Greetings, beloveds. It’s been a while since I’ve been able to see many of you, and since I’ve been in our First Unitarian pulpit (virtually or otherwise!). Yet, when I was invited to write a piece about Body Liberation for our Staying Connected reflections, I welcomed it, because it is something that deeply grounds my own ministry–and, I believe, is an integral part of our communal work for collective liberation, inherently connected to work for anti-racism, disability justice, and ending so many other forms of oppressions.
My particular ministry context is one deeply related to the reality of our bodies, particularly during this time of pandemic. As some of you may know, as an Affiliated Community Minister, my work takes place outside the walls of the congregation–namely, in the healthcare field, where I work as a Palliative Care Chaplain. In this work, accompanying patients and their loved ones through serious illness and to the end of life, I find myself aware daily of the truth that we are embodied beings–that our human experience occurs in and through these bodies and bones and beating hearts.
Particularly in the pandemic, I think we have all been reminded of the importance of our bodies and how much we depend upon them–how vulnerable they can be (as we have had to calculate risks and think about droplets and antibodies) and also how miraculous (the lungs that keep us breathing, the immune systems that can learn from a vaccine how to fight a deadly virus).
At the same time, this pandemic has revealed even more starkly the way some bodies are valued more than others in our society. Working in healthcare, I’ve seen it firsthand—from the health disparities that disproportionately impact marginalized communities, particularly communities of color, to the plans healthcare systems had to draw up last year, before the vaccine, on how they would ration care (which brought forth myriad concerns about ableism, ageism, and more; just here in Oregon, there were multiple unjust cases of rationing COVID-19 medical care to people with disabilities.
And then, yes, there is the way that sizeism shows up over and over again in healthcare, where people living in fat (using “fat” as a term reclaimed by the Body Liberation movement, over the pathologizing term “obese”) bodies are subject to biased medical treatment from healthcare providers. There are many statistics and studies on this (such as those explored in this article). And then there are the stories: the horrific and heart-rending experiences of weight bias I’ve witnessed, the heartache and injustices I cannot tell here in honor both of HIPAA and sacred confidentiality.
And, sadly, this valuing of certain bodies over others is not just something that happens in healthcare. It happens in our broader society–and it happens in our very own Unitarian Universalist congregations. Yes, even in Unitarian Universalism, where we strive to embrace the radical promise of honoring the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” named in the First Principle, prejudice against fat bodies–tangled as it is with so many other forms of oppression–shows up.
Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us. After all, this judgement of bodies, of flesh, has deep theological roots. The Ancient Greek philosophy of mind-body dualism (drawing a division between the supposedly superior “rational” mind and the inferior, sinful, animalistic body) heavily influenced Christianity and dominant Western culture, the same thread of supremacist thinking that would position whiteness as superior and BIPOC bodies as less-than-human, and “rational” men as somehow above women, debased by their connection to the fleshly realities of things like childbirth, and other gender identities. Unitarian Universalism’s own Puritan and Congregationalist ancestors heavily leaned on this dualism, understanding bodies as a source of shame, and fatness itself as a manifestation of laziness; even later Unitarian theologies drove people to constantly try molding and shaping themselves into sinless paragons of “perfection.”
Perhaps this is sounding familiar to you from all the work our congregation has been doing around adopting the 8th Principle and covenenating “to affirm and promote: journeying toward spiritual wholeness by working to build a diverse multicultural Beloved Community by our actions that accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.” That is no accident–the dominant culture of white supremacy is the same one that shames bodies. In fact, a whole book has been written on this: in Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, sociologist Dr. Sabrina Strings explains how white supremacy linked fatness to “savagery” and the believed racial inferiority of Black bodies, cultivating a racist ideal of a thin white body as superior.
The good news is that there is important work being done on this issue in our Unitarian Universalist communities. In 2020, the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association formed the Fat UU Clergy Against Sizeism Caucus; members of that caucus led a powerful workshop at General Assembly this year, entitled “Taking Up Space: Fat Liberation and UU” (which you can watch here), where they talked about creating a fat liberationist congregation and where my colleague Rev. Molly Brewer reminded us: “Fat bodies are not a problem to be solved. The hatred and demonization of fatness is connected to many, many other insidious prejudices that hinder the full expression of justice” (you can read more of the workshop’s main points here).
Meanwhile, our own Unitarian Universalist Association’s publishing house, Beacon Press, recently published What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, a book by Portland-based activist Aubrey Gordon which gives an in-depth understanding of the discrimination fat people experience and calls for understanding fat activism as part of a holistic approach to social justice work. And, right here at First Unitarian Portland, our own community member Debbie Kaufman is leading a “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” discussion group, starting on Thursday, October 14th, which will read Gordon’s book and further explore the harm that body discrimination does to all, as well as ways to engage in activism around this issue (you can find out more and register here).
And I’m so glad that this work is happening within Unitarian Universalism, and within our communities. For it is important, as we examine ourselves and our hopes for the future of this community, as part of the process of searching for a new minister–and as we ready ourselves for the possibility of coming together again in person after so long apart, in a time where our bodies may have changed since we last saw each other.
It is important, in order to truly love each other well and honor that call of the First Principle to honor the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” as well as that of the Eighth Principle to “accountably dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”
And friends, there is so much more that could be said on this topic–I do encourage you to explore it more through the resources linked here–but for now, I want to leave you with this quote, from my friend and fellow ministerial colleague, Rev. KC Slack (one of the members the aforementioned Fat UU Clergy Against Sizeism Caucus), who says:
Here’s the summary of my big dream for our collective future:
What if we all had a nice time.
What if we were concerned with not making life harder
than the ordinary chaos of the universe makes it?
What if it mattered to us
that folks got to enjoy being alive?
What if those words were a guiding invitation for us all–for our journeys of internal growth, for our work of community and justice? What if we knew each of our bodies as good, and saw each other’s bodies as good, and transformed systems to make a world where instead of making each other’s lives harder, we all just…had a nice time? That’s certainly the dream I hold to–one of a thriving Beloved Community, where each of us is able to fully participate in the joy and fullness of life. May it be so. And may you love your own good body today