The Bubble Bath Rebellion: Sacred Self-Care in Times of Crisis
So here we are.
I feel a deep privilege writing this reflection after our homecoming Sunday, where we celebrated the Table Church, which began around a dinner table 12 years ago, and Resurrection City, which also started around a dinner table six years ago. So much has happened for all of us since then. So much hard work among the volunteers who have showed up Sunday after Sunday after Sunday. So much has happened, bitter and sweet—moments of incredible beauty and moments of heartbreak.
The majority of church life, like any community, is messy. Together, we have been tenacious. We have been raucous (some of y'all, especially raucous). The beauty of this community is overspilling, a reflection that we have believed and continue to believe that we have been called to be in this city for such a time as this.
What Homecoming Means
I grew up in a church—particularly in my father's family church—where on every first Sunday, we would visit. Once a year, we would have a homecoming celebration where we would invite folks who had been around for a while to come back. It was a time to recognize that no matter how distance or seasons of life have affected our relationships, we were still kin. We had been nourished from the same spiritual tree, and we had Holy Spirit experiences together that forever bonded us.
It was also a time to catch up and hang out, to encounter children who were way bigger than you thought they should be, and to embarrass them by saying how big they've gotten (just as others had pinched my cheeks when I was young). Homecoming was a time to take stock of additions and subtractions to the family tree. By the end of it, we always found ourselves in the culture hall with a plate full of food and smiles on our faces because we knew we were part of something that had a history before us and would have a history long after us.
A Year of the Bubble Bath
At the end of last year, my wife made a funny observation that at the time seemed unremarkable. As we approached December 31st, during a brief moment of reflection on the previous year, she said something that has stayed with me as a real gift. Sitting at our kitchen island, she said simply, "Honey, this has been the year of the bubble bath."
When she said that, I laughed, just like you might be laughing now. It didn't seem serious or all that important to note. But the previous four years for us had been really hard. We had moved houses so we could care for our aging parents. We moved again to be in a more diverse neighborhood in the Arston School district. And then we moved yet again to what we thought would be our forever home, which turned out to be a money pit with every problem imaginable.
When my wife spoke those words, we were in the kitchen of yet another house—our current one, praise God. After having moved three times in about four and a half years, we had endured huge financial losses, not to mention the anxiety of living in a house that didn't feel completely safe for our kids.
Once we moved to a house that finally seemed safe and began to feel like a home, we took a lot of bubble baths. Sometimes we'd even negotiate: "Is it your turn? My turn? Is it your turn? Okay." I gradually pulled out a teak tray that one of my friends had given me for my birthday—a bath tray—and set it up. I bought a bath pillow so I could relax against the tub. And I topped it all off with Dr. Teal's Lavender bubble bath and some Epsom salt.
During those times, I would rub my feet and realize, "Oh, I never give my feet any attention." Or I would massage my shoulders and think about all they were carrying. Eventually I started to do some work in the bubble bath. I would take my phone or a book and intentionally do the work that, as Katie G. Cannon says, "the work that my soul must have." The things that might pour out into my day job, but which were also about what I needed as a Black, queer, gender nonconforming woman.
I was releasing the harm and grief of the previous four years in those bubble baths. I was embracing what my body and soul needed. I was carving out space to be refreshed and to feel joy.
The World on Fire in 2025
Now it's 2025, and I don't know about you, but I feel a little bit like the world is on fire. Because of that, I'm realizing that the comment my wife made almost in passing contains something essential. I have to find ways to both release the pain and embrace what my body and soul must have. As silly as it sounds, I am developing this bubble bath time into an intentional spiritual practice.
I'm convinced that while you might not have a bathtub or might not enjoy the feel of water the way I do, you too will need intentional spiritual practices of self-care to root you in this time. Some of you are really good at this already. There was one person in the community I told about the bubble baths, and they immediately said, "You also need to have your sage going through the air." They were elevating the practice, and I thought, "You are good at this!"
Some of us, though, aren't as good at it. If you're like me, in times of very real suffering, it can be easy to feel undeserving of self-care or like we just need to get on with the "real work" of speaking and living truth to power.
Lessons from Queer Resistance
I heard a quote recently that reinforced for me just how essential self-care is. In writing about the politics of this moment, gay columnist Dan Savage reflected on the organizing of queer folks in the late 1970s to push back against Anita Bryant's attempt to frame queer folks as needing to "recruit."
In his reflection, Dan Savage insisted: "Anyone who tells you that making time for joy is a distraction or a betrayal has no idea what they're talking about."
Watching clips of protests against Bryant when he was a kid, he found it remarkable how much fun the protesters were having. The folks that Savage observed made space for joy out of care for themselves, out of a need to protect their humanity.
But then Dan Savage said one more thing that I think is most important of all. He said, "During the days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. And it was the dance that kept us in the fight. Because it was the dance we were fighting for."
Y'all, it is the dance we are fighting for. The dance of love on which the world is founded. In pursuing that dance, we've got to process our grief and speak up and speak out, and also remember joy—that we were created for joy. We've got to do all that while taking care of ourselves because ultimately nobody else will.
Sacred Self-Care: A Lenten Journey
Because of that truth, we're going to spend the weeks leading up to Easter exploring practices of self-care through many different lenses. We'll follow along with many of the ideas found in Dr. Shaniqua Walker-Barnes's brilliant devotional "Sacred Self-Care."
As I talk about self-care, I know that the days leading up to Easter—the season we traditionally call Lent, when we focus on journeying to the cross—are supposed to be days set aside for fasting and self-denial. That's usually how we think about it.
But this year, when grief and fear and gender identity erasure and very real job loss are all around us, I am encouraging us to practice Lent differently. It's time to spotlight intentionally taking care of our bodies, minds, emotions, and hearts.
This Lent, what we can give up once and for all is the idea that suffering equals goodness. We can give up once and for all the belief that self-denial translates to holiness. And we can take up lived practices of radical self-care.
Self-Love as Biblical Practice
Galatians 5:13 says, "For you were called to freedom... For the whole law is summed up in this single commandment: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
The dance of freedom and love that we're called to begins with self and then flows outward. Or as Sonya Renee Taylor puts it, "Radical self-love starts with the individual, expands to the family, community, and organization, and ultimately transforms society... all while still unwaveringly holding you in the center of that expansion."
To take up radical self-love is to take up its embodiment: self-care. And when I say self-care, I don't want you to think of the flimsy, counterfeit version peddled by the proprietors of capitalism. Instead, think about the love, stewardship, and desire for flourishing that was conferred on all of humanity—that was conferred on you—when God called you "very good." Think about something that cannot be bought or sold, and which has the power to keep you alive in the deepest sense of that word.
Here's a more helpful definition of self-care from Dr. Walker-Barnes: "It is the activities, the habits, the disciplines, the thought patterns that we integrate into our life on a regular basis to maximize our capacity for wellness, given our circumstances, ability and disability, and personal history."
Is Self-Care Biblical?
Before I go further, I want to address one objection that might lurk in the corners of your mind: that self-care is not in the Bible.
It's true that Jesus was not slipping away to King's Spa. It's true that the newly freed slaves didn't have scented pillows, bath salts, or cozy socks that said "dope queen." Nobody had to remind the ancients to drink water because the process of getting it out of the well was so hard—once you got it, you drank all you could! And nobody had to tell the ancients to remember to move because that's all they did; they didn't have a choice.
Even as their time is not our time, stewarding our bodies, minds, emotions, and hearts speaks a better word against something very familiar that would have been familiar to them too: scapegoating.
Scapegoating and Self-Care
Scapegoating is the practice of sacrificing one person or group to maintain the unity of the dominant group. It is exercising violence against someone on the margins in an attempt to create peace at the center. Scapegoating is as old as time.
As we move toward Easter this year, as we hear the stories of immigrants, disabled people, trans folks, people with expertise in DEI, and people who are simply hardworking civil servants—as we hear them and so many others scapegoated—I want us to remember that in the cross, God in Christ became the ultimate scapegoat to disclose one of the most hideous sins at the foundation of the world.
If you are like many folks who struggle to understand what the crucifixion accomplished, start here: Jesus became the sacrifice to end all sacrificing. Co-suffering love will always be part of the Christian way—you can choose that. But forced sacrifice based in shame, blame, coercion, or violence has been revealed in the death of God on the cross for what it is: a satanic way of organizing society.
When our Savior Jesus was raised from the dead, John records that his first words were, "Peace be with you." As writer Brian Zahn notes, when Jesus was raised from an unjust death speaking peace instead of revenge, he revealed that society need not be organized on accusation and scapegoating, but can instead be founded on advocacy and solidarity.
To practice self-care is to refuse to allow yourself to become the scapegoat. It is to refuse to consent to the sins of society being laid on your body. It is to let go of the belief that it is acceptable for us to be made the sacrifice for any reason without our consent. If the death of Christ on the cross reveals anything, it definitely reveals the true nature of systems of violence or coercive sacrifice. The practice of self-care can be a practical way to live out the truth that we no longer have to live that way.
Ezekiel and the Sour Grapes
Let's look at one passage of scripture that intriguingly sets up a building block for thinking about sacred self-care. The passage is found in Ezekiel 18:1-4:
"The word of the Lord came to me: What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel, 'The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge'? As I live, says the Lord God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel. Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine. It is only the person who sins who shall die."
This might seem like a strange passage to introduce the idea of sacred self-care. It's found in a prophetic book, on the lips of a former priest, addressing God's people who had been exiled to Babylon—in a moment when national independence had disintegrated and people's sense of identity had been devastated.
The folks who would have heard this prophecy are understandably concerned with three questions:
- Why is Israel in exile?
- Is God just?
- Is a break with the past possible?
Ezekiel's audience wanted to know if there was any cause for hope. They believed that the sins of their foreparents were what had landed them in exile because they understood God to be jealous primarily and the kind of deity who is "intent on punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation," as Exodus 20 says.
In this passage, we overhear God expressing frustration with this cultural proverb. They believed that the sour grapes of harm, trauma, and oppression were their destiny based on their lived experiences. That's what they saw happening around them; they thought that's the way it had to be.
Yet through Ezekiel, God says, "The proverb shall be no more." If you read further in the chapter, you'll notice that more than once it is made crystal clear that God does not desire the death of her people, but rather their life.
Embedded in these few verses is a clash between the way that those people then (and many of us now) understood fate, and the way that God desires for us to enter into a new reality.
Epigenetics and Ancestral Trauma
Dr. Walker-Barnes incisively points out that the folk wisdom found in this proverb is beginning to be borne out through discoveries in the emerging scientific field of epigenetics. Scientists are discovering that the ways harm and trauma were experienced by our ancestors can actually change how our DNA is expressed.
That means many of us, especially Black and brown folks, may actually bear in our bodies the sensitivities and protective strategies our foreparents used to stay alive—even if they don't serve us now or might actually harm us.
As a way of living in God's desire that this proverb "be no more," we are invited to take care of ourselves, to practice sacred self-care. Here's how Dr. Walker-Barnes puts it:
"As a descendant of survivors of U.S. chattel slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow, I practice self-care as a reparative strategy to heal pain and trauma that I have not directly experienced but that flows through my body in the form of elevated stress and inflammatory responses. I practice self-care to repair the story that my body has been told, that my ancestors' bodies were told, and to give it a new story. My ancestors were force-fed unripe grapes, but I do not have to suffer."
For Freedom
Y'all, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. It is for life. It is for us to become participants in the dance of love that is the foundation of the world.
For many of us, it will always take tremendous work to fight the cultural messages we receive about our bodies and the value of our lives. To fight the fatalism that says we cannot escape the cycle of forced suffering. To escape the scapegoating that our society loves so, so much.
But thankfully, Lent is coming. We can repent from the ways we have not been faithful stewards of our own lives. And we can receive the good news anew that God loves us and desires us to enter into life—the life that only God can give.
As we move through this season, may we contemplate and sense by the Spirit what God is calling us to this Lent. May we find, in our own bubble baths or whatever equivalent speaks to our souls, the courage to refuse scapegoating and embrace the dance of love for which we were made.
Amen.
