The Creation - James Weldon Johnson

Matthew 22: 34-40

March 19, 2006

Sacred Ground

Elizabeth Macaulay

I am soaking in the wisdom of Joseph Campbell these days. He is a man devoted to the study of the stories that define us: mythology. The book I am inhaling is called Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation.

The core premise of Campbell’s work is that we each live out a core story. Parts of our story are given us through the circumstances of our birth. Parts of our story we create and reinforce in the ways we interact with our world.

So maybe your story line is that you are a hero, or a victim, or dumb, or intelligent, or always missing out, or incredibly blessed. Whatever your story line, it comes to define you. Because we perpetuate our beliefs and stories in the living of our days.

Think about it in your family. You have your brother, maybe, who is always getting into trouble and can never quite handle money well. Time after time after time the universe seems to conspire to serve up your brother the chance to mess up again. And he seldom disappoints.

Is it because he is somehow wired wrong? Most likely not. Most likely, he needs to learn a new way of storying his life. A new narrative that leads him in new directions. If his internal story begins to move in the direction of all the ways he is competent and able, his outer life will come to reflect that.

Our inner stories define our outer lives.

On this Sunday when we raise the issue of self image and the sacred gift of our bodies, I want to talk about a core story that has wounded us over and over and over again.

It is one of the core stories of our faith: the story of how it is we came to be in the first place. The story of creation.

I love James Weldon Johnson’s speaking of God’s ache: God was lonely, and so God created humans. Created us through the incredible intimacy of breathing sacred breath into our very nostrils. We are, as the psalmist says, “fearfully and wonderfully made” by a God who desires life and fullness of being for us.

So why is it that when we hear the words “garden of Eden” we are so often swirled into the place of shame? It has to do with the falling into temptation, the eating of the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It has to do with the teaching through the ages that in that act all of humankind fell into a state of sin so profound that it is called original sin. The bedrock of our relationship with the Holy.

Matthew Fox is a theologian who sees the core story differently. He wonders what life through the ages would unfold to be if we allowed ourselves to see the act of creation and the longing for knowledge not as original sin, but as original blessing.

What would our life as people of flesh unfold into if we lived the story of original blessing? Instead of viewing our bodies and our flesh as suspect and unreliable and somehow shameful, we would instead celebrate the blessing of being flesh, breathed into being by a creator who loves us lavishly?

We live such a crazy relationship with our bodies.

We take things into them and we abuse them and we tend them and clothe them and we call them “them” as though they are not us. We split ourselves off from one of the most inventive and honest sources of wisdom we have and the world is literally groaning in pain as we practice this mind body split.

It is not our call to be so divorced from our flesh. Noah, who is being baptized doesn’t know his body or his parent’s bodies as anything other than a source of delight and goodness.

Think of your earliest body memory. The time when you felt yourself held in the great good of the world and you were glad to be flesh.

Children love their bodies and celebrate the great good gift of their bodies until they learn the story that they are supposed to treat their bodies as unruly things to be tamed and ignored and ashamed of and then, and then, and then, the sense of original blessing becomes deadened by the burden of body shame our culture - including the church - is only too quick to teach.

We need to be intentional about our core stories.

I share with you a reflection written by Anne Lamott. No, she doesn’t get a commission each time I mention her in sermons, but she should. She has some things to say about this thing called body image. She speaks as woman, but we all know that men are just as vulnerable to the practice of self body bashing.

“I was at a wedding Saturday with a log of women in the 20’s and 30’s in sexy dresses, their youthful skin aglow. And even though I was 20 or 30 years older, a little worse for wear, a little tired and overwhelmed by the loud music, I was smiling. I smiled with a secret Cheshire-cat smile of pleasure and relief in being older - 49 and change, which even I would have to admit is no longer extremely late youth. But I would not give you back a year of life lived.

Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life - it gave me me. It provided the time and experience and failures and triumphs and friends who helped me step into the shape that had been waiting for me all my life. I fit into me now - mostly. I have an organic life finally, not the one people imagined for me or tried to get me to have or the life someone else might celebrate as a successful one - I have the life I dreamed of. I have become the woman I hardly dared imagine I could be. There are parts I don’t love - until a few years ago, I had not idea that you could get cellulite on your stomach - but I not only get along with me most of the time now, I am militantly and maternally on my own side. Left to my own devices, would I trade this for firm thighs, fewer wrinkles, a better memory?

On some days. That’s why it’s such a blessing I’m not left to my own devices. Because the truth is I have amazing friends and a deep faith in God, to whom I can turn. I have a cool kid, a sweet boyfriend, darling pets. I’ve learned to pay attention to life, and to listen. I’d give this all up for a flatter belly? Are you crazy?

I still have terrible moments when I despair about my body. But they are just moments - I used to have years when I believed I would be more beautiful if I jiggled less; if all parts of my body stopped moving when I did. But I believe two things now that I didn’t at 30. When we get to heaven, we will discover that the appearance of our butts and skin was 127^th on the list of what mattered on this earth. And I know the truth that I am not going to live forever, and this has set me free. Eleven years ago, when my friend Pammy was dying at the age of 37 we went shopping at Macy’s.

She was in a wheelchair, with a wig and three weeks to live. I tried on a short dress and came put to model it for Pammy. I asked her if she thought it made me look big in the thighs, and she said, so kindly,

“Annie? You just don’t have that kind of time.” I live by this story.

I am thrilled - thrilled-ish - for every gray hard and achy muscle, because of all the friends who didn’t make it, who died too young of AIDS and breast cancer. And much of the stuff I used to worry about has subsided - what other people think of me and how I am living my life. I give these things the big shrug. Mostly. Or at least eventually. It’s a huge relief.

I became more successful in my mid-40’s, but this pales compared to the other gifts of this decade - how kind to myself I have become, what a wonderful, tender wife I am to myself, what a loving companion. I get myself tubs of hot salty water at the end of the day in which to soak my tired feet…..I live by the truth that No is a complete sentence.

I rest as a spiritual act.

I have grown up enough to develop radical acceptance. I insist on the right to swim in warm water at every opportunity, no matter how young and gorgeous the other people at the beach are. I don’t think that if I live to be 80 I’ll wish I’d spent more hours in the gym or kept my house a lot cleaner. I think I’m going to wish I had swum more unashamedly, made more mistakes, spaced out more, rested. On the day I die, I want to have had dessert. So this informs how I live now….

I know many of the women at the wedding fear getting older, and I wish I could gather them together again and give them my word of honor that every one of my friends loves being older, loves being in her 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s….

Looks, my feet hurt some mornings, and my body is less forgiving when I exercise more than I’m used to.

But I love my life more, and me more. I’m so much juicier. And, like that old saying goes, it’s not that I think less of myself, but that I think of myself less often.

And that feels like heaven to me.” (Words for Women by Anne Lamott)

We are distanced from our bodies. We tell ourselves the story of the “don’t haves” or the “too much” haves of who we are.

And we don’t have that kind of time.

Called by our teacher Jesus, we are to love ourselves, in order that we love our neighbors and this creation God has called us to tend.

May we do it grateful for the word made flesh. In us each.

Amen