It’s interesting for me to realize how the slings and arrows of early childhood stick deep and linger long. As I young adult, I never really felt at peace in my own body. I always had this lurking fear that there was something fundamentally unacceptable about it. As a result, I never felt at home in the gym, at the ball diamond, on the basketball court.
It was probably both a blessing and a burden, this distorted self-image. Looking back, I expect one of the reasons I’ve learned to enjoy sports, and movement, and exercise the way I do today, is precisely because I was haunted by this desire to prove all the name-calling ghosts in my past that they were wrong. Whatever may have been true of my body type as a baby (I probably thought subconsciously) that didn’t have to be true of me now.
Of course, this is a blog post about the theology of exercise, not a therapy session. The only reason I’m sharing all this here is that, if we’re going to talk about the theology of exercise we’re going to have to talk at some point about the bodies we exercise with. And truth be told, I grew up with a sort of love-hate relationship with my body. I loved it, in so far as I fed it, took care of it, kept it from harm. But I hated it, to the extent that it never seemed to look or feel the way I thought it should.
I have a sense that I am not alone in this experience. We live in a world where idealized images of beautiful bodies are flung at us from every corner. From the click-bait on our newsfeed, to the magazine rack in the grocery store, from the posters in the shop windows down at the mall, to the billboards lining the freeway, we are bombarded with messages about what a body “should” look like, and continually asked to measure our own bodies against that ideal.
No wonder if we find it hard to be at ease in our bodies, what with the world screaming at us that they don’t measure up.
This is probably why struck me so profoundly the day I realized that I don’t have a body; I am a body.
That sentence may sound strange to some readers. Indeed, throughout this post I’ve described my body as a “thing” that was other than me. I said that I’ve never been at ease “in my body,” as though the body were just the casing for my “self,” and I described myself “taking care of my body,” as though it were something distinct from who I actually was. This is how we usually speak about the body. It’s a vessel that “contains us” in some way, but whatever else it is, it’s not “us.”
So imagine my surprise when, a number of years back while studying for my Masters of Divinity, I came across this line in a book by theologian Marianne Hicks, in which she argues that theologically, our embodiment is essential to our human nature.
“My physical reality is both the matrix and communicator of my psychic life,” she writes. “I do not have a body; I am one. I do not have a soul or psyche, I am one. ‘I’ come into being and live and grow in the process we call life, in the inextricable interconnection of matter and spirit.”
Hicks is touching here on a deeply biblical idea. When Genesis 2:6-7 describes the creation of human beings, it uses the Hebrew word nephesh: “the man became a living being (nephesh).” Genesis uses the same word to describe sea life (1:20), the great sea creatures (1:21), land animals (1:24), birds (1:30), and human beings. What all these things share in common is that they are all living bodies brought to life by the creator. Unfortunately, the closest Greek term we have to nephesh is psyche, which often translates as “soul,” and so nephesh is often misread as though it only referred to the “spiritual” aspect of human life. When read in context, however, it’s pretty clear that the word actually denotes both the living matter that is your body, and the spirit that animates it.
The point here is that, from a biblical perspective, we are not just “souls” contained “in a body.” Rather we are the very flesh and bone that stares back at us when we look in the mirror. We are more than just bodies, to be sure, but we whatever else we are, we are those bodies.
There is potential healing here, I think, for those of us who, like me, have struggled with a vague dis-ease about our bodies. A biblical understanding of the body assures us that the creator actually intended for us to be embodied like this. More than that, it reminds us that when we say “God loves you,” we mean he loves your stubby toes, too (if you happen to have stubby toes), and your gangly arms (if they happen to be gangly), your knobby knees (mine are particularly knobby), or whatever it is that makes your body so distinctly you.
Like it does for all our relationships, the love of God has life-giving power to heal even our relationship with our own bodies.
And in that healing, we can take our next step towards a robust theology of exercise, which is, after all, why I started this blog post in the first place. Because you don’t have a body, you are a body. And as bodies, all the movement and play, the stretching and lifting, the sweating and running and breathing hard—all the things our bodies do when we’re exercising well—these things remind us of this fundamental fact of our human nature. We are the bodies we use to do those things. In that remembrance we may start to discover (at least in part), what God had in mind when he made us of the dust of the earth in the first place and breathed into us the breath of life.
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