over, in the months ahead to the practices of loving care for my body so that I can care for and love the bodies of others in my community and in the world. I will continue to look at myself in that mirror, seeing with the eyes of the Incarnate One, that which is beautiful and holy in what is reflected back to me. I’ll try to remember the Apostle Paul’s teaching, that “now we see as through a mirror dimly” and one day we shall see face to face, just as we are seen and known even now. And, like the poet, love all things that take awhile to love so that my body may be a house of belonging.
