November 29, 2009

Coming Home to the Body

The Rev. Mark Ward, Minister
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

SERMON

Jane Kenyon, in one of her most well-known poems, conjures a series of images so commonplace as to seem unremarkable: I got out of bed on two strong legs, she writes. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. I did the work I love. And between each of these images she intersperses five words that give them a telling significance. “It might have been otherwise.”

She goes on: “At noon I lay down with my mate. It might have been otherwise. We ate dinner together at a table with silver candlesticks. It might have been otherwise. I slept in a bed in a room with paintings on the walls . . . and planned another day just like this day. But one day, I know, it will be otherwise.”

Kenyon’s poem is especially poignant because it was not long after writing it that she was diagnosed with leukemia and in barely over a year had died.

The poem resonates because each of us can imagine a similar litany for ourselves, the often pedestrian moments which occupy little of our attention but that totaled together add up to our lives. This is the place where our bodies live: two strong legs standing or walking, our eating, our sleeping, the intimate moments with lovers or friends.

I say they take up little of our attention, except, of course, when our bodies struggle, or ache, or no longer respond. For me, when the pain of osteoarthritis flares on a hike or wakes me early, I remember what it was like to sleep late or to lope along strong and carefree. Then, it is, indeed, otherwise, and I’m not the least bit happy about it.

The disconnect that many of us have with our bodies is expressed in the language we use. We speak of “inhabiting” our bodies, as if we were little ghosts bouncing around inside this fleshly carcass, and complain about how certain joints or organs aren’t working right, as if we were diagnosing a balky car engine.

We can hardly be blamed, though. For at least 25 centuries our western culture has encouraged this kind of thinking. The Greek philosopher Plato argued that mind and body were separate things, that the mind could exist both before and after its residence in the body and that during life its role was to rule the body.

This Greek philosophy strongly influenced the emerging Christian church, which elaborated the notion of a soul that seeks union with God in heaven after death. The Christian writer Augustine developed the notion further, arguing that humans are composed of both body and soul, but that the body is the inferior part, the seat of our sinful nature. The philosopher Rene Descartes argued that our bodily experiences cannot be trusted, that the only thing we can know for certain is the rudimentary understanding that we exist. I am the thing that thinks, he famously wrote. I think, therefore I am.

And so it remains in our culture today. From an early age we are taught to value the work of the mind above all else. We seek to be “elevated,” raised up from the common, the fleshly, the course. That of the physical that we do admire, we hold up not for what it is, but for what it represents, for the way it manifests what we call “higher values,” such as beauty and proportion.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this in principle. The work of the mind is truly glorious, and beauty feeds our souls. When it comes to our bodies, though, this way of thinking can be crippling. Some of us learn to love the life of the mind so well that we essentially disregard our bodies: they are at best vehicles to get us from here to there and at worst hindrances. And when we do attend to them we reflect on how far the dimensions our own corporeal presences range from classic forms of beauty, which can cause us to hide our bodies as best we can or simply dissociate ourselves from them.

The truth is, of course, that we can never escape our bodies and the demands and desires that emanate from them. They make themselves known most insistently from our earliest days. Instead, we learn to subvert those feelings into denial and shame. When we are with others, talk of the body brings embarrassed silence or smirks and whispered dirty little secrets, evidence of a culture that is at once hyper-sexualized and puritanical.

In recent years there has been a drive to find a way to bridge this gap between the privileged mind and the despised body, a way of thinking that views our essential nature as “embodied,” that helps us see that we live, not as a brain on a stick, but as fully integrated beings for whom, in Walt Whitman’s words, “nothing human is alien.”

Whitman’s poetry is remembered for the controversy that it created at the time for its frankly sexual imagery. And it’s true: more than 150 years later some passages in his poems still push the boundaries of what can be spoken in polite company.

 But Whitman was clear at the time that, while he didn’t mind tweaking the noses of those he considered prudes, it was not his purpose purely to shock. Rather, he hoped to make precisely this point: that the mind and body didn’t inhabit separate regions, but were intertwined and dependent on each other. Body and soul were one, and he would demonstrate it through his poetry in an extended exploration of his own experience, to which the reader was invited. “You shall stand by my side to look in the mirror with me,” he wrote in the introduction to his collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass.

In this way his project was not dissimilar to that of transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who praised Whitman’s work, even if he was a bit put off by the more erotic poems. Like those writers, Whitman aimed to confront the world as it presented itself to him, like Henry David Thoreau, “to live deep and suck all the marrow of life,” to know its meanness or its sublimity and publish it to the world.

In his choice of metaphor for the poem you heard excerpted earlier, Whitman made explicit what he hoped to communicate. “I sing the body electric,” he wrote. Electric! This body that we drag around is not some lump of corrupt and degraded flesh. It is energized, empowered, connected to a source of vitality, having received, in his words, “the charge of the soul.”

Any separation we make between body and soul, he insists, is an artifice. They are one in the same, and each body may be appreciated as good, as worthy of respect as the other. And so he enumerates each part, metaphorically holding it up like a jewel. Ah, hair, neck, ears. Oh, mouth, tongue, lips: arm pit, elbow socket, ribs, belly, backbone, and so on. “The curious sympathy one feels,” he writes, “when feeling the naked meat of the body, the circling rivers, the breath, and breathing in and out, the exquisite realization of health; O, I say these are not parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul. O, I say now these are the soul!”

Yes, it is carnal, in a sense, but not obscene, not exploitive. It seeks not to titillate but to invite us into new relationship with the flesh, our own flesh, that we are taught to view with embarrassment and shame.

But, some of the final words of Whitman’s poem also allude to one of the greatest hurdles in the task of coming to accept and celebrate our bodies. Aware of our bodies, he says, we feel “the exquisite realization of health.” What about when we don’t feel that realization, when, in fact, we are sick, injured, chronically ill, even dying?

Sociologist Arthur Frank points out that “as long as we are healthy and mortality is beyond the horizon of consciousness, associating self with the body comes easily.” When we are ill, it’s tempting to view the body as the enemy of survival. It’s malfunctioning, after all, will bring our selves to an end. And encountering the health care system, where indices of our health are reduced to numbers or diagnostic images, often does little to encourage body awareness.

Sometimes illness itself will distance us from others, who see the coming of their own demise in our debilitated state. It’s encouraging that the hospice and palliative care movements are inviting more of us to be present with each other even as we face our final days, helping us accept our own and each other’s failing bodies.

Legend tells that after a sheltered life of privilege, Gautama left home in pursuit of enlightenment after encountering suffering, decay and death. He turned first to asceticism, denial of the body, as a way to distance himself from those sad facts but found he could not. Instead, he discovered a middle way that acknowledged suffering as a fact of life that cannot be escaped but must be accepted.

In Buddhist practice, the body is called “the soil in which understanding grows.”  That is because it is through the body that the world is encountered, and it is also through practices using the body – sitting, walking, breathing – that followers attain deeper understanding.

Instead of distancing oneself from the body, the one who meditates focuses closely on what the body has to teach. Each breath taken in, the lungs expanding, the diaphragm dropping, to the limit of a comfortable fullness, and then let go, lungs falling, diaphragm rising. Thoughts drop away and one is left with pure presence, without judgment, without distraction: entirely here, inviting every part of your imperfect corporal being to be awake, aware, at peace.

In the end, it is a matter of incarnation, of fully inhabiting the physical presence that we are given, attending to it and imbuing it with care, whatever its state may be. “Jump into experience while you are alive,” wrote the Indian mystic poet Kabir. “What you call ‘salvation’ belongs to the time before death.”

Those who attend to their bodies say that over time their bodily wisdom grows. They learn its cycles, its needs, its limitations. And so, as the writer Jack Kornfield puts it, “instead of fearing our body, its losses and strange vulnerability, we honor it.”

We can come home to our bodies and find comfort in them. In this embodied state we are more accessible to ourselves and others. We can give and receive sympathy and care. We can await the “otherwises” of life without fear or regret and instead enjoy the pedestrian pleasures that each day affords us. We can steer clear of both the guilt and the salacious exploitation that our culture has gathered around the human form and simply be.

Let me close with a poem that for me has become a sort of prayer of the embodied life, one that helps me locate my own physical presence where I believe it lies: interlinked with all life, with all that is good, with all that brings hope. 

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

(By Mary Oliver)