You Are Your Best Thing: Embodiment as Radical Self-Love
by Tonetta Landis-Aina
Toni Morrison's 1987 novel Beloved holds a special place in my heart. I've often reflected on how its depiction of Hush Harbors helps me think about who I am as a pastor and what I believe church should be. But as we've been moving through this Lenten season focused on self-care, there's another portion of the novel that keeps reverberating through me.
Toward the end of the story, there's a pivotal conversation between Sethe and Paul D, two people who have known immeasurable pain and loss as a result of a society seemingly incapable of loving Black flesh. In the scene, Sethe grieves that her daughter has gone away once and for all—what she sees as her "best thing" has finally been lost. Paul D, the man who loves her, tells her unequivocally: "Sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."
Then he leans over, takes her hand, and with the other, touches her face: "You your best thing, Sethe. You are."
To which Sethe responds, "Me? Me?"
I love that a book about the nightmare of slavery and the ways in which it never stops haunting us is also a book about radical self-love. We need to hear that no matter what our yesterdays have held, we are our own best thing.
When "Me?" Is Hard to Believe
Even as I say those words, I know they might be hard to take in. Most of us have received messages from parents, caregivers, teachers, or other Christians that make this simple truth difficult to accept in our hearts. Or if you can take them in, you might receive them with questioning disbelief.
Me? Me?
Not my ability to earn and accomplish. Me? Not the ways that I make others feel good. Me? Not how I can perform goodness. Me? Not the "after" photo to my "before" self. Just me.
If that's as hard for you to believe most days as it is for me, you'll be happy to know that we still have a few weeks to go in our series on sacred self-care, named after a devotional by Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes. For the past few weeks, in a season when our national leaders seem wildly out of step with our best interests, we've been exploring what it means to take care of ourselves and our community.
We're rejecting any false gospel that tells us we owe it to others to be scapegoats in their stories. We're giving up once and for all the ideas that suffering equals goodness and that self-denial translates to holiness. Instead, we're committing ourselves to practices of radical self-love and community care.
The Body as Your Best Thing
When I tell you that you are your best thing, I am not just talking about your spirit. I know we're real holy in here, but I'm not just talking about your spirit. I am not just talking about your mind, even though I know we're real intelligent here.
No, I am talking about your body. Maybe mostly talking about the you that is your body as your best thing.
Dr. Hillary McBride, in her fabulous book on embodied living, points out that in Western culture, we've often been taught that our mind and body are separate—that we are our mind rather than our body. She explains what this logic costs us: connection to ourselves and others, the joy of pleasure, and the sense of aliveness that comes from being present in the moment.
One of the ways this separation occurs is through how we come to identify where our "selfness" lives. Embodiment invites us to see that we are our bodies. Our selfness exists just as much in our toes, digestive tract, and beating heart—in our movements on the dance floor, in memories of smell and sound and laughter—as it does in our thoughts and minds.
Understanding this, I'll say clearly: our spiritual formation will be anemic if we are not attuned to our bodies. Attending to the body is holy work.
Discerning the Body
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul transmits his understanding of communion to the Corinthian church:
For I received from the Lord that which I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus Christ on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me... For all who eat and drink without discerning the body eat and drink judgment against themselves.
When I was growing up, this was a passage that scared me. Taking communion in our church was already a big deal—it was "closed," open only to baptized people who believed and lived a certain way. And when you added on all this language about judgment, it frightened me. I thought I had to be righteous, perfect, showing up a certain way to take this meal or else face judgment.
While I completely misunderstood Paul's warnings, I did know enough to realize that "discerning the body" meant something important. The Greek word for "discerning" means to distinguish, to prefer, even to confer superiority. To discern the body is to correctly understand it, to reckon with it, to favor it.
From the context, it's clear that "discerning the body" means to discern our relationship with Jesus—the Word who became flesh, in whom "all the fullness of God lives in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). It also refers to the body of believers, the church—being concerned about our relationship to other disciples and the needs of the community.
But underneath those explicit meanings, I think there's another crucial question for our time: What does it mean to discern your own body? In an era when we desperately need sacred self-care and communal care, how can we discern the body that is ours in light of the enfleshed Christ and the materiality of community?
Cultivating Sacramental Consciousness
A first step to discerning our body—perhaps the hardest one in Western culture—is to cultivate what theologian Simon Chang calls a "sacramental consciousness."
Spiritual director Cindy Lee explains that in a sacramental consciousness, the material and spiritual are intertwined, and we can experience the supernatural through our senses and practices. We're not trying to understand God, but to experience God. Our cultures and traditions become fully infused with the spiritual, and the Holy Spirit is embodied in our movements, expressions, and practices.
This means returning to the truth that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. When you eat and drink and move and laugh and experience pain or just breathe, God is present.
The sad thing is that many of us have only heard "your body is a temple" (1 Corinthians 6) in two contexts: when someone is trying to police our sexuality, or when someone is trying to shame us into a diet. All of a sudden, your body becomes holy then. They'll work you to death, but then your body's holy, right?
Resisting Lies About Our Bodies
It's so much easier in our world to believe lies about our bodies. Dr. McBride provides a helpful list of these lies:
- You are not your body
- You need to subdue and control your body because it is dangerous
- Some bodies are better than other bodies
- Bodies must present within rigid binaries of gender
- Ideal women have sexual, young, thin, and fertile bodies
- Bodies are impure and pleasure is sinful
- Appearance is all that matters about your body
- You should change your body
- Fat bodies are unhealthy
- Others get to decide what is best for your bodies
- Bodies get in the way of pure and right thinking
Which of these register as difficult for you to disbelieve? For me, as a woman in my 40s whose body is changing, I have to grapple with everything I've been taught about fat bodies being unhealthy. I was raised in a culture that believed fat bodies were desirable, but I was also told the lie that health looked a certain way and was some kind of universal standard.
In a world where mirrors and photography are everywhere, it's much easier to focus on your body as seen rather than as felt. But your felt body is a primary avenue through which God speaks to you. When you're only attuned to your body through appearance, which is the temptation of our culture, it disconnects you from the feelings, memories, and messages that your body contains—and from the ways God desires to communicate with you.
Bodies and Justice
One thing I love about our church is how much we care about justice. But as author Sonya Renee Taylor reminds us: "When we speak of the ills of the world—violence and poverty and injustice—we are not speaking conceptually. We are talking about things that happen to bodies."
Racism, sexism, ableism, homo and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia—these are all "algorithms created by a human struggle to make peace with the body." A radical self-love world is a world free from systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.
The brilliant book Fat Church notes that "the power of the Christian gospel has always been in its invitation to organize society in a new way. The church can choose to use this power for either colonization or liberation."
We cannot resist domination culture and tune into communion without being honest about the ways we've accepted the hierarchy our world places on bodies. We might be "woke" when it comes to Black bodies or queer bodies, but what about elderly bodies, fat bodies, or disabled bodies?
True communion—both in the meal we take as Christ-followers and in the posture we take toward our neighbor—is the end of scapegoating. We can't move from domination to communion, from colonization to liberation, unless we rightly discern the body.
Beginning the Journey
I won't lie—this was a hard sermon to write because it's hard to know where to begin the journey in a society pervaded by so many myths about our bodies. It's hard to know where to start with basics like getting enough sleep, drinking water, moving our bodies, and a host of other things.
I confess that I don't know if this feels like good news to you, but I do know that you are beloved in your body, the body that you are. Allow the God who preferred to take on a body—preferred embodiment as a way to connect with us—to whisper the truth that you are your body and that is good news.
You are your own best thing. Every time you participate in the Lord's Supper from here on out, may you rightly discern the body—and your body.
Amen.