I was in a training last week with a bunch of (other?) ministers. One of them recounted a story that rocked be back on my heels and tuned me into an important anxiety I’m carrying. In pursuit of taking the lesson but leaving the story, I won’t recount it here, but the lesson I take is this: the church is always watching, and the church polices bodies. Even in our time, of pushing boundaries of gender, of pursuing and rejoicing in diversity of being and expression, the church is bound by a painfully narrow scope of what is and is not appropriate ways for its people to live in their bodies.
The church is not free.
I realize this is what scares me about parish ministry. I am nervous, I am downright frightened, of doing my best to live a free, spirit-filled life in pursuit of our collective liberation, and being told by the community I serve that I am simply too much—too big, too loud, too free—to be effectively used by God for good, at least as far as they are concerned. This is not a new phenomenon in my experience of Christianity: I was taught to dress and appear a particular way so I would not cause my brother to stumble. (I was not taught that an idea or approach like this renders me an object without consent or action in another human being’s actions, that these actions without my consent were felonious and with my consent were delicious if complicated, and that my brother should be responsible for his one behavior, and that he should seek my consent before he “stumbles.” None of that makes the lesson on purity training for young Christian women. It is a particularly insidious and harmful way of teaching young women to dissociate from themselves, to be afraid of their own bodies and their own sexuality, and it turns on blame, shame, and a pathological inability for the church to reckon with embodiment and sexuality. We can do better.) I learned to cross my legs at the ankles if i was wearing a skirt, and not at the knee, because at the knee someone might see too much of my leg and have unclean thoughts. I was taught to think of my body as a weapon, a tool of communication with others that I was always having to rein in, to holster and minimize. What do i gain from this? I guess that others can look at me and say they see God on my or in me or through me. Disappointing that they are unable to see this just by looking in my eyes, but that I have to tick boxes of an inventory—How Pure Are You?
I don’t encounter this purity policing in my yoga communities. No one has ever told me that my practicing In that tank top compromises their balance or focus, or their capacity to still their mind in seated subtle practice. No one has ever stepped to me and said that God laid a word on their heart that when I wear short shorts to class I distract the teacher and compromise his ability to deliver the Word, so I should change my wardrobe. No one has ever told me I was chanting the name of God too loudly. I’ve discovered a lot of freedom in this tradition, freedom to experience my body in its fullness, and to hold that fullness as a gift of God, as an expression of God: God is not small, Jess, why should you be small?
Don’t get it twisted: there is plenty of body policing in yoga. The ongoing question of whether one can practice ahimsa and also eat animals… which bodies are yoga bodies… what your modifications say about your practice… the purpose of brahmacarya as truly sexual control or abstinence versus moderation… is transformation possible… props: to use or not to use. (Eye roll.) This is to say nothing of teachers who are preying on seekers and who use their students and students’ bodies to meet their own needs and insecurities. There is also the capitalist phenomenon of how to dress for yoga that functions as a gatekeeper in some spaces. Yoga purity policing exists and it has its own inventory.
This body policing scares me about ministry. I have been in congregations that were restricted by rules of behavior: about dress and diet and appearance, arguing that “the world” should look at us and see us as followers of Christ. (Sad that the world would see that not based on the kindness and generosity, the forgiveness, the growth, with which we treat one another, but instead on our conservative values regarding hemlines and alcohol intake. ) I have a large personality. I no longer try to mitigate it. For folks who don’t know me—and for some who do—it has been a lot to process. I am my mother’s daughter: I know how to be politic and polite and appropriate, and often I find behaving that way means watering down the truth. I tattooed ahimsa (nonviolence) and sayta (truthfulness) to the insides of my arms so I would remember that each without the other is ineffective, though I often have trouble using them both in equal measure. But one thing I can’t control is how other people perceive me. Because I can’t control it, I often try to ignore it.
But the congregation is always watching. I remember, when Barak Obama was elected, I held my breath for years, waiting for some scandal to come out of the woodwork and destroy him and his family, and the pride and joy of black folks who’d elected him along with it. I remember thinking, this man has always, always got to be above reproach. These white folks will take any tiny, stupid little thing they can and use it to torpedo him. He cannot do anything wrong. I feel a similar sense of dread when I consider what it means to serve as a pastor in a church. Not that I can’t do anything wrong; I do a lot wrong. But instead, that folks might often perceive me as doing wrong even if I’m not, and my credibility will be completely compromised. My smile will be too full, my walk will be too provocative, my passion will be misread as rage, my ambition as aggression, and that will be the end of me. I cannot put a foot wrong.
Skating on thin ice.
One thought I’ve often had is how important racial reconciliation is in my own work. I think and talk about white supremacy and patriarchy in yoga spaces, and I talk about it in the church too. Often, it’s just conversations that I’m having in my head, at least right now, and occasionally in this space. But what I’m trying to say is years ago, when I had a come-to-Jesus moment sitting on a twin bed in an ashram in India, I asked God if helping white folks to reckon with their own whiteness was really, really the work I was meant to do. And she said yes. In fact she said, yes, girl, I already answered this question, you know what your work is. And now I find myself afraid to do it: afraid to step into a denomination that is largely white. I want to step into it because I appreciate its flat, democratic nature, although I dislike that that same nature can foster conservative, exclusionary values that center racism, control, and oppression over love and abundance. Point is, I’m choosing to try and practice life in ways that highlights the divisive, oppressive forces we operate in, so that we can tear them apart. This is difficult work. It feels particularly difficult for people of color, because we wind up dealing with emotional labor that isn’t ours. It’s a special kind of teacher we’re consenting to be. I don’t know if I want to do it. But I think it’s my work to do.
If the parish is always watching, if as a pastor I am always under the gaze of the community I’ve been entrusted with serving, what they think of me intersects directly with my ability to do my job, not just to draw my paycheck, but to execute my vocation as a servant-leader within the community. Suddenly, my black body isn’t as neutral as the other white bodies in the pews, and not just because my hair is different or because I don’t look like the people around me. Behind the wheel of her own car, at the truck stop or gas station, in the classroom, in the pulpit, in the studio, or in line behind you, White Reader, the black woman’s body has some kind of meaning. You don’t read her as neutral, even if you think you do. Nothing she does changes how you read her. No amount of education or manner or purity or propriety will save her from the judgment, or indeed, the retribution, in your gaze.
If the congregation is always watching, are we watching when Jesus is crucified? Are we going to police Jesus’ body? (Perhaps this is why in protestant churches there is no bleeding, six-pack, scantilly-clad Jesus, there is only the torture device on which he was killed. His body is simply too much for us to take in, and if a replica of it were present, we wouldn’t hear announcements about the church picnic or the elders’ meeting, we’d be too distracted and given to “stumble.”) Do I really thinking Jesus cared at all about anyone trying to shame him for his nakedness while he was dying? Because let’s be real, that loincloth we all see, we put that there. Like all of us, Jesus died as naked as the day he was born, and if we can’t hold the reality of that, we really do need to do some reckoning about what it is to be in a body. First Corinthians says that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. If we are policing bodies for purity or modesty, and ignoring their practice of connection, compassion, and of sacrifice, I think we’re missing the message.
So what do I do? What does it mean to teach, to serve, to abide and to listen, if I am trying to do so as a servant leader of God if on top of the complexity of that work, I have to navigate our racial (etc) identities and compensate for whatever one of us is projecting onto the other additionally? How do I make you less afraid of me, white stranger? How do I get you to hear me, fellow white parishioner? How do I hold space for you without abandoning myself, white teacher? And am I the one who’s doing all the work here?
This is a real fear. I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t think it’s as simple as cherry-picking a different denomination. Body policing goes on in black churches and denominations, too, and to paraphrase Tolstoy, each conservative black congregation is conservative in its own way. I’ll acknowledge my vantage point about this is narrow, and maybe there’s something to learn or see about this that will broaden my horizons, and if it doesn’t remove my fear, at least it will teach me to walk with it. I have my eyes open. I’m not looking away.
Let’s see.