There was a great trail that led alongside a creek, under the road and through vineyards for about 2 miles into the country. The weather was perfect running weather, cool, almost rainy. My Playlist was an experiment. I usually run to dance music. Today I ran to cathedral chants.
I pressed start on my running app and play on Spotify and headed out. Slowly. Painfully slowly.
I am a slow runner. And the first few miles are bit of a battle as my body cranks on whatever physiology or hormones that make long runs feel amazing.
Observing my slow ass body trying to get itself in gear and the new green of spring while the smell of rain hung in the air. The haunting notes of a sacred chord, high then low, layering with reverberations off some walls transported some part of me to an ancient cathedral where light streams in through stained glass and I felt myself on a kneeler watching myself struggle to run as a type of prayer. Old men whizzed pass me and I plodded on slowly as fingers trace the beads of a rosary.
Having a body is a spiritual discipline.
In prayer, the spiritual part of me is unfettered and unlimited. It feels timeless and hasn't seemed to age or change too much since I was a child.
My physical, biological being is constantly changing. It is limited and grounded in the present moment and I am often painfully reminded of its limitations.
But this struggle with limitations, I believe, is spiritual. God became flesh and dwelt among us. Jesus struggled with limitations of his body. Hunger, pain, fatigue, mental anguish. Jesus was born and had to learn to walk. Jesus went through puberty and had a brain and heart and stomach to wrestle with.
My body perpetually disappoints me. I think this is hard to admit and wrestle with. On one hand there are messages out there that compel us to master our bodies -- to subjugate them to our will. If we can develop mental acuity we can conquer physical challenges. We can lose weight. We can perform athletically. We can dismiss pain and suffering. We can power through and work despite our stress, fatigue or frailty.
On the other hand, there are messages out there that free us from control over our biological limitations. We can embrace comfort and not push through or deny ourselves any hunger or desire that the body craves.
These two extreme positions try to sweep the spiritual practice of having a body under the rug. To hold disappointment in one hand and grace in the other. To say, I am whole and wonderfully made just as I am but to also take steps to push our bodies to be better in some way or another. Even as we age and our bodies and minds decline.
Right now, I'm heavier than I've been in 20 years (not including pregnancies), I've had set back after setback on my nutrition and exercise routines due to chronic autoimmune disease and disentangling parts of my frustration that stem from vanity and societal images and parts that stem from a stewardship of my health that allows me to vibrantly live out my call is a thorny and very spiritual practice.
But this moment of struggle is not the only time my body has led me though spiritual growth. Wrestling with mental health as a teenager taught me that faith was bigger than our emotions or even our cognitive ability. Pregnancy, labor, birth and post-partum have always been a time of spiritual formation to put it lightly. Working in the field of fertility and walking with couples who couldn't conceive opened my heart to a level of disappointment in the body that is hard to describe. Moments of pain taught me what wordless prayer looks like. Diagnosis of my autoimmune disease and subsequent covid pandemic was a journey through wrestling with my mortality that has spiritually matured me in ways that perhaps nothing else short of terminal illness could. Watching people journey through the end of life has opened me to how many different ways our bodies fail us and what it can look like to walk with God in that final season
My body perpetually disappoints me but disappointment has illuminated scripture and taught me to lean on God in ways that I never could have otherwise.
It is inevitable that our bodies will disappoint us. The ashes placed on our foreheads at the beginning of this season remind us that we will return to dust.
Our bodies will fail.
But those same ashes remind us that we are known, called and loved. We are marked. All of us including the disappointing parts. We are whole, even when we are broken and there is no where that we can go that God does not go with us.
God is with us when we feel frumpy and nothing fits right.
God is with us when we are too tired, too sick, in too much pain or even too drunk to get out of bed.
God is with us when our minds lie to us, when our memory fails, when we pee ourselves in public and when we find hairs growing in strange places.
God knows us by name and knows the ever changing number of hairs on our heads.
And so today I cherish this slow, tired disappointing body for the miracle that it is and I won't give up on it. Me and it are on this journey together and that is a beautiful thing.
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