For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 1 Corinthians 12:12
We’ve taken a scalpel to the Body of Christ.
Youth group talks and pulpit sermons and relegated roles cut apart the beautiful body and said these parts can’t be one. Can’t hold hands. Can’t front hug. Can’t pray together. Can’t look at each other too long. Can’t be alone together. Can’t learn too much from each other.
And lost each other.
Out of fear of crossing sexual lines in the sand, we put up barbed wire fences…and walls, and in very Levitical fashion backed it waaaaay up to prevent what was seen as the ultimate failing: losing your purity.
This broke my heart as a young person. I remember feeling so frustrated because I wanted to scream that I was more than my body which I was already uncomfortable with. But the rules made me feel dangerous. This place talked about intimacy with God but showed me we were terrified of intimacy with each other.
For purity’s sake. Purity? What did that mean, that somehow my personhood mingling with another’s personhood would somehow be tainted? I remember talks about flowers depetaled, presents ripped open, gum chewed, and one particularly haunting image of standing at the wedding altar in shame as lined up behind me were all the people I had shared my body with. My future husband would have to forgive me. Accept my tarnished gift. Or reject it. And of course this was only presented from a heteronormative perspective. My heart aches when I think about the kids in youth group whose existence wasn't even acknowledged as they navigated their own tumultuous adolescence, or worse, it was, and they found themselves reduced to a sin.
But what life and adulthood has taught me is that the pursuit of purity is impossible and lonely. Purity is something that once lost, can’t be reclaimed. Purity doesn’t allow mistakes. Purity places value on something that was never meant to be the source of my worth. Purity equated my worth with a commodity. It’s value was only in relation to one other: my future husband. It wasn’t even about me.
I dream of a Body that is connected. A Body made up of bodies meant to embody Christ on this earth, and I don’t see in the life he lived on this earth a picture of a life lived with lines in the sand. I see a flesh and blood man drawing in the sand while others tried to get him to accuse the “adulteress”. He didn’t. He mingled with harlots. He repeatedly subverted the old testament purity code. He lived on the margins, stepped over the lines others drew. What he didn’t do was use bodies. He honored them.
What if instead of purity, we embodied the intimacy and sacredness with which Jesus handled bodies? What if instead of rules out of fear we held each other as holy? What if instead of denying our sexuality we embraced it and made it something we could navigate openly? What if we understood our bodies are sacred no matter what has happened to them, what we’ve done with them, what they look like, what they are capable of? This innate sacredness resides in the very flesh you draw breath into. There’s not a thing in this world you can do or that can happen to you to change that fact. What if we learned to live in a way that sees every body as holy? That the person across from me - or on the other side of the world from me - is not for me to use: physically or emotionally or capitalistically or in any other capacity. What if we embodied that? What if we were a Body made up of many parts, none more important than the other, but so deeply connected to each other and ourselves that we understand that what hurts one hurts us all. That when the least of these is hurting, the whole body suffers?
Purity culture stole something from the Body but it didn’t start there. In the garden, we were naked and knew no shame. Shame entered the picture and everything changed. We have lost so much between us and within ourselves. We are fingers and toes who have forgotten we share the same blood supply.
I don’t believe we are doomed to stay that way. I have to believe we can make peace with the Body. But first we have to make peace with our own.
Such a great post. One idea sparked for me: the rules, both spoken and unspoken, that we grew up with in youth group (I particularly remember separate swimming times or everyone being required to swim in giant t-shirts and basketball shorts) were also based on heteronormative assumptions! Those rules make even less sense when we admit the reality that we cannot assume or predict anyone's sexuality.