I've been doing a couple of months of life coaching from someone who specializes on anti-racism, embodiment, and enneagram work. It's a really specific venn diagram and it's not for everyone. But I have loved it. I struggle to find "my people" and to feel understood even in circles and relationships where I have been known for a long time. I carry a lot of anger from the ways that being misunderstood has hurt me. 

Right now, I'm feeling my way through a lot of the embodiment pieces. They are hard. I don't live in my body. I live in my thoughts. My body is where I shove all of the emotions and thoughts that I don't know how to confront. The process of listening to and valuing my body, is a homecoming that I've long heard other people talk about. It never seemed for me. And I think there was a tiny sliver like belief that I was too fractured to come any more home than I already was. 

I've been thinking about this in the context of my own family. The way my parents did or didn't talk about their bodies. The ways they worshipped or condemned pleasure or suffering. And while my parents are wildly different, I realized that my young mind was trying to synthesize all of the messages about existing that I was getting. There was a clear hierarchy of being. 

Soul.

Mind. 

Emotions.

Body. 

But the soul and the mind were so important that they received 80% of the time, energy, attention and love. The emotions and the body had to make do with what remained. And if your body wasn't "healthy" (read: able and thin), then that last bit of energy and time was saved for fixing your body. Loving it much less thanking it was never part of the equation. Moreover, I learned a kind of loving that demanded constant improvement. There was no love in stillness and quiet and just being, especially for the body. What was a body for anyway? Just a temporary shell. Something that really spiritual people quickly outgrew. And yet, it's the only home I've ever known. Isn't that something? The home in which all these multitude of thoughts come together to find action and rest. The table at which all of the emotions dine and find their voice. 

Even within Christian theology it is unclear if there will ever be incorporeal life. The end times prophecies speak so much of a new heave and a new earth and the second coming of Jesus. For centuries, Christian tradition was to bury the body as respectfully as possible so that we could make use of them when everything is made new. So, truthfully, this body may be the only home I ever know in both this life and the next. Why does it get so little time and attention? How come the best kind of love many of our bodies will ever know is pride in their fitness and acceptability? A fragile love that will surely waver as youth slips away. 

31 years I have been with this body and it holds a memory of everything that has ever happened to me. Sometimes, it remembers even better than my mind. I am trying to take more time to stop and say "thank you". For the bodily knowledge that comes as intuition when I need to know something that the mind cannot grasp. For the care my body shows me when it let's me know that I am pushing too hard. For the endurance. For the room to hold both joy and sorrow. For the capacity to experience pleasure and suffering in their turns. These wild extremes held in this small home. 

Bodies are so fragile and so resilient. Prick them and the bleed so easily. Sleep a little funny, they'll let you know. But they don't give up very easily. It's a home that keeps healing as best as it can for way longer than my mind thinks is rational in the grand scheme of human history. 

Which brings me to liberation theology. Mainstream theologians criticize liberation theology as being to fixated on the suffering of Christ, of making his suffering mean more about our suffering than it really does, of not giving the resurrection the center stage that it is due, and finally of not emphasizing the forgiveness of sins nearly enough. And yet, this is what keeps me coming back to liberation theology. That mystery for me is that somehow Christ's body was necessary to his victory. It does not make sense to take a literal reading of the resurrection but to take a metaphorical reading of the importance of the bodily suffering and resurrection. It was his body that was broken for us. And in the last days of Jesus we see him crushed in all ways. Abandoned by his closest friends. God himself looks away. His body crushed. Stripped of every emotional and mental comfort. The resurrection is total restoration, and something most of us who have been betrayed and crushed can only dream of. 

Spiritualized suffering is worshipped. If I said that I was tired of my step dad's emotional abuse, my church would have been only crickets. So I learned to tell the spiritual story. You aren't' abused by your stepfather because his trauma keeps him from emotionally regulating and caring for himself, you're fighting a spiritual battle for his soul. If you say the former, the church would hush and stare and stumble over their words. But if you say the latter, they will clap and say hallelujah. But both were true. But liberation theology looks at the abuse and says words like "patriarchy" and "generational trauma" and so on until you know that it isn't your fault, you aren't alone, and there are solutions besides praying and hoping that some outside force intervenes before you break totally apart. In such a context, resurrection feels more hopeful and less likely to be more spiritualized nonsense. A real experience for both the body and soul. 

And isn't the body the battle ground for so many of us? I know the places that my body has tucked specific traumas and stresses. I know which years of silently suffering affected which muscles. So when Jesus comes to someone like me, I want him to touch those places in my body and bring healing there. When we are resurrected, I want this body to have a second chance not to swallow all of that bitterness. I feel the need quite often these days to apologize to my body for the ways I asked it to carry more than we could, for the ways I ignored it's messages that I was past my limits and hurting myself.