#3: Theology Of The Body

In the wilderness, I lost track of the number of times I prayed a simple prayer: “God, just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

Christianity is my portal to God, and so much of its beauty is in its rituals like prayer, testimonies, communion, and the fellowship of community. But one of the side effects of Christianity can be the disembodied rigidity it sometimes fosters. There can be a false simplicity that leads many of us Christians to reduce our lives to mathematical equations—borderline transactions—disguised as theology: if you just seek and honor God in X way, Y will be the result. When we get Z instead—when we reach life’s inevitable dead ends—we drown out both our realities and intuition with scriptures. We forget that God didn’t stop speaking after the Bible was written; that what was true for Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob may not be the truth for us…

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My father was the first love of my life.

I was fifteen years old when he died.

I didn’t cry when I learned the news—there were so many reasons not to. As my parents’ firstborn, I felt a duty to be strong for my siblings and mother. Many pointed out that it was a miracle my father had lived beyond the weeks—months at best—the doctors had predicted, and that I should be thankful for that. I agreed with them. I considered the fact that there were people who had it worse—people for whom the loss of a father meant the loss of all financial stability; people who were orphaned. I understood even then that taste buds are made for both sweet and bitter, and that we all have our crosses to carry.

In the days following my father’s death, the church he co-founded with my mother launched a prayer and fasting crusade, begging Jesus to raise my father from the dead just like he did Lazarus in the Bible. I had no desire to attend those services, but my body gave me a good excuse: not long after learning the news, an abscess started growing on my thigh. It swelled until it reminded me of how the doctors had described the tumor growing in my father’s brain (“the size of a golf ball”) and hurt so badly I could barely walk. So, while the church wailed and prayed, I stayed home, nursed my wound, and watched Spice World. (My father had banned secular music in our home, and the Spice Girls had been a particular bone of contention. Loving them out loud became an unexpected upshot of his death. Lemonade, you know?)

Around the day the church finally surrendered and accepted my father’s death, the abscess burst. It smelled rancid—like a rotting dead body. While I thought I was okay, that abscess exposed something: a pain beneath the surface I could not suppress. My brain had dictated that minimizing my pain was the logical thing to do, but my body determined that was a lie.

That abscess (I still have its scar) was the start of a new and constantly evolving relationship with my body: it is both my truth-teller and my truth-finder.

Sometimes the messages from my body come through discomfort—ranging from dis-ease to disease. But they also come through joy.

I am writing this essay in South Africa, a country that is slowly but surely starting to feel like home. I had no idea when the year started that I would spend so much time here. But my body did. Around this time last year, I was at an Afro-House party in Brooklyn, dancing to South African house music, when I felt a strong stir within me…a sudden sense of missing South Africa. I figured it was just inspiration to plan a trip and filed the feeling away.

At the start of this year, I felt an even stronger urge to visit South Africa, but this time, the feeling refused to go away. I booked what I thought would be a three-week escape to Johannesburg…I haven’t quite left since. My body knew it long before my brain did: South Africa was calling me.

My body has told me about my calling, too. So much of my career has involved paying attention to little prompts—things that excite me or make me angry, even when I can’t fully articulate why.

Not every revelation my body uncovers is clear-cut though—sometimes, it’s downright messy.

What do you do when your situation and scripture seem at odds?

When David wrote Psalm 46:10, God had said to him, “Be still and know that I am God.” But what do you do when you hear a still small voice saying, “Get up, go, and know that I am God”?

And what do you do when scripture, sermons, and saints tell you God hates divorce, yet you feel God’s love gently but firmly pulling you in that direction?

It is where Biblical literalism ends that the theology of the body begins.

As a Christian, I believe the Bible is one way God has spoken—and still speaks.

As a woman who has racked up life mileage, I know our bodies are another.

What life has taught me, and continues to teach me, is this:

Our bodies are sacred vessels of divine messaging.

Indeed, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit.

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One day, two years deep in therapy, I exclaimed for the umpteenth time during a session, “I just don’t know what to do,” after laying the cards of my work and marriage on the table.

Rather than respond with a question, my therapist said calmly this time, “Blessing, you do. You do.”

She was right.

Each time I said I didn’t know what to do, I was telling the truth—but I was also lying.

The dissonance was the disconnect between my brain and my body. The distance between confusion and clarity was fear.

The more I tried to suppress what my body was telling me, the stronger the smoke signals became:

The patches of hair I was losing.

The random bleeding my gynecologist couldn’t explain.

The pounds I kept piling on.

The insomnia.

The struggles to get out of bed.

Sometimes we want theophany when God’s answers are already in tangibilities.

I knew.

I knew.

“And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” — John 8:32