I look out at this gathering and feel so appreciative that we are all here together. Sometimes it seems wonderful and amazing to me that folks choose to be here rather than any number of other places doing any number of other things. It may sometimes seem amazing to you that you actually got yourself together, and perhaps your family together, to get here relatively on time.
But I don't think we realize how absolutely incredible it is, how amazing it is, what was involved in getting our bodies here-or maybe as accurately, what was involved in our bodies getting us here.
Imagine a man sitting quietly in a research laboratory. By some wondrous technology, the activity in his brain is being observed, presented visually on a screen. He is instructed to flex his index finger. A microsecond before he moves a muscle, the image on the screen shows a sudden flood of activity surge through his brain like a wave. He flexes his finger.
He hears and understands the instruction. He has the intention to flex his index finger, and then he flexes. In order for him to accomplish this simple action, a rush of electrical and chemical communications must course throughout his brain and body.
If all this has to happen just so that he can flex his finger, think of what went on to get yourself, or to get "you and yours," dressed, fed, and organized to get to church this morning.
Day in day out, moment after moment, each one of us performs tasks of boggling neural complexity and precision, tasks like chewing, tying our shoes, walking, not to mention monumental feats such as conversation, playing a musical instrument, dancing, teaching, typing, performing surgery, or fixing the leaking sink pipe.
I have been reading a bit about the human body. Some of the books, if they're written by poet-theologian-scientists like Paul Brand and Philip Yancy, who gave us our reading about the brain this morning, well, some books on physiology read like poetry. Or they read like epic dramas, full of exciting or tragic episodes and populated by interesting characters like lymphocytes and osteoblasts.
As one learns about the immune system, the endocrine system, the brain and nervous system, the blood, the bones, the muscles, respiration, and how everything works together in concert, it's inevitable that one will have to exclaim aloud, occasionally, "that's totally amazing!" "incredible!" "wow!"
It has shed new light for me on the notion of the body as a temple-although "temple" may not be quite the right metaphor. I think of a temple as a tranquil space. All the activity going on inside each of us at this very moment is more like the New York Stock Exchange during a day of heavy trading.
And yet one's body is a temple, not only because it is awe-inspiring in and of itself. It is a temple because it houses something holy. Your body enfleshes you, locates you in the world of time and space. Somehow all the teeming, streaming physical elements coalesce into a unified being: a person who thinks and chooses and acts, who remembers and dreams, who creates and loves.
In spite of all we know about the body, one of the greatest mysteries in our universe is the question, what is a person? What am I? What are you?
One of the readings this morning is the testimony of someone trying to come back home to his body, even though it has been traumatically and irrevocably changed. Dan Gottlieb had to learn to live as fully as possible within the limitations of his paralysis. By coming to live more honestly within his body, he also learned to be more attuned and responsive to others.
Perhaps for a short period as children, most of us live in joyful unity with our bodies. But soon we learn to to objectify them, and so lose the experience of living sympathetically and sensitively within them.
As Americans, we accept certain fictions about what they should be, and then manipulate them, starve them, pump them up, disguise them with clothing and cosmetics, forever evaluating them in the mirror or the responses of others. We overwork or mistreat them and then suppress the symptoms of their distress with medications. We may hate them when they fail us or don't meet our expectations. And we live in fear of their demise.
There were a few months when, for some unknown reason, my husband Tom began to receive in the mail the magazine "Men's Health." He had never ordered it and didn't want it (at least that's what he said), but it just kept arriving. It became a source of humor and amazement for us.
Assuming that its features were driven by market research, we guessed that it must reflect the concerns and interests of a fair number of men in American society. Here is an example of its typical feature stories:
MASSIVE FOREARMS, BICEPS AND TRICEPS!
GET ROCK HARD, RIGHT NOW!
TESTOSTERONE = MUSCLE: HOW YOU CAN BOOST YOURS
GET A WORKOUT, IN BED!
I won't go into the products and procedures being hawked in the back pages.
So you'll know I'm not just picking on the men out there, there is a correlating magazine for women called "Fitness." This is apparently the most popular women's fitness magazine on the market-one which I myself subscribed to for a little while, and found mostly demoralizing. But month after month, the headlines were always variations on these same themes:
GET A BUFF BUTT: BEST MOVES TO STOP THE DROP
YOU'RE FIT. BUT IS YOUR SEX LIFE?
ARE YOU A FAT MAGNET?
TROUBLEZONE MAKEOVERS: 3 READERS GET AMAZING NEW BODIES!
What do you read between these lines? I read profound anxiety. Intense anxiety about what it means to be male and female. Anxiety about not being strong enough and healthy enough, not being potent and desirable. While independent strength is glorified, its glory comes from how wanted and admired and magnetic you are to others as you look into the mirror of their eyes.
Sam Keen in his book Hymns to an Unknown God:
I remember the shock of alienation in the ninth grade when I lost a fight with Ray Snead. In my estimation Ray was a wimp, so I was doubly humiliated when he rubbed my face in the gravel. My consciousness seemed to regard my body from afar and to be ashamed.
I immediately sent away for a Charles Atlas body-building course and began to construct some muscles. The results weren't bad. Within a year I was trim at the waist, had good triceps, biceps, and pectorals. I was determined that no bully would ever kick sand in my face again.
It didn't dawn on me until my middle thirties, after more body-building and physical discipline, that I had organized my body around the mirror, the opponent, and the job.
The body I had fabricated looked good, competed adequately, and functioned efficiently, but was permanently tensed against the invasion of tenderness. I told it what to do, and for the most part it obeyed like a well-paid sullen butler. It was better at work than play: a good, stylish, serious, productive disciplined, neurotic, death-defying American body.
But just when I got close to the body image I held in my private Platonic heaven, I became painfully aware that it, and I, had little direct sensuous or kinesthetic awareness. I had practically no ability to surrender to the soft streaming sensations that accompany the play of intuition, imagination, and graceful sexuality. I did not allow the soft animal of my body to love what it loved.
His body had become a fortress, "permanently tensed against the invasion of tenderness."
I know that any time I check in with my own body, I notice places and ways that I have been unconsciously steeling myself against some imagined threat, or clenching some place as if I were holding something up or holding something together. My body knows all kinds of things about me that I don't know, until I ask it.
The body is working, working, working all the time, trying to serve us, protect us, sustain us, do our bidding, hold our pain, our fear. It is a miracle if, as adults, we can allow ourselves to be vulnerable at all, or surrender to the soft streaming sensations of love and play and intuition.
We rely in it so completely that it's hard to be compassionate toward our body's failings and signs of mortality.
In her book, Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Non-Disabled, Nancy Mairs writes how, for years after she began to have symptoms of multiple sclerosis, she used language to avoid owning them. She objectified herself in a different way: " 'The left hand doesn't work any more' 'There's a blurred spot in the right eye.' " She says, "In distancing myself from my ravaged central nervous system, I kept grief at bay. But I also banished any possibility of self-love."
Gradually she brings herself to say "my hands," "my eyes." She accepts the hard spiritual journey of living within her body, as it is, and as it is becoming with MS. She admits, though, that self-love is often still beyond her.
So, on the one hand, we ought to remember how miraculous the body is, we ought to ponder, at times, its physiological genius. On the other hand, we also have to grapple with the difficult, difficult truth that, for those blessed enough to be able-bodied, even the abled-bodied are only temporarily so. We will likely all feel, at some point, our absolute dependence upon others.
Magnificent and vulnerable? Strong, courageous, independent and in need of others?
The story of Dan Gottlieb's life after his accident is one of awesome strength, determination, willfulness, and achievement. It is also a story of someone touching the absolute depths of despair, suffering, and loss. Both his strength and his weakness brought him to a deeper level of relationship with others than he had ever known before.
He is able to give and receive the gift of compassion in a new way. He describes being able to "float around inside" the person he is listening to, and empathically sense what they're going through. This sensitivity was a new gift emerging from his own vulnerability.
Sam Keen writes:
A fully sensuous life involves knowing the essentially tragic character of the human condition-that is, disillusionment. As I identify with my body, I see the insignificance of all those substitute monuments to immortality-hoarded wealth, opulent machines, political empires, youthful facades-that we death-defying prometheans create. Each is an evasion of the primal sorrow that all we love and enjoy is terribly and wonderfully fleeting and vulnerable. All flesh does [perish], and until that knowledge comes to root in our interior, there can be no dancing. Reinhabiting the body, becoming carnal, is both a joyful homecoming and a heavy trip downward into the humus, the ground of human existence, the first and last truth of the flesh.
Knowing how many people in this congregation have suffered greatly because of illness, injury, or loss-their own or that of someone they love-I feel the enormous risk, the audacity, of stepping into this emotional territory.
None of us can really know what another person is going through, and still, we want to try.
I cannot know what it's like to be in your skin, your psyche. Still, I try to understand. I want to help, as inadequate as that help may sometimes be.
If there is a need, we want to know about it and to respond. That's friendship. That's living in religious and caring community. We reach out when we know someone is in trouble.
Sam Keen tells us that unless we grasp that truth of our body's mortality, without shame, there can be no dancing. By dancing, I don't think he means swing dancing or hip hop, although we certainly want to be able to do that as long as we can.
I remember a little story I read in the "Sun Magazine" by a woman whose mother was in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's disease, and was just a little wisp of her former self. But the daughter discovered that, though virtually all memory was gone, her mother remembered, or her body remembered, how to dance, and so they danced, they gently waltzed, and this was the sweetest communication they were able to enjoy together toward the end of her mother's life. Even though her mom didn't know who her dancing partner was, she would look into her daughters eyes with delight.
So we want to keep dancing, literally, if we can. But I believe the dance Sam Keen is speaking of is the flow of giving and receiving ... the capacity to be open to the world and to others, even given the reality of suffering.
So let's dance, holding one another in the knowledge that we're all living the same the truth.
The singer Lee Ann Womack wrote a beautiful song about this, and I'd like to end with a passage from her lyrics:
I hope you never lose your sense of wonder
You get your fill to eat but always keep that hunger
May you never take one single breath for granted
God forbid love ever leave you empty-handed
I hope you still feel small when you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope another opens,
Promise me you'll give faith a fighting chance,
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance.
I hope you dance.
May it be so. Amen.