day 6 / bodies afraid
Friday, December 3, 2021
BCP Readings: Psalms 16, 17, 22 | Amos 5:1-17 | Jude 1-16 | Matthew 22:1-14
Fear has a way of transforming a body into an unfamiliar place. Particularly when a body feels powerless, every part can feel different. Distorted. Disjointed. You can get engulfed in a foggy head or tight diaphragm. Arms and legs feel like they belong to someone else because they won’t do what you say. The whole body can shrink inside your skin. Senses go on high alert, and eyes and ears can’t trust their own perceptions.
The psalmist captures this experience so vividly in the lament of Psalm 22. Ferocious enemies are poised to attack. The psalmist’s life is in danger. In that moment, the psalmist’s body morphs into liquid with bones loosed from their sockets. Their heart dissolves, and their mouth can’t utter a thing. The very solidity, stability, and sanctity of the psalmist’s own body vanishes before them. Raw vulnerability to imminent violence is all that remains.
So the psalmist cries out to God for help. What is fascinating about the psalmist’s plea is how it calls upon God to show up. The psalm starts with the image of God as royal ruler but then shifts to the midwife God when the psalmist begs God to intervene. At the point of life-threatening, terrifying powerlessness, when the psalmist’s body feels undone, they seek help from the God who was there at their birth, bringing them into the world with their laboring mother.
And this God responds. The divine midwife shows up and saves the psalmist. She does not reject or abandon this body in its raw, fearful state. She brings the psalmist to safety and presumably does what a midwife God can do: supports the psalmist through the labor of knitting their body back together until they are reborn. [1]
And this God still responds. If the God you typically associate with Advent doesn’t look like the God that the psalmist shows us, consider calling upon this God this Advent. Our divine midwife has already helped generations of bodies through labor; she will lead and support you through it too.
Updated: December 8, 2021
Notes
[1] Two comments about these sentences. First, I am using feminine pronouns to refer to God here not to limit the role of midwives only to persons who identify as women but to widen the language for God beyond the masculine pronouns that Christian tradition has normativized and that appear in the English NRSV translation of this psalm. Second, the idea of God helping the psalmist knit their body back together is inspired by Shawn Copeland’s exposition on a scene in the novel Beloved. Copeland describes Baby Sugg’s message to the “emancipated and fugitive slaves” gathered with her in the “Clearing” as “command[ing] the people to love their flesh, to love their bodies, to love themselves and one another into wholeness.” As Copeland says, “She names each bruised and tortured body part–eyes, hands, mouth, shoulders, arms, necks, feet, liver, lungs, womb, reproductive organs. Her naming re-members broken bodies, heals torn flesh.” M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Fortress, 2010), 51-52.
Image of “Blue Abstract Liquid” is by Pawel Czerwinski on the Unsplash website
