Before I became clean and sober, I didn't much like myself, which meant I wasn't really fond of other people either. I used to hang out with a group; we nicknamed ourselves the "fashion police." Not that we ever really handed out tickets and we were in constant judgment about what people were wearing. The thing I have learned about judgment is if you judge other people, they are certainly going to judge you. It is a reciprocal universe.
Last week I wrote about learning to inhabit my own body instead of just occupying it. What I didn't say is that the same lesson applies to every body I encounter — not just mine.
Here's the truth I don't love admitting: I have judged bodies that weren't mine. Not out loud, not even always consciously — but the thought crosses before I catch it. Too old. Too much. Not enough. We've all absorbed decades of messaging that tells us which bodies are acceptable and which ones need explaining. Diet culture, fatphobia, ageism, racism, colorism — they all whisper the same lie: your body is a problem to be solved.
I don't think that's an accident, and I don't think it's harmless. If the Divine chose to show up as physical form — if, as Ernest Holmes put it, humanity is the place where heaven and earth meet — then every time we treat a body as unacceptable, we're rejecting a little piece of God showing up in the world. If judgment is reciprocal, so is grace.
I have never felt so much love and support as I have experienced from the Light on the Mountains CSL community, especially after my Achilles tendon surgery. From being carried down to a canoe while in a non-weight bearing cast and then floating down Silver Creek like Cleopatra floating down the Nile. This community has opened its hearts and homes to me prior to, during and after my injury. It's how that Divine presence shows up for us. I love the quote, "Don't tell God you've got big problems, tell your problems you've got a big God." ~Unknown. That is what the Light on the Mountains community demonstrates time and time again.
Togetherness is not an abstract, spiritual idea. It is bodies — in pews, at tables, in hugs held a beat too long because someone needed it. You cannot be in community without being in a body, near other bodies. That's not a limitation of the spiritual life. That's the whole point of it. Spirit didn't choose the physical as a compromise. It chose the physical as the way to know itself at all — and it chose to do that in more than one body, so we could know each other, too.
So, this week, the invitation isn't just to inhabit your own body — it's to notice how you inhabit the space around other people's. Where do you make room? Where do you flinch, compare, or quietly withhold? What would it look like to greet the body in front of you — whatever shape, age, ability, or color it comes in — as the place where God also lives?
We say we want to build a world that works for everyone. That has to include everyone's body, exactly as it is today, not as it is once it changes to meet somebody else's standard.
Blessings on your journey,
Rev. Gayle
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