The Sacredness of the Body

When was the last time you felt…
I mean, really, truly felt
the sacredness of your body?

When was the last time you noticed…
I mean, really, truly noticed
the preciousness of each inch and cell
that tethers your wandering soul to this earth?

When was the last time you knew…
I mean, really knew, in your bones
that every last line, curve, wrinkle, and dimple of flesh
is the one way you get to experience this world?

And when was the last time you beheld…
I mean, you were bowled over with the beholding,
the sacredness of the body of another?

And has it been far too long?

And does it sound, does it feel impossible to do?

In the end of April, I joined many thousands of sequined fans at a concert in St. Louis to watch the pop star Lizzo bring her gospel of the body to the people of Missouri. Lizzo is wildly gifted, hilariously subversive, unapologetically sexy, beautiful, and Black, femme, and fat. And Lizzo’s music celebrates every one of those identities as a luscious part of who she is, and who we all get to be, which is a fully embodied human. Fully embodied in the nearly 8 billion ways there are of being a person in this world of beauty and pain.

Watching Lizzo that night, I had a spiritual experience, which may sound obvious when I describe it, as deep truths so often do.

She had changed into a flesh-colored bodysuit and had come down to the front of the stage. Her glorious back up dancers, also fat Black women collectively called “the big girls,” were taking a well-deserved moment off stage, and Lizzo stood by herself, under the lights, with a look of such tenderness on her face and began to sing her hit song “Naked.”

Welcome to my body, I know it’s nice to meet it
Fantasies been written ‘bout the beauty and the sweetness
Can I be discreet with you? will you keep all my secrets?
I just wanna lay it down and open up the deepness

All the conversations say I should feel a way
I don’t care what people think or spend or sway, we can run away (yeah)

Let down my guard, undo my robe
I’m standing here, don’t need no clothes
I’m naked
Love how you look at me naked
Come make this body feel sacred
I’m a big girl, can you take it? naked

[…]

Come make this body feel sacred
I’m a big girl, don’t you waste it, naked

As she sang, the light drifted between illuminating her nearly naked flesh and projecting roses unfolding across her belly and breasts.

And I remember thinking: Oh. She knows. She knows in her bones that her body is the one way she gets to experience this world, this life. She knows and she’s telling us. As much with her open face and nude bodysuit as with her lyric: This body is sacred. Come make this body feel sacred.

Come make this body feel sacred. And yes she’s singing a song to a lover. But she’s also singing it to each of us there in the crowd and to a dominant culture that controls and hates bodies, especially bodies that are femme and black and fat. She’s singing it to a dominant culture that tries its best to make her body an object, to use it or destroy it (supremacy systems don’t much care which).

She is inviting us, her fellow humans: Come make my body feel sacred.

Here I am, I imagine her saying, femme and black and fat, and my body is holy. It is Love enfleshed. It is the only way I get to be in the world. And I am willing to risk inviting you to see it that way too.

Hers is an invitation few of us might dare to make — to bare our bodies before this cruel culture and say look, how sacred. Look, how precious.

The culture around us does not make the body feel sacred. The culture around us makes the body feel economically or sexually objectified, or disposable, or wrong.

The culture around us enacts violence on sacred bodies every day in obvious and in very subtle ways, until it succeeds at last in stripping away our innate experience of the holiness of flesh.

Bathed as we are in that culture, I’d wager that few of us would dare to make Lizzo’s invitation even to ourselves. Even in a dim room with an angled mirror: Come. Make my body feel sacred.

Yet there Lizzo stood. Naked in every way that mattered. Inviting us to worship her body and through it, our own. And the spiritual experience for me was simply this visceral realization: “Oh. She knows. She knows and she’s telling us. This is it. This flesh. It is the only way we get to touch this sacred world. There is no other way.”

How could we possibly consent to hate it?

This flesh is the way we get to touch this sacred world. This is it.

And she knows, we all know, that the body is as funny and wild as it is beautiful. She knows, we all know, that bodies belch and fart, and chafe, and grow fungus and host bacteria, and do all kinds of undignified things.

And she knows, we all know, that bodies ache, and that they break, and that they cease to function the way we might wish, whether slowly or all at once. She knows, we all know, that bodies die.

And all of that is part of the sacredness of the body, because all of it is unbreakably connected to this life, this world, this singular and miraculous earth.

Your particular flesh, the one you are already in, is the way you get to touch this sacred world. This is it. There is no other way.

There is a tempting and dangerous move that can arise from truly recognizing that our bodies are our one precious way of being in the world.

And that is to control our bodies, and try and make them better, to try and make them last longer, to try and preserve them from any harm by limiting the ways we let them move and be in the world.

This is a dangerous choice. Controlling the body separates it from the sacredness of the world.

Of course, a body controlled is no less sacred. The holiness of flesh is inalienable. But a body controlled is diminished in its experience of its own sacredness and of the world.

We most fully experience our bodies as precious to the earth because of their vulnerability, because of their limits, because of their wild irrepressibility.

So the response to recognizing the sacredness of the body cannot be to try to improve or preserve it in some impossible changeless state.

Instead, we continue to worship the body as it evolves, as it ages, as it grows or shrinks, as it becomes less able to do the things it used to do and yes, as it dies.

The body is our only way to experience the world, and our response to that truth cannot be control, but must be softness, wildness, courage, openness, and such tender care.

Our response to the sacredness of the body must be care. Great growing cultures of care that expand to include each precious body on this breathing earth.

Because here is my final point this morning: Worshiping bodies is not a solitary act of self-care or self-love.

Recognizing the sacredness of bodies is the way to collective liberation.

Empire knows this. Those that horde power know this. Why do you think they are working SO HARD to control our bodies? To ban abortion. To ban drag. To ban gender affirming care. To fat shame and diet culture us all. TO refuse access to disable bodies. To police Black bodies. To deport migrant bodies. To incarcerate poor bodies.

Because they know there is no stopping us when we truly make each body feel sacred.

The sacredness of bodies is at the heart of every effort for our collective liberation, every tentative step toward Beloved Communtity — it ALL requires that we see and feel and celebrate and uplift the holiness of flesh.

The heart of Abortion Rights: The sacredness of the body and its freedom to choose.

of Queer Liberation: The sacredness of the body and its freedom to exist outside limit or norm.

of Trans Rights: The sacredness of bodies in all their glorious expressions.

of Fat Liberation: The sacredness of bodies in all their shapes and sizes.

of Disability Justice: The sacredness of every body, each of which functions differently in this world.

of Abolition: The sacredness of every body, none of which is disposable.

of Earth Care:The sacredness of human bodies and animal bodies and plant bodies and water bodies and mineral bodies.

Every way that we are called to get free starts here:
All of it requires that we worship rather than fear the body.
All of it requires that we make each body feel sacred,
beloved, indispensable, free, necessary, precious, exactly how it is.
All of it requires that we care, materially, for bodies.
That we include them, feed them, celebrate them, shelter them,
hold them, heal them, witness them, worship them.

Behold your body.
Witness every precious inch that allows you to touch this world.

Behold your community.
Witness every shape. Every difference. Every way of being flesh.

Behold this earth.
Sacred in every landscape. Every mile. Every body.

Come, make it all feel sacred.