Miraculous and One

October 2009

by Catherine Malotky

Time for true confessions. When I was but 12, I sent a letter to Ann Landers desperate for advice, unable to ask my loving mother or wise father. I required anonymity because I was both terrified and thoroughly ashamed.

I was facing the mandatory get into-seventh-grade physical. The appointment was set and I was trapped. I knew I would need to disrobe before my doctor, who had never done anything to create such dread. How would I survive this?

At age 12, I did not love my body. It came along with me like troublesome baggage I could not trade away or change. At that time, there were no sports programs to help me and my girlfriends celebrate the capacities of our bodies. There were no school programs to help us learn to push our physical limits or team up with others to accomplish a goal—or how to lose (or win) gracefully. I did not live in my skin.

I was 12 years old, and in my perspective, grotesquely behind in my adolescent development—too tall, too flat, too loud, and too smart for my own good. I wish I could say that I’ve grown well beyond those days. In some ways, I have. In others, not so much.

How did this happen? Studies indicate that I was not alone 40 years ago. Girls struggled then to see their bodies as gifts. Still today, the wonder of our female flesh is too often overwhelmed by the steady force-feeding of distorted and unachievable images of what girls and women should look and act like. Girls still have precarious relationships with their bodies, and far too many of them pay too high a price to feel better about themselves.

A relationship

But it’s not just young girls who struggle with what it means to live in their flesh and be able to rejoice in it. How about you? What’s your relationship with your body? Good friend? Begrudging caretaker? Camouflage virtuoso? Gracious encourager? Design artist? Loving defender? Awed admirer?

Are you always going to lose 20 pounds? Do you tend to your aches and pains rather than deny them? Do you use your body to the extent you can, offering it an opportunity for wellness, resilience, and strength? Do you feed it well? Rest it enough? Pamper it just a bit?

Step back for a moment and think about this relationship you have. Your body has been around as long as you have. In fact, you probably wouldn’t be the person you are without the body you have. In fact, your body and soul are inextricably entwined.

There is a strain of faith that considers the body the lesser of the two. The body, after all, gets sick, it hurts, and one day, it will die. An outside observer can see that there’s something wrong in the body. But the truth is that what’s on the inside, though not as obvious as what’s on the outside, can be sick, hurt, and die right along with the outside, or even, in some cases, before.

A package deal

In the Genesis creation stories, we do not read of yet another act of creation reserved for the soul. God created human beings, body and soul, the package deal. In the first story, human beings were the last thing to be created before God rested on the seventh day. With a word, they were called into being.

In the second story, God fashioned the human being from humus, breathing into those first nostrils the breath of life so that the human being became the one God had designed. This intimacy, this fashioning of the human from the earth that would be humanity’s home, is all about the flesh—a little dip here, a little paunch there, a vascular system, an endocrine system, hair in all the right places, and a grin.

Now think of your body from this point of view. If your flesh is God’s intention, if it is as it is on purpose (not just anyone’s purpose, mind you, but God’s), then it is God’s first covenant with you. When you emerged squalling or wide-eyed from your mother’s womb, you were whole, one thing, you, and none other than you. Your you, inside and out, is God’s covenant with you, primal and primary.

It is true that you received two sets of DNA that, combined, lean in the direction of left- or right-handedness, dark or light hair, blueish or brownish eyes, tall or short, wiry or solid, male or female, gross-motor inclined or fine-motor, introverted or extroverted . . . the list goes on. We could claim that these things are an accident, a function of natural selection, and a bit of genetic luck when those first strands of chromosomes started winding together.

Or, from the vantage point of faith, we can see God’s hand at work, shaping the miracle that is you. You are a product of God’s imagination, as are all of us, and each of us. Such an infinite variety! Look beyond the media images. See the real women in your life, each one a wonder, each one unique, each one created by God.

God’s handiwork

Our similarities are also miracles. I have been told that I sound like my mother, that I gesture like my sisters, that my daughters’ speech cadences are like mine. My father’s  mother was an editor and a spelling whiz. My mother's mother was soft and warm. Her smile drew me to her safe embrace. I can see these things in me, manifesting my grandmothers’ gifts in my own self.

Of course, the shortcomings of my gene pool are also apparent. We have trick shoulders, a tendency toward arthritis and strokes. Menstrual cramps seem to run in the family (sorry, daughters!), along with impatience. Some of us have troubles with numbers, though words seldom stop us. We can be on the heavy side, and can be a little too helpful.

Gene pool or God’s handiwork? What about both? Because what kind of miracle is a gene pool? Let’s get a little awestruck about all that, while we’re at it. What kind of divine imagination made up a gene pool? And how it works its way out in a life?

And speaking of gene pools, what about the whole conception and birth thing? Most of us have had the birds and the bees talk, but really now—isn’t that all amazing? Sperm and egg and cervix and fallopian tubes and implantation and pregnancy? What a miracle!

How could we ever in a million years come to think of our bodies as less than? As not a part of ourselves? Just because our bodies don’t look like Barbie’s?

Gathered whole

We need to do a little cultural reality therapy here. Once we have a few decades under our belts, our bodies are going to tell that story.

Our hands will have nicks and scars, our laugh lines will start settling in for the long haul, and the weight of caring for those we love will take its toll. Why would we think or expect otherwise?

When we have a whole lifetime of experiences behind us, and our bodies have weathered them all, and we begin to manage our infirmities rather than trying to get rid of them, shouldn’t we count our wisdom as success and rejoice in it? Of course these things can be frustrating, too, but why do we not cherish the slowing down?

Why would we think or expect that an 80-year-old woman could have the same beauty as a 20- woman?

And finally, when we are old, and we know how interconnected our bodies and souls are, when our reach is about living each day, loving, praying, and remembering, then we come back to the place we were when we first emerged from our mother’s womb.

You will be one, then, filled with the breath of God, each inhalation a miracle, and each exhalation a blessing, until finally you breathe your last. It is then that the promises made to you at your baptism will be fulfilled and you will enter into God’s domain, beyond the limits of time and space that have bound you.

With all the saints who have gone before and with all the saints who will follow, you will be gathered, whole, into God’s eternal breath of life.

The Rev. Catherine Malotky serves the ELCA Board of Pensions as retirement planning manager. An ordained pastor, she has also been an editor, teacher, parish pastor, and retreat leader. She writes the “Amen!” column for LWT.