In this episode about the body, Rev. Deborah Duguid-May shares her love for the physical world, while Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe is a bit skeptical. They explore how their attitudes impact their relationships and their faith.
Transcript
Transcription provided by automated service.
DDM [00:03]: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09]: And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11]: This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy and action.
MET [00:39]: Hello and welcome. Today could be kind of interesting because we’re going to explore 1 of Reverend Deborah’s favorite things.
DDM [00:47]: Puppy dogs?
MET [00:49]: Maybe. And 1 of my least favorite things. Okay, I have to tell you. So I came up with the idea for this topic and I was like, oh, Reverend Deborah, we could do this. And over the past time that we’ve been working on this, she has been getting increasingly more excited and I have become increasingly regretful that I suggested this. So, it’s going to be a…
DDM [01:12]: Sorry, Elizabeth.
MET [01:14]: No, no, no, it’s fine That’s why it’s a good idea, right? Mm-hmm. You remember the creation episode where we came at things from a very different perspective? Today we are taking it up a notch. We are talking about bodies, which, as you will see, Reverend Deborah sees as holy and essential to the faith and I would just as soon do without. If I could be a Cartesian brain in a jar and skip the whole body thing entirely, I think I might. So we thought it would be a good topic to explore together to see if we can get to the bottom of this juxtaposition and help each other see where we are coming from.
MET [01:50]: So I am gonna let Reverend Deborah start us off, if you don’t mind.
DDM [01:54]: Not at all. So you said it, Elizabeth. I mean, I love bodies. I love my own. I love other people’s bodies. Is that okay to say? I love my puppy dogs’ bodies. I love my goats’ and my fishes’ bodies. I love the earth’s body. I feel at an emotional level, bodies for me radiate love, companionship, deep warmth. But let me also equally say that has not always been the case for me. You know, as a teenager, bodies were highly traumatic for me. You know, sexual assault, being beaten, hated developing breasts, oh my God, you know the body was like a minefield of trauma and anxiety for me.
DDM [02:40]: And I think so like many other young people I struggled with bulimia and anorexia, cutting myself, really not feeling safe or at home in my own body or with anybody else’s body. And so in my own journey, I just escaped into music and the arts and through those things, I mean, eventually discovered spirituality. But in the beginning stages of my faith, it’s interesting because I loved spirituality, but if you, Elizabeth, could be the brain in a jar, I could be the spirit in the heavens. I could also simply bypass the body. And so in those early years of my faith, I could spend hours in trance or in prayer, visions of Mary and God.
DDM [03:28]: As a young person, you could say I had either the gift or the curse of seeing those on the other side, hearing and communicating with them. And so in some ways spirituality seemed the perfect fit for me. Bypass the body and soar into other worlds in the spirit. But thank God as we’re being shaped and formed for priesthood, we have spiritual directors. We have to have a spiritual director. And the idea is, is your spiritual director has this wisdom and whose task it is really to keep us rooted on a healthy path. And my spiritual director was like, no, no, you have to root girl.
DDM [04:10]: You’ve got no problem with mystical prayer and visions, but you cannot bypass the body. And so she really encouraged me to walk, to swim, to garden, to find ways to root my physicality in this world. And so doing that and going obviously into long-term therapy over time really led me back into my body. And it took a lot of lessons to learn, a lot of having to avoid bypassing, but now at age, I was going to say 50, but it’s actually 52. Now at age 52, You know, for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling so rooted.
DDM [04:54]: In fact, I’m feeling so rooted that honestly, if you found moss and mushrooms growing out of me, I wouldn’t be surprised. I know. But I am so much happier and healthier now that I’ve been able to in some ways deeply integrate the body and the spirit into 1. So that’s kind of my context. But let’s just, did you want to say something? You’re staying well away from moss and mushrooms.
MET [05:26]: This is all foreign to me.
DDM [05:27]: But in terms of spirituality and our faith, you know, we are for this lifetime born into a human body. Now that’s not accidental. We could have been simply placed here by God as little spirits floating around but God didn’t. God places us in bodies and not just us but every other living being is given a body. Dogs, given dogs bodies. Butterflies, given butterflies bodies. Elephants in these huge bodies. The earth itself Is God taking time and care to fashion and create every living thing in a body? So this can’t be accidental for God to have taken so much time physically creating not just each thing, but also with this amazing diversity that we see.
DDM [06:21]: But I think if we watch in Scripture how quickly the story unravels. After the fall, we see human beings beginning to eat other animals, to kill them. We see human beings beginning to kill each other, we see men beginning to dominate over women’s bodies, we see violence being acted out on other bodies by those in bodies, and over time disease, which is if you split that word, dis-ease, simply no longer being at ease or at peace in our bodies, as disease begins to root in us physically, we now see people dying and beginning to die at earlier and earlier ages.
DDM [07:01]: And so by the time Jesus comes again, we see God again choosing a body in which God enters physically into this physical world. But it’s interesting that God comes as a tiny baby born through a woman’s vagina, born in blood and water and mucus. And so God enters into our world in this most physical way. Now if you think about it, I mean, God could have chosen to enter this world In any way. Why this way? And I think for me it’s because God does not see the body as being unclean, but as beautiful, amazing, a miracle.
DDM [07:44]: You know, God creates blood and water and mucus, each playing their own amazing function. But the problem is as human beings, we are so un-at-ease with our bodies, and especially women’s bodies. I mean, think about it, Elizabeth, we don’t even like to talk about vaginas or menstrual blood or mucus, right? But why? Our bodies are walking miracles. And then if we look at Jesus, I mean, Jesus was incredibly physical. Most of Jesus’s ministry is about healing the body, helping those who have been cut off from society because of bodily issues find their way back into wholeness.
DDM [08:24]: Jesus heals in public out loud the woman who has been menstruating for years. I mean private bodily issues that need healing are for Jesus just part of his public ministry. But by the New Testament we see how quickly people began to spiritualize again the gospel. It became about heavenly salvation, about the Spirit, and the body became something to discipline, something to control, because it was seen as the root of sin and temptation. And so bodies shift from being these miraculous creations of God that can see and hear and touch and taste and smell this wondrous world into which God places us, now into sources of temptation.
DDM [09:13]: And so bodies become imprisoned, bodies become mistrusted, bodies face discrimination and hatred, and we become alienated not just from our own bodies, but from the bodies of each other and the bodies of other creatures, and therefore, the body of God. And I think alienation for me is just 1 of the best words I can think of to describe sin.
MET [09:37]: Okay. Bodies are very difficult. It’s a difficult topic for me. And that is because in my early life, I was definitely taught that bodies are shameful. My body was always something that had to be controlled and covered, right? There were definite rules about how much skin could be showing at all time. And there were people in my life who I was very close to who constantly commented on other people’s bodies in some sort of judgmental way, right? There was always some comment to make about how attractive or unattractive somebody’s body was. And that was generally the value of a body, specifically a woman’s body, whether it was attractive or unattractive.
MET [10:20]: And of course, that was a matter of how thin somebody was. And like many people, and like I said, we talk about women specifically this way, But it’s a larger people problem. I’ve never liked my body. On the 1 hand, I have a number of health problems. I tend to think of my body as a Judas, which is a bit of a double bind. Yes, my body presents me with any number of huge problems, but I have also survived a dangerous pregnancy and childbirth, meningitis, and brain surgery. So my body is a fighter, but I have a hard time seeing this body as something beautiful or as a blessing that has borne me through this life, so much as a traitor that keeps throwing monkey wrenches my way.
MET [11:14]: And Then there’s just the body image unhappiness. I was happy with my body once. And it was when I was treating my body so poorly that the only reason I stayed healthy is just because I think I was young and resilient. I was eating once, maybe 1 and a half times a day and working out about 2 hours every day as well. It was unhealthy and it was obsessive and I was driving myself to do things that nobody should. And yet that was when everybody told me I looked my best and was my healthiest.
DDM [11:48]: The irony of that.
MET [11:50]: Yes. The other time I was kind of happy with my body was when I was in grad school and I was so poor I couldn’t eat. My hair and nails were brittle and breaking all the time because my nutrition was so poor. So even I recognized at the time that my dress size was maybe secondary to my health, but hey people love to tell me how good I looked.
DDM [12:11]: But you know Elizabeth, could I just interject here, you know it’s always struck me as so ironical that men are told to make themselves bigger. And as women, we must shrink and become as little as nothing. And I’m always like, there’s a deep misogyny and hatred in this whole thing.
MET [12:28]: Well, I say all this to emphasize that it’s not just me, as you say, that has an unhealthy relationship to the physical self. It’s that all of us have an unhealthy relationship to the physical. Because we don’t know what healthy is. We don’t know what’s good for us. We have made the physical completely aesthetic, which is 100% a classed thing, and as such, bodies are commodities. We trade them for influence and money. I laugh at the people who get so wound up about sex work because people are quote-unquote selling their bodies. But honestly, what do you think we’re all doing every day all the time?
MET [13:11]: If you don’t think an oil hand is selling his body just as much as a stripper or a football player, or a kindergarten teacher, you’re just freaking out about some purity fetish and like, whatever, get over it. And besides the obvious, we’re all trading our physical bodies for profit or influence or attention. And I think that’s why, even as I learned to be more okay with myself, I kind of still bristle at a lot of investment in the body sometimes, because in this world in which we live, our bodies aren’t just where we live, they are capital, and I’m kind of uncomfortable with that.
DDM [13:53]: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think the sad thing as well is that in so many of our traditions, women’s bodies, gay bodies, bodies of color, bodies who are incarcerated, Palestinian bodies, they’re still not seen as being as worth as much as the white male Western wealthy body, you know. And That sense of shame you speak about, I mean, Elizabeth, it’s really real, you know. And it’s interesting that shame is the first thing in the Christian tradition Adam and Eve feel after the fall. You know, so that shame, I think, It’s deep and it’s ancient. But we have to remember that there was something before that for me.
DDM [14:36]: It’s not the way we were created in the beginning to feel and to create it to live in. I know for myself, the issues that always most affected me as a woman were the ones that I was told, please don’t speak about publicly, deal with it privately, you know, as though they should be a source of shame. And so we don’t speak about menstruation, we don’t speak about rape, we don’t speak about anorexia and all the other issues that actually affect us and affect many of us. But what is interesting is that at the heart of the church, every time we come together, certainly as Episcopalians, we have communion, that physical, bodily receiving of the body of Jesus through real bread and wine that goes into our mouths, into our stomachs.
DDM [15:26]: And this act for us becomes the heart of worship. It’s this real tangible sacrament, taste and see in your body, become 1 with yourself, with each other, and with the body of God, that I think in some ways is so subversive of everything else that we’ve been taught.
MET [15:46]: I have really tried to unlearn these negative things that were kind of my input about physical presence, but it’s an evolving, ongoing process. And the issue of communion is particularly poignant to me. In the tradition I grew up in, communion was not emphasized at all.
DDM [16:05]: Interesting, yeah.
MET [16:06]: Like, we didn’t even call it communion, we called it the Lord’s Supper. And it was relegated to an evening service when very few people showed up and it was just every few months. There was really no emphasis on the physical. It was a purely symbolic thing, you just took a little cracker and the grape juice, I mean, not wine, can you imagine? It was definitely grape juice. And Jesus was there in spirit with you. They weren’t called sacraments, They were just representative. And I’m not gonna lie, to this day, the idea of transubstantiation just seems ludicrous to me.
MET [16:40]: Consubstantiation, I can get, but the idea that the bread and the wine actually become Jesus’s body and blood are just total nonsense to me. I am completely unconvinced of that physical part of the sacrament, but thankfully I am not Roman Catholic.
DDM [16:57]: Some of us Episcopalians believe that too, but carry on! Right, right, right.
MET [17:02]: But it’s not required.
DDM [17:03]: No, definitely not, definitely not. I don’t think Episcopalians require much.
MET [17:09]: Right. But I have been thinking about the physical expression of identity, and that makes sense to me in the framework of communion. Jesus said, here I am, I am the sacrifice for you, here I am, broken for you, that I get. It’s a physical representation of an essential truth. And actually, the thing that helped me make sense of this was something really random and seemingly unrelated. Again, I do that. But bear with me, I’m going to make a really random connection to something we talked about much earlier. So do you remember we did an episode on women and gender in the church and I talked about the first wave of feminism?
DDM [17:52]: Yes, yes, yes.
MET [17:53]: 1 of the things I mentioned is that the first part of the women’s movement was pretty exclusive. It was kind of this middle to upper class affair, like white women. In fact, I mentioned a work by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. I gave you 1 reading by another. I gave you 1 way to look at it, like, oh, I can retreat into my solitude, which is very much a privilege of the wealthy. And a lot of people read that not so much as the I have my rights, but as like, I’m retreating into my white woman solitude.
MET [18:27]: Around that time, there is 1 figure of the first wave that stands out as someone very different than that kind of retreating into her white womanhood. And her name was Sojourner Truth. Sojourner Truth is pretty much the opposite. She was an ex-slave who became a celebrated speaker in the women’s movement. She was 1 of the few black women who really became kind of a cause celebre in the first wave. And she was an important link between the abolitionists and the first wavers. Her most famous speech was, “‘Ain’t I a Woman?” And it was given at a women’s conference in Akron, Ohio.
MET [19:09]: And the reason I bring it up is because I have learned from Sojourner Truth that arguments can be physical. Truth’s speech is about how she is a woman, just like all of these white women who are arguing for equality, but she points to her womb, which has born children, and she argues that she has worked as hard as a man and deserves the respect given to any worker, and she points to her arms and back and describes the strength it takes to do the labor of the field. So what she does is Sojourner Truth couches her argument in her physical self.
MET [19:51]: Her body is her argument. Her presence is her proof. And I find that really profound.
DDM [20:00]: Absolutely
MET [20:01]: She takes that Cartesian dualism – like, I want to be a brain in a jar. She does the opposite, right? She takes that Cartesian dualism that we’ve been laboring under for a few hundred years and she’s like, nah, sis, we’re not doing that anymore. This is really brave and profound And I could talk at length about the theoretical or rhetorical importance of that, but the truth is, what happened is she made herself, not an intellectual process, the basis of her pursuit for equality. Her person is the proof, which means if you’re going to argue with her, you have to argue with the strength of her back and arms, not her appeals to logos and pathos, and that is a completely different creature.
DDM [20:41]: Wow. I mean, that is powerful. That is powerful. You know, the body, not the mind or spirit, although of course they are woven into the body, but this whole body is the basis for equality and sacredness. And I think that’s why in our faith there is this emphasis on, you are a part of the body of Christ. You, together with others, are the body of God. I think in the Western world there’s that strong temptation to want to privatize spirituality between me and Jesus. You know, me as an individual and Jesus as an individual, which I think is so ironical, given that even Jesus is part of a trinity, you know, part of a community.
DDM [21:22]: But that’s not… because it’s not what Scripture presents. Scripture roots our relationship with this communal God in a communal body, in a corporate body, a body made up of others that are very different from me, see things differently, express things differently, love differently, act differently. And I think there’s a real messiness in that, Because communal bodies are not easily controlled, they’re not easily owned, it’s harder to make them 1 thing. And so I think there’s a lot of wisdom in God rooting our relationship with God in a body, and a body that is a communal body made up of other bodies.
DDM [22:06]: But again, if we look at Scripture, Jesus locates his body while he is here on earth in the poor, the marginalized, the excluded, the child, the lamb. And so we have that iconic passage, when you feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visited the prisoner, you did this to me. And so Jesus directly locating his body in those that are hungry, naked, imprisoned. And if we take these words and the life of Jesus seriously, then these bodies need to be always central. These bodies in some ways in our society should be seen as the most sacred and these bodies should be the most loved.
DDM [22:48]: But instead, I think in the Western church, we’ve so spiritualized the message of Jesus. And so we’ve managed to push these groups to the outside, making them no longer sacred bodies, but once again, shameful bodies. And that for me is sin.
MET [23:09]: So, you know, I talk a lot about old speeches and theorists and philosophers because I intellectualize. But, as I’ve said before, the truth is my specialty is free speech and the law. I can talk about the First Amendment longer than any person should. I say this to make 1 final pass at this subject, and that is to posit that for me, 1 of the ways I am learning to appreciate the body is to understand the body as expression.
DDM [23:42]: Nice.
MET [23:43]: I’m really interested in speech and identity, and that’s actually how I got interested in the law. There’s this theory that the law is 1 of the ways in which we write our national identity into being. And I’ve been thinking about the body recently in regard to this. I could give you a bunch of theoretical or philosophical foundations for all this, but what it comes down to is I have come to understand the body as a kind of speech. Our bodies say who we are out into the public. We say something about how we relate to the world and how we want people to understand us by how we comport ourselves physically.
MET [24:26]: Our bodies or our physical presences speak our identities out into the world, right? Like my person, the way I am physically, here I am, says something about who I am. That actually really helps me think of a body as something more than just like meat or a walking carcass and as a statement. It is constitutive, it is expression, it is speech. And we know from earlier episodes how much I value that.
DDM [24:54]: The word became flesh. I love this, Elizabeth. I love it. Right.
MET [24:58]: A body is 1 way in which we establish our personas. And if we think of the body as speech, then many of the laws out there that are trying to restrict bodies, like anti-trans laws, for example, or anti-drag laws, aren’t just disciplining the body, they’re infringements on speech.
DDM [25:15]: Right.
MET [25:16]: Now, I am a person who values free speech to a fault, probably. But for me, then these laws that aim to discipline bodies are immoral in ways of magnitude because they are infringing on people in a variety of ways. There is the most basic, right? These are people. Their lives matter. They deserve to be able to live their lives unmolested and unfettered as much as anyone else, right? That’s just the basic. But there is also the expression part of it. People should be allowed to speak and express themselves and the body expresses identity. When bodies are disciplined, that ability to express yourself is denied.
MET [25:57]: And I think that is 1 of the most basic and fundamental speech rights. I’m actually writing a book chapter on this right now in fact.
DDM [26:03]: in fact.
MET [26:04]: The body speaks ourselves into the world, so laws that discipline the body are censorial. So, you know, if you want to email me, I can just go off on it for however long you want me to. This issue cannot be understood outside the current political climate either. There are 2 things you have to bring to bear on this conversation, the Dobbs decision, which is the decision that overturned Roe and the fact that 1 of the campaigns was pretty much fueled by anti-trans and anti-immigrant sentiment. The Dobbs decision is fundamental to understanding the place of bodies in the public eye right now.
MET [26:46]: And just in case you think I’m exaggerating or making connections where there are none, within 24 hours of the election you could buy sweatshirts online that said, your body, my choice.
DDM [27:00]: You know, I heard about that, That was frightening.
MET [27:03]: Yes, the election was and still is about control of bodies. There was a concerted effort in this campaign to control bodies, specifically women’s bodies, queer bodies, and immigrant bodies. People want to control health, sex, gender, space, and access. And all of these things are about freedom. The people who are affected by these efforts to control bodies are already marginalized. These are the people who chafe under both policy and hegemony to begin with. These are bodies that are already disciplined in some way. But politics as it is, is literally premised on the notions that some bodies absolutely must be locked down tight and not allow the freedom of motion or expression that other bodies are privileged to have.
DDM [27:53]: You
MET [27:53]: You know, if control over your body means freedom, then there’s a big portion of the country that wants to make sure a large swath of the population is not free.
DDM [28:02]: And it
MET [28:02]: And it would be really easy to point to 1 campaign or 1 person and say, yeah, that’s bad, don’t be like them. But the problem is much more widespread than that.
DDM [28:10]: Absolutely, far deeper.
MET [28:11]: Yeah, people on all sides of the aisle have devalued Palestinian bodies, for example. And in that same vein, there is an ever-growing strain of virulent anti-Semitism that wants to curtail the physical lives of Jewish people. We’ve discussed before about segregation, But newsflash, that’s not history. We still live in a segregated society. Redlining worked. White flight absolutely realigned social stratums. Private schools and homeowners associations 100% created whites-only spaces. To the point that in many places in America, we are more segregated now than we were in the 1970s. And if you don’t believe me, shoot me an email and I will respond with the stats and references.
DDM [29:02]: Elizabeth, what you’re saying is resonating because I remember when I first came from South Africa, having lived and grown through apartheid, and I came here to the USA, and I was like, this is more segregated than we were under apartheid. It stunned me when I first came to this country, just how segregated it is. It is. Unbelievable.
MET [29:24]: Yeah, I think people live under this notion that that’s a time past, but we are still 100% a segregated country. The disciplining of bodies keeps people oppressed, and we are really concerned with people’s bodies. If you doubt me, listen to the LGBTQIA episode we put out. I lay out the legal history of how we have restricted bodies in the most literal sense. And the church has played a big part in this. I spent years of my life believing God wanted me to drive every natural instinct out of my body and clamp it down so I never sinned, strayed, or tempted anyone to do the same.
MET [30:08]: Because the Church has, for hundreds of years, been teaching us that the body is corrupt and it is our job to control it, and that 100% shows up in our public discourse.
DDM [30:19]: It’s frightening, but you’re 100% right. And for me, the real sin is not seeing our bodies and the uniqueness and the senses that God created us with as being pathways for that fullness of life that Jesus came to remind us of. You know, because this is our birthright. It’s everybody’s birthright. And so much damage has been done, as you say, by clamping down the body and our bodily instincts, because we literally then are shutting down pathways to sacredness. I mean the senses, if you think about it, have always been used to connect us with the divine.
DDM [30:58]: Music, dance, sex, touch, taste, I mean these are pathways for the spirit to experience unity, ecstasy, sacredness and in all of this, God. And so to wrap up this episode today, where has this episode touched something in you? Where are you in your relationship with your own body? How are you relating to bodies that you have been taught are worth less than yours? How could you explore your body as an amazing gift and blessing, not just to you, but also to this world.
MET [31:40]: Thank you for listening to The Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast at priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at priestandprof.org slash donate. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [32:15]: Music by Audionautix.com.
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