Wasting & Renewing
Bodies, Seasonal Shifts & Eternity
I heard the sirens as I was leaving the library before I saw the lights flashing in front of my neighbor’s house. The ambulance was in our neighborhood again, the 4th or 5th time in as many weeks. Our elderly neighbors have been walking through the challenges and frustrations of aging bodies.
Last weekend we finished auctioning off the last of my grandparents’ estate. Hands were thrown up to bid on treasures, antiques and miscellaneous items were hauled off in droves, and trash and unwanted articles were discarded in piles to be disposed of. Soon their house will be sold, and all that will be left of my grandparents is their legacy in the generations after them and the memories and artifacts that we have tucked away in our minds and our homes.
After a very hard night of toddler teething Sunday night, my pregnant body was smashed in the bed between Luis and Jael. I had a middle of the night thought about the verse “pressed, but not crushed,” and it made me chuckle. I know my situation wasn’t Paul’s context when writing it, but it was a reminder that hard circumstances are able to be endured because they are temporary.
There is a melancholy in it - the breaking down and changing of bodies. The somber reminder that from dust we have come and to dust we will return. But also, the sacredness in our human bodies - the Word Became Flesh: Jesus.
One of my favorite Honest Advent images and writings from Scott Erickson is this:
How do you depict something sacred?
Something significant happened - a meeting between the finite and the Infinite that changed the way we see reality - and we memorialize it. We honor it & add some shiny gold leaf. Humans have done this since the beginning.
My only problem in the process of making something sacred is that we usually cut out all the really human stuff. Most paintings of the newly born baby Jesus are of him sitting upright, clean and clear-eyed with a shiny halo around his head. And I get it. This kind of depiction looks way better in a painting than the newly born alien-faced baby the doctor hands to you in the delivery room. Mary as well. It’s honoring to portray her as well-rested and dressed in her Sunday best rather than just waking up in the morning with an achy back and morning-sickness breath.
We will always take our most important stories and sacredly set them apart so we remember them for the rest of time. But this process becomes unhelpful when we separate our own fleshy humanity from the humanity found in these sacred stories. When we dismiss the naked fleshiness under all the fancy clothing, we can dismiss ourselves from being ones who could also find ourselves in a sacred story.
If the incarnation insists on anything, it insists that our physical bodies matter to God.
Jesus was crucified naked. Nakedness was shameful & the Roman soldiers were going after his humiliation. But honestly none of us want to see the cock and balls of the King of Kings when we enter into a sanctuary.
So I get it. It’s a holy reverence that implores us to put a loincloth on his beaten and pierced body. But to be clear, this is editorializing the story. Even if it is only in our mind’s eye, we must hold to a vision of a God who shared the fullness of our naked vulnerabilities.
Mary is worthy to be revered because she was asked to bear in her body the weight of sacred motherhood.
Let’s give kindness to her body, and kindness to our bodies as well. Because our body, with all its fleshy, sweaty, hairy, nausea-prone, heartburn-prone, cellulitey gloriousness, will be a part of the sacred story we will one day find ourselves in.
In seeming dissonance to the ever-changing human body, the first day of Spring came Monday and with it came all the expectance of sunshine and promise.
Our windows were flung open, and the hyacinths and daffodils showed their colorful cheeriness. The buds started opening on the trees and the grass got a little greener. The week teemed with playgrounds and puddle jumping, ice cream and sunsets, and walks around the block. And is there anything cuter than a toddler in overalls and rainboots?
I am a four seasons type of gal, but the anticipation of Spring is hard to beat. It’s like the whole earth has been crouched in the waiting and now is vaulting to life. You can’t help but smile at the world and turn your face towards the warmth.
I have been thinking about 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (ESV) in the midst of dynamic bodies and burgeoning hope.
“So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
The “eternal weight of glory” - what an admonition to my heart. Where does my perspective lie as I parent and wife? As I build relationships in our community? Am I creating time and space to be led by the Holy Spirit? Am I so caught up in the temporary, that I miss the unseen?
As we greet the Spring season and embrace the anticipation and growth that naturally come with it, may we recall what the Winter has taught us: that the waiting, dark nights, howling winds, and dormancy teach us endurance and that conditions are impermanent.
The Good List
Sunday lunch with some out of town friends — So much fun spending time with them and processing motherhood and life!
Reading the books We Dream of Space (a middle grade fiction set during the lead-up and aftermath of the Challenger Space Shuttle Disaster) and Open-Air Life (about Nordic principles on prioritizing getting outside).
Having time in my schedule to run errands for my neighbors. The Lord knew what He was doing when he put us beside a couple that remind me so much of my grandparents.
World Doula Day on March 22nd - it was fun to reflect on my little-over-a-year of being a birth doula!
Thursday Farmers Market dates with my girl
Fruit smoothies & Amish-made donuts Watercolor painting toy cars and bikes in the yard and washing them off: such a fun way to entertain toddlers!
A great lookout spot over our city — we drove up for the sunsets two nights this week!
Sunset over Reading, PA Feeling lots and lots of baby kicks and movements and just savoring it. I enter third trimester next week which is hard to believe!
Roasted Veggie Pasta with Feta (and I add some mozzerella cheese). Sonya Spillmann shared this recipe in her newsletter a month or two ago, and it has become a favorite in our household!
This Instagram post by Anthony Gurrola — (click the image to see the second image and read the caption)
