Bodies, Part V
I’ve been talking about bodies, and about the shame that so many of us feel in relation to them—about their size or appearance, their functions or lacks thereof, the experiences they have or haven’t had. About how body wounds run deep. I’ve been talking about an opening that seems necessary if we want our shame to go away, and how, unchristian that I am, I see this opening reflected in the Bible. And I want to step away from the Bible for a minute to explain more fully what I think I’m trying to mean. This is intuitive stuff here, in addition to stuff consciously thought, so I’m feeling my way along even as I write.
It seems to me that shame is about believing there is something inherently wrong with us, something we mostly can’t help (I say mostly because some shame circles around feeling like we should be able to help whatever it is that’s wrong with us, but just aren’t). So helping shame fade is a matter of helping that belief in our messed-upness fade, and helping a new belief replace it. One that’s something about us being fine, being actually good and loveable. Not perfect, not in need of no growth or change or healing. But fine. Like in a fundamental way. In a sense that envelops all of us, too—not just the clean parts or the nice parts or the parts we let other people see. The sense I mean holds all of who we are.
So the question becomes, How does this happen? How does the fading of this inherently-flawed belief happen, and the introduction and growth of a new and different one?
This is where I think Love comes in. I don’t think any of this can happen without it. And this is where the opening I’m exploring comes in, too, because just like “fade” and “growth” imply, Love can’t zap shame instantly out of us. At least as far as I can see. It’s one of those laws of shame, I think: must get undone slowly.
A few posts back I wrote about grace (here and here), and how maybe the experience of it is actually a stepping stone to realizing there isn’t any need of it, that the experience of grace is what helps us realize we actually do deserve kindness, actually do deserve love. The experience of grace unravels in our minds the very reality of grace.
So. I think experiences of love are similar. And I’m not capitalizing love here intentionally, because I’m meaning something other than Love, which to me means the most massive and unboundaried and flooring and simultaneously gentle stuff there is, whereas love means lesser versions of that, ones that are peppered with all the normal stuff of us: gaminess, impatience, I’ll-love-you-if-you-love-me-back, limited understanding of the beloved and all they’ve been through, all they are, I’ll-love-you-if-you-stroke-my-ego-and-reassure-me-constantly-that-I’m-your-favorite-one, etc. Experiences of love—this peppered-with-normal-human-stuff kind—are a stepping stone, I’m thinking, or at least can be one, to realizing and experiencing the reality of Love, and actually taking on more and more of It’s traits. Love unravels love, if that makes sense. It enlightens. Its light reveals love for what it is, which is less than Love, and in so doing, in the very same breath, reveals us for what we are. And what I think it reveals is that we’re good. Fundamentally so. Fine, just exactly as we are. And to repeat myself, I don’t mean in no need of healing, or growth, or change. I mean fine in a fundamental sense, and therefore having nothing to be ashamed of.
So to be less heady about all of this, and more clear about what I mean by Love revealing us for what we are. Let’s say I feel ashamed of being so tall, ashamed that this makes me so different from what I’ve got in my head is the standard of feminine beauty. And let’s say I’m ashamed of the veins on my legs, too, that their ever-darkening, ever-multiplying-before-my-eyesness doesn’t strike me so well. And maybe I wish I could dance better, too, and that I could jog, rather than only walk, because I have in my mind that jogging is more cool, and the back problems that keep me from doing so aren’t. And that surgery on my toe? It didn’t leave the nail looking so good. And there’s a scar from where that mole got removed. And where that baby was removed. And maybe all my issues with my body—all the ones I might say in a note like this and beyond—spill over into issues with my personality and my education and my life experiences. And maybe I try to downplay all of these things, all of the things I’m ashamed of, when I’m getting to know someone new.
Does any of this sound familiar?
But let’s say this person that I’m getting to know comes to love me. Let’s say they’re not really paying much attention to these things I’m trying to hide. Let’s say they’re noticing things they genuinely like about me, things they find charming. And, let’s even say they may not like me so much—love me so much—if they knew my whole story.
But that’s the point: they only love me. They don’t Love me. But you know what? Their love alone, with a lower-case ‘l’, begins to heal me. It speaks a different voice from the one(s) in my head and starts a new belief going: maybe I’m loveable.
And maybe I’m lucky enough to find a friend who sees some of these parts I’m ashamed of, I mean truly sees them, and doesn’t turn away. Maybe their love is actually big enough to hold some of those parts, maybe even big enough to demonstrate instinctually that no effort is actually required to love some them, because they’re fine. Totally par for the human course.
So something starts to open up inside of me. Some clenched up ball begins to loosen, and I start to realize that the love that felt so good at first, but that came on the condition that I don’t really show my whole self, wasn’t actually as big as this love I’m now being given. Maybe this love has a bigger sort of ‘l’ at the front, is just a little less mixed up with all the stuff that’s less than Love.
So an opening starts to happen, where I start to recognize what Love is, and in It’s light, even if only a glimmer, I start to see that I’m loveable. And when I start to feel loveable, I start to not have to hide so much, or at least so much of the time. So a relaxedness starts to grow where worry used to be. Fear of exposure and rejection starts to fray.
When any of this happens, even just a tiny little bit, surely angels sing.
But here’s where I think we get in trouble, where this opening I’m talking about gets stalled up sometimes, and frozen uncomfortably close to closed: when we mistake love for Love. When we equate the two, and believe everything love has to say. Which, at least in all my listening, isn’t altogether nice. To put it mildly. love is mixed up with all the things that make us real, which means things like shame and fear and lust and maybe a deep, deep need for control. Its voices aren’t only about healing and making us whole.
I think this connects with the Bible. I think the openings that are in it, the ones I described in that last post, that can deepen and widen our concept of Love, can be used to do the very opposite. We can take what an opening reveals and equate what we see with Love, all the way, as though every veil has been lifted and the Whole Truth revealed. We can say God = love, and obligate ourselves to reify some version of this, rather than look for ways that Love is being cracked open, pointing ever beyond our concepts of love. I think we can do this with openings outside of the Bible, too.
The people I know who seem most deeply unashamed seem to be in a lifelong process of opening. Love is always getting unveiled for them, veil off of veil, sometimes shockingly, sometimes disturbingly so. Often in ways that shake up old categories. This process seems to embolden and humble them at the same time. They get more joyful and their voices more free. It makes them looser, if you want to put it that way—less worried about being right and making sure they’re on the right side of boundaries and more concerned with living, and making safe space for others to do so, too—for all of us to live well.
love opens us up to Love, is what I’m trying to say. Or has the potential to. And I think it’s when we find ourselves inside Love’s reach, or at least start getting the hunch that that’s where we belong, when we discover ourselves to be inherently loveable, and therefore fundamentally good, our height and our weight and our shape and our smells and our bodily functions and the experiences we have and haven’t had; our sexual orientations and genders and (un)athleticism and (un)paired-upness with someone we love—everything that makes us such embodied creatures: all of it starts being less and less grounds for fear and shame. A new kind of core starts taking shape, I think, inside of us, and our wounds become that much less crippling. They don’t define us any more.
Openings like these are becoming my guiding lights. They’re what my body yearns for and my soul is drawn toward. In the Bible, and anywhere else I can find them.