Parts of the Whole

March 2010

by Martha E. Stortz

People accuse me of living in my head. they're right. As a writer and teacher, I overvalue language and the body parts that make it happen: The head comes up with words, the mouth speaks them, the hands write them. but no more! I have a new appreciation for feet. My feet recently taught me some things about God's ways that I never could have learned from a book.

This past September, a friend and I hiked about 270 miles of an ancient pilgrimage route, as millions of other people have done over the centuries.

Since about the year 1000, pilgrims from all over the world have made their way to Santiago de Compostela to visit the tomb of James, apostle to Jesus, brother of John, son of Zebedee. Soon after the Ascension, tradition has it, James came to western Spain to preach the Good News, but didn’t have much success. So he returned to Jerusalem, where he was promptly beheaded in about the year 44. His followers brought his body back to Spain. In the Middle Ages, Santiago de Compostela emerged as one of three major pilgrimage destinations, along with Rome and Jerusalem. And the Camino de Santiago was the path I planned to follow, too.

In the months before my trek, I assembled maps, practiced Spanish—and started walking. All the guidebooks tell pilgrims to break in their boots. I noted every potential pressure point on ankles and toes. What I didn’t realize was that a 20-pound backpack would make both feet, from toe to heel to sole to ankle, one big pressure point.

I’ve never appreciated the gift of feet so much in my life. In my ordinary life, I get up in the morning and make up my face. On the Camino, I got up every morning and made up my feet. I massaged them; I talked to them; I padded them daily with fresh applications of bandages. On the Camino, I shopped for moleskin and creams the way I shop for lipstick at home. I gained a new respect for feet, a body part I had taken for granted, on this ancient pilgrimage route.

We all need each other

Feet caught the apostle Paul’s attention as well. In one of his letters, he writes: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. . . . Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 14–15). Biblical feet had it even worse than Camino feet: no moleskin! Instead, there were streets paved with dust and shared with livestock, a blinding sun that beat down relentlessly, and sandals—if you were rich! Feet quickly became dirty, dusty, and painfully cracked.

As much for sanitation as for hospitality, hosts saw that their guests’ feet were washed immediately upon entering their homes. They delegated this task to the servants. In wealthier homes, servants also oiled guests’ feet, protecting them from cracking. When Paul talks to the Corinthians, he’s speaking from the world of biblical feet.

Context enhances Paul’s words: We need feet. As members of the body, they are indispensable. Yet as parts of a complex organism, feet function in tandem with other parts of the body. We need only two of them, and they depend on the head for direction. We’d be in trouble if all the members of our body were feet, just as we’d never get anywhere if we were all hands.

Think about it for a moment: Clumsy people are “all thumbs,” lacking a delicate touch the fingers supply. Gossips are always “all ears,” lacking a compassionate vision that might make them curb their tongues. But as important parts of an interdependent whole, thumbs and fingers, ears and eyes, head and feet work together to make up the life of the body. The psalmist underscored the synergy: We are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14).

We all come with gifts

Even though he knew a lot about anatomy, Paul wasn’t writing a medical textbook for these communities in Rome or Corinth. Instead, he was giving them operating instructions for life in the body of Christ. Specifically, he draws an analogy between the body and the community, comparing one to the other.

Just as in the body, each member serves a function that no other member could, so in the community, each member does something unique and utterly indispensable. Paul names those functions: “To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues” (1 Corinthians 12:8–10). Just as the body needs fingers and thumbs, ears and eyes, head and feet, so the community needs the diversity of gifts its members supply.

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians supplies the illustrations for his counsel to the Romans in Chapter 12. When we put illustrations together with the instructions, we have a moral manual for Christian communities—complete with pictures. Here is what it counsels:

YOU DON'T HAVE TO DO IT ALL.

When I first considered walking the Camino de Santiago, I thought I’d do it all: 500 miles of it and in only four weeks. Perhaps it was Paul who prompted one of my friends:

“Good heavens!” he said, “do what you can. Everyone walks her own Camino.” Others could power-walk the pilgrimage route. What part could we do, given our time frame, our ages, and what we carried?

In similar fashion, Christian community doesn’t depend on one person doing everything. Congregations don’t need 500 members, each one of whom can sing in the choir, run the youth group, and visit shut-ins. That would be a formula for disaster, burn-out, and intense competition. Rather, faith communities depend on everyone doing something. If Paul were talking to us directly, he’d say: To one is given the gift of singing, to another visiting, to yet another the gift of hanging out. How well we know that the gift of singing is not given to everyone!

HONOR WHAT YOU CAN DO.

Don’t diminish it—and don’t overestimate it either. Our gift was not speed. We walked pretty slowly: People passed us all the time, and we let them. Our gift was simple encouragement. We were the cheerleaders of the Camino, a supporting role—and an important one.

In similar fashion, Christian community invites people to name their gifts and to celebrate them. Good congregations enable members to discover that they have gifts. That discovery empowers them to see that they are gifts. “I can’t get to meetings anymore,” confided a woman with severe arthritis, “but I can still use the phone. I run the prayer chain.” She recognized the importance of her ministry, and in doing so, she blessed the people who ran the meetings.

HONOR WHAT SOMEONE ELSE CAN DO.

Don’t diminish it—and don’t envy it either. I quickly realized there are class distinctions among pilgrims: the super-pilgrims, who carry all their own gear, hike 18 miles each day, and stay in pilgrim hostels every night; the plodders, who carry all their own gear, hike 13 miles each day, and stay in Bed-and-Breakfast inns; and the tourist-pilgrims, who don’t carry any gear—and stay in five-star hotels. We fell somewhere in the middle. I sensed tension among these groups, and more than occasionally I heard super-pilgrims disparaging tourist-pilgrims.

More than occasionally, people sniffed at us as we sipped yet another café con leche before heading out again. But hey! Even pilgrims are only human.

Paul’s counsel could have helped. He recognized the all-too human tendency to build up the self by undermining the other. There’s a little of the Pharisee in each of us, that part that says, “I’m glad I’m not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18:11). Paul also cautioned against tending an inferiority complex.

One woman focused so much on the obvious gifts of the council president that she failed to see her own. When the council president identified them—in public!—she had to concede: “Well, I do make a mean pound cake, and I guess I could bring it to the potluck supper.” Comparison corrodes congregational life. Paul prescribes honor as the appropriate way to celebrate one’s own gifts and those of others. Honor neither stretches the truth nor is it stingy with praise. Honor openly and authentically acknowledges what is real.

Respect lies at the heart of honor, and that respect comes from an appreciation of what someone’s distinctive contribution is to the whole. You don’t have to love pound cake to celebrate its presence at the potluck! And I certainly don’t love my feet—but I am in awe of how well they work under pressure.

REMEMBER THE SOURCE OF YOUR GIFTS AND YOUR LIFE: THE SPIRIT!

Because we carried everything we needed on our backs, I became acutely aware of what mattered and what didn’t. Of course I brought too much. Everyone does. At the end of the first two days, I made little altars of unnecessary gear, snapped a photo, and left them behind in our hostel. Maybe my stuff would come in handy to some other pilgrim. By the end of the trek, I was carrying only a change of clothes and my passport.

Stripped down to bare necessities, I became acutely aware of what really mattered. Everything I had and everything I was belonged to God. Head and feet, eyes and ears, hands and thumbs: they all belonged to someone else. Super-pilgrims, plodders, and tourist-pilgrims: We were all part of the same family. The gifts of speaking in tongues, the gift of interpreting tongues, the gift of wisdom, the gift of healing, the gift of knowledge: all come from the same Spirit. Paul puts it more starkly: “. . . and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God” (1 Corinthians 3:23). All our gifts are simply on loan. Use them for God’s greater glory!

Martha E. Stortz is professor of historical theology and ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary.