Readings:

Call to Worship — “For Sweet Honey in the Rock” by Sonia Sanchez

Responsive Reading — “Children of the Age” by Wislawa Szymborska

Reading — “I Had a Bad Dream” by Ibrahim Farajaje

“The Body Political”

“I had a bad dream that lasted too long, that started some weeks, some months, some years, some centuries ago, telling me that my body had no value.”

How many of us have had this bad dream? How many of us are living in that bad dream right now?  

This bad dream, the poem we just heard by Pir Ibrahim Farajaje, is a call to inhabit the bodies we have, to join together and rise against those who tell us that certain bodies have more value and some less and some none. Ibrahim Baba, as we called him, was a Sufi sheikh, a black bisexual radically sex-positive “Scholartivist” who spoke about a dozen languages and was the provost of my seminary, Starr King School for the Ministry, until he died in 2016. 

In his words and his actions, he encouraged each of us to consider the intertwining of flesh and spirit, the interrelation of oppressions, the interconnection of all things, the beauty in multiplicity. And he called us into liberatory, not just liberal, practices in support of one another. 

In all aspects of life, but particularly embodiment, Baba called us to play in and delight in joyful variation among us, viewing it in terms of a kaleidoscope, rather than unseemly deviation from the idealized perfect norm. And of course, when we’re talking about bodies, the norm that we are usually compared to is a body that is is white, male, young, healthy, cisgender, thin, heterosexual, monogamous, athletic, and non-disabled. 

I believe we’re all aware that those of us who don’t fit any or all of these categories face increased oppression, stigma, and barriers. And over the past century, especially in liberal circles, we’ve made significant strides in accepting and celebrating a wide variety of people. It occured to me recently that one of the things that seems to help on that road to social acceptance is the idea that variation in humanity — in color, gender, sexuality, and more — is natural, people are born that way, and that therefore we ought to be accepting of that variation.

But this logic, offering acceptance only on the contingency of it being out of our control, contains a tinge of pity, a whisper of relutcant acknowledgement that after all, not everyone can be that perfect normal ideal of white, straight, cisgender and all the rest. It’s as if there is an undercurrent of the acceptance that says “we’ll forgive you for not living up to the perfect ideal, because it’s not your fault that you’re a woman, or black, or trans, or gay. You can’t help it so we can find grace and charity in our hearts to accept you.” And underlying that assumption is that if there were a choice, nobody should or would choose it. 

But I wonder — what if whether someone chose it or not was irrelevant? And what if it was irrelevant because the goal was not perfection or conformity, but expression, acceptance and love? Progressives have long been striving for improvement and perfection, but this endeavor often comes dangerously close to requiring everyone to work toward just one way of being, rather than relishing in the ways that we exist in our wholeness right now. This is what I believe my mentors mean when they speak of shifting our stance from liberal to liberation. 

I think it is this underlying assumption that we ought to always be aiming for “perfection” that drives and explains the places where we liberals continue to enact scorn, loathing, pity, and open hostility to whole groups of people. 

One that comes to mind most clearly is fatness. The dominant narrative says that fatness is both undesirable and usually within a person’s control, and therefore not something that we can deem acceptable in society. There is mounting evidence that it is possible to be healthy at any body size, and that there is naturally incredible variation in the range of heights and widths and shapes that human bodies come in. 

(And I know this may be a challenging and surprising thing to hear since this message that “thin is best” is so pervasive. If so, I encourage you to check out the book and website that are both titled Health at Every Size for more information.) But despite this new body of research, and despite our professed acceptance of all people, fat people are one of the only remaining groups that in many circles it continues acceptable to deride, make fun of, villianize, and undermine. 

I have been surprised more than a few times to be in the company of otherwise generous, kind, and “woke” people, only to have someone scoff at a women who they say “should be wearing something more flattering,” or lament that they themself “need to lose ten pounds before they can go swimming”, or openly laugh at a fat character on screen who is depicted as ridiculous or unworthy of taking seriously merely because of their size.  

Most of us have been told since we were little that in order to belong, in order to be acceptable and loveable, our bodies had to look and work a certain way. And I ask, does this conformity align with the Universalist values we proclaim here? We believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and in the beauty in diversity in our communities. In what other realm do we, Unitarian Universalists, find it acceptable to be told that there is one perfect way to be and be beloved, and that we must conform to it? Why do so many of us accept this story when it is about body size and shape?

I remember being teased by slightly older boys when I was ten or eleven, who kept taunting me for being “FF.” I had no idea what that meant but could tell was a bad thing. Not long after, I learned that “FF” meant “fat and flat.” The slight presence of body fat on my belly, and the lack of it on my prepubescent chest were enough to make me a target of shame. 

After those taunts, and combined with all the messages I’d breathed in like air growing up, and like so many other adolescent girls, I started to dislike my body. I hadn’t thought about it much before that. It did what I wanted it to do — ran and climbed and sang and made art and swam in the river. But I worried, perhaps subconsciously, that my body was shameful, that it was distasteful to be around, that I would be unpopular, unloved, that I would not belong if my body wasn’t the right kind. I was told, subconsciously, that it was my duty to be thin and attractive, and that it was indeed under my control. 

I started a weight-watchers program and received plenty of affirmation, mostly from the adult women around me, as I removed pounds from my thirteen-year-old body. “Oh you look so cute!” “What have you been doing, you look great!” “I bet you’re getting lots of attention from the boys!” I became quite slim, but it didn’t actually make me any more popular or make me feel more loved. In fact, it made me feel so hollow to constantly wonder whether any positive attention I was getting was because of me or because of the “new and improved” way I looked.

I’m sure many of you of all genders have similar stories. That you were told, in the words of Ibrahim Baba, that we could not be “fat or too tall or too short or too skinny,” or I’d add, maybe you were told if you wanted to be loved and accepted, you couldn’t be too weak, too old, too young, too sexy, too plain, too pale, too dark, too loud, too quiet. That you couldn’t be outside of the range of whatever was considered “normal.” 

But I have to ask — what if your body was beautiful and whole and good enough as it is? Or more importantly, what if your body was not what made you loveable or not lovable? 

We were told that our bodies were supposed to be under our control and were what made us acceptable, lovable, and valuable in society, or not. That our productivity and attractiveness were the things that gave us power. 

Those of you who are elders have likely experienced the invisibilizing that happens in society when due to age, you are considered to no longer be “productive.” The same happens to fat people, to people with disabilities, to children, to anyone whose body does not match that “perfect, standardized normal” and is therefore not able to be capitalized on quite as efficiently. 

I’d like to push against these toxic messages today and say that our bodies hold power. Not just interpersonal power, but political power. Our bodies are so powerful that their mere presence is threatening to those who benefit from the status quo. Why do you think that many in our country are trying so hard to control women and our bodies, and all bodies that hold the capacity to nurture life? Because the patriarchy can’t stand competition for being in charge, and eliminating reproductive choice and saddling families, and particularly poor, brown women, with unplanned children, provides a barrier to exercising political power. 

Why are queer bodies so threatening to the status quo? Because we queers upset the economic power structure of the nuclear family, the productive unit of our modern capitalist society. Why are black and brown bodies controlled and brutalized? Because in the history of this country, the exploitation of oppressed bodies was and is the single most lucrative method of amassing capital. 

This week marks 400 years since the first African slaves were brought to Virginia. (And if you havent seen it yet, I highly recommend the recent New York Times project called 1619, cataloguing the practice and ramifications of slavery over the last 400 years on this land.) The exploitation of black people produced the wealth that grew this country, and the continued punishment and oppression of black people keeps them in a position to create power and profit for the ruling class. 

When people say “Make America Great Again”, the America they refer to is necessarily one only made prosperous by the brutal enslavement and exploitation of laboring bodies without fair compensation. So why are fat bodies so derided and feared? Because it is another way to divide us against one another, and to keep us preoccupied with fear and shame rather than revolution and radical self-love and community building. 

Our white-supremacist exploitative capitalist society requires that we co-enforce hierarchies of worth, logics of domination, against our fellow human beings, and body shaming has been handed out as a tool that we can effectively wield against one another. 

The demonization of fatness goes hand in hand with the multi-billion dollar industry of diet products, weight loss programs, surgery, and beauty products, which author Sonya Renee Taylor describes as the “Body Shame Profit Complex” in her excellent book The Body Is Not an Apology. 

In many circles, the word “dieting” has gone out of fashion, but has been replaced with phrases like “clean eating” and “healthy lifestyle”, and crash diets fashioned as “cleanses”, all of which are often, though not always, used as thin veneers for weight loss. The Body Shame Profit Complex is comprised both of the advertising and media outlets that sell us unrealistically standardized models for what our bodies should look like, and the corporations that profit off of our subsequent shame and insecurity. And not only does it produce profits, but the obsession with weight and self-loathing serve to distract us from other things that we might find joyful or worthwhile.

Now, I’m not saying that fitness is bad, or looking and feeling your best is not something worth investing your time and money into. Please don’t leave here thinking I am maligning taking care of yourself. I’m saying we need to question the implicit bias that we have against our own bodies, just like in this congregation we engage in exploring and questioning our implicit bias around gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and so many other identities. 

What I’m saying is that your body is beautiful and capable and powerful, just because it exists, and most of us, of all genders and backgrounds, have a lot of work to do before we can honestly see and believe that beauty in ourselves and others. It takes courage, deep courage, and love. I’m not all the way there yet. 

But I know for myself, it is like facing any other internalized oppression. Call one to mind right now — it could be size, or queerness, or femininity, or any number of other things. 

We were told that we could not be a certain way (whatever that way is you’re thinking of) and be accepted. So we punish and shut down that expression. Then, when we are faced with someone who is that way we learned we couldn’t be, who is existing in spite of it, and especially if they are thriving and happy, we are faced with cognitive dissonance and must make a choice.  We can either continue to believe our old story, and project it onto that other person — condemning, shaming, dismissing, and dehumanizing them — or we can accept that perhaps the story we have held to be true is, in fact, wrong. The latter choice requires us to face the grief at the self-censoring, self-abandonment, and self-deprivation that we’ve engaged in over the years. And sometimes that grief is just too much. We keep enacting that old story. 

This is where our faith comes in. We must cultivate deep love, fierce love, and incredible courage in order to face the grief caused by our inner critic, that part of us that has abandoned and ridiculed the other parts within. Whether it is about body size, or sexual orientation, or gender, or race, we each have work of internal repair to do in order to love ourselves the way we deserve, and the way that nobody else can do for us. 

And we also have to do the external work of embracing the power that our bodies hold and using it for change in the world. When we show up to build the communities we believe are possible, we are exercising that power. When we join together with others at church, in neighborhoods, in unions, at protests, we are exercising that power. When we show up in a multiplicity of ways to counter environmental destruction, terrorism, and white supremacy, we are using the power of our bodies, and simultaneously resisting the messages that would have us hate them. 

Last Saturday, I joined “The Spectacle”, the gathering of prayer, music, dance, and learning together at Waterfront Park as white supremacists held a gathering nearby. We who arrived costumed, singing, sharing, we who were adults, children, elders, deaf, disabled, polyamorous, fat, queer, straight, and eveything else so delightlfully Portland, we came together to attest to the indominable spirit of joy and collective agency in the face of hate. 

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go. What about their threats of violence? Wouldn’t it be better just to have nobody show up, take the wind out of their sails so that they would get bored and go home? But through conversations with friends and colleagues to whom I feel accountable I realized that the alt-right came looking for conflict and would not leave without it. And if nobody showed up to meet them and hold them in tension at the waterfront, they would go looking, as they have in this city in the recent past, for targets for their violence. 

And I, a young, white, able-bodied, feminine-presenting person, would not be the target of that violence. I came to understand that by showing up by choice, prepared with buddies and snacks and music and costumes, I was in a small way taking on my fair share of the risk rather than doing nothing and leaving that risk for black and trans and non-english speaking people around our city who were just trying to go about their days. 

I am so glad I showed up and I wish there had been even more people there. In this time of increasing attack on black and brown bodies, migrant bodies, women’s and trans bodies, disabled bodies and more, we must, whenever we can, in the diversity of ways that we can, use these bodies that we have as instruments of our own liberation. 

Learning to love our bodies, to silence that inner critic, is a liberatory act. Loving and celebrating other bodies is a liberatory act. Protesting the alt-right fasicist, white supremacist ideology is a liberatory act. Showing up, in these bodies, with all of their beautiful variation is a liberatory act, and an essential one if we are to build the beloved community we so often speak of. 

We must build with our hands, with our movements, with our love, a new way of being with ourselves and together, a way where we work together, not to aspire to the pinnacles of one standard perfection, but toward the shimmering multiplicity of freedom for all of all of us, for everybody and every body. 

May it be so, Amen.

Topics: Embodiment