On being in a body

We tend to focus on the downsides, but embodiment is not a mistake

Embodied. The word sounds so much like “entombed.” And, boy, does it feel that way sometimes. How often do you feel trapped in a frame that doesn’t look quite like it used to or do quite what you want it to do today? 

I am working on a chapter for my book about our fading frames, about how the time-wrought changes to our bodies are gentle—and sometimes blaring—reminders to wisely number our days, to live well within our limits.

Lately, it’s been easy for me to focus on all the grisly underbellies of that reality. I can meditate a little too long on the knee that hasn’t felt stable without KT tape since my third pregnancy, on the immune system that so easily falls victim to the latest virus, on the way I run into the corner of the bed if I don’t have my glasses within reach in the morning. And, I know, I’m not very old! 

But, just now, my outlook is shifting. I am sitting on the stairs while my son brushes my hair, typing this into a phone note. And, I remember, how very good it is to be embodied... to have hair that fingers can run through, a back that can feel the gentle strokes of a boy who rarely moves this mildly. His sticky fingers catch the strands in places, but I don’t mind. This is a moment we share only because we both have bodies, his with working arms and mine with hair. 

What my son’s hands are usually doing.

And then gratitude. It washes over me like a wave, over this body I’ve forgotten to give thanks for far too many times. 

I think of the (somewhat cheesy) movie my oldest daughter and I watched the other day while folding laundry, Soul Surfer, which tells the true story of surfer Bethany Hamilton losing an arm to a shark—and carrying on. I think of how my kids never knew my mom, their grandma, to have hair that they could touch and brush. Constant chemo took that away for the last 5 or 6 years of her life, the only years they remember. 

These working bodies with functional limbs and growing hair are not givens. But the fact that they could be more marred than they are is not what makes them precious. What makes them gifts worthy of gratitude is a good Giver, who does not do things accidentally.

“If we have been created,” Sam Alberry writes in What God Has to Say About Our Bodies, “then our body is not some arbitrary lump of matter. It means something. It is not peripheral to our understanding of who we are. For all the difficulties you may have with it, it is the body God wanted you to have. It is a gift.” 

So, as my entire family recovers from the latest sickness, I am surprisingly, deeply grateful in this moment. For a body that works pretty well: That has the innate ability to heal itself, however slowly, from most sicknesses. That lets me put flesh on my love for my children by caring for them, especially when they’re sick. (I find in this care a way of embodying love even for the mom who taught me it, who told me stories of begging God to give her my sickness so she could know how I felt as a baby.) For a body that fades and breaks and bends and recovers and reminds me that I will not live forever. But that I am alive to life—what a miracle—right now.