Today is a shift from our primary resource. We are entering work by Marcia W. Mount Shoop in her book Let the Bones Dance. What will follow in the next weeks is from part two of that book and it is called 'the (em)Body(ment) of Christ."
Whoever tries to gain his/her life will lose it; but whoever loses his/her life for my sake will gain it. (Matthew 10:39)
Being uncomfortable in our own skin has consequences. We are hard of hearing when it comes to body language. We are out of shape when it comes to embodied practice. And we are disabled when it comes to living with ambiguity. What we may hear of our body's language is hard for us to translate and even harder for us to trust. For many Christians, embodied life is distorted, contorted, or, worse yet, ignored.
Feeling helps us tune in, pay attention, and surrender our need to understand completely. Feeling is the translator and the teacher of a new kind of language - a language that can speak a theological word about our embodied condition at the same time that it clears a space for what words cannot articulate. Cellular stories of trauma, pregnant poetics, and muddled metaphors of motherhood tell of the tragic, relational, and ambiguous layers of embodied experience. these experiences in-form us and our communities; and our resistance to these facts of who we are also in-form us and our communities.
One of the items missing here are the many pages of how she develops this embodiment. But I found in these introductory words a bit of a change in language that I kept mis-reading. She writes: "feeling helps us tune in....." She did not say feelings. Feeling has much to do with being in touch - sensing that which is around us. It even carries with it a bit of anticipation. Some dance groups look as though they know how close they are and how far they can lean and how an outstretched hand will be grasped by another - do not worry. They can feel what is present - the energy, the community, the vitality that comes within a shared mission. When think about feelings, I am often caught up in myself. This can be such a turned-in way of living that I am unaware of how dramatic and dynamic life can be when we feel within the presence of others. This is not to belittle feeling - at all. Feelings often help us catch the 'feeling' of a group. Unfortunately, too often some people allow the feeling to be the ending point. "Getting in touch with my feelings" can turn into nothing more than a journey inward without the wonder-filled journey into the expansiveness of the greater body of our humanity.
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