Episode 7: Body
As a note, today’s podcast will include brief mention of rape and sexual assault towards the end. If this is something that is too much for you to handle, please know that You are more important to me, and you mean more to me than a potential listener in my statistics. I encourage you, if you are listening, to sip warm tea, to find a journal, to call a friend, to do whatever you do to nourish and sustain yourself. While I have tried my hardest to attend to this particular passage with care, I also recognize that this can be difficult. If it is helpful for you, you can browse the transcript so that you can see where I end up going. Sometimes it’s nice to have a sense of where the conversation is headed.
The Chopping Board
My body gives me information.
My body is real and has needs.
I am worthy of good resources and tools to help me process my body’s needs.
I am more than a brain on a stick. I am more than a worker. I am more than other people’s expectations. I am more than the stuff of someone else’s dream. I get to have my own dreams, too.
God meets me here in my flesh. And it is good as it is.
Fish Sandwich
Luke 1:46-55 NRSV
1:46b "My soul magnifies the Lord,
1:47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
1:48 for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
1:49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.
1:50 His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.
1:51 He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
1:52 He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;
1:53 he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.
1:54 He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy,
1:55 according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever."
Body
Some time ago, I was in the middle of ranting to a friend. He stopped me in the middle of my rant and said, “did you have a nap today?” And I said, “No.” To which he said, “Okay you probably need a nap.”
It was not a time out or punishment. It was a simple offering; “beloved, you’re mad, maybe you need a nap.”
And when I woke, I felt so rested. He was right. I needed a nap.
My body was trying to tell me something.
I am more than just a brain wrapped in skin. I am a human. I am a heart, lungs, booty, skin, ears, fingers. I am dreams, wonders, curiosities, fears, anxieties. I am my mother’s nose and my father’s smile.I am fries AND a shake. I am a mocktail of hopefulness and existential dread.
What else does the body teach us?
My body notices things. It notices chill and warmth. It notices bad energy, although not consistently. But consistently enough for me to listen to my gut. After all, this is Capricorn flesh, so I am never wrong.
It notices pleasure. It responds well to warm insomnia cookies and deep hugs. It likes to dance and flirt underneath a canopy of hookah and other kinds of smoke at Black queer day parties as I exchange instagrams with honeys I’ll never see again.
MY BODY needs that. My spirit needs that.
Bodies tell us things, and sadly, the world teaches us to be skeptical of our bodies.
“He didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” “You don’t need a skirt like that with all that thigh meat showing.” “Oh my friend had that same diagnosis, you just need to do keto.”
Bodies respond. Not everybody reacts the same way.
It could be argued that Mary is the perfect person to teach us about learning from our bodies. Because her Body is the source of thousands of years of theological debate. And sometimes I wonder what Mary would say, as mostly cishet men debate who and what she was.
Now, in a bit, we’ll discuss the limits of her consent, the trauma she likely endured meeting an angel in real life, the weight of a crown given when she became a mother to a godly human.
Her body knows something. It knows, among many things, that her redeemer lives.Mary’s Magnificat, the passage we read today, is as much of a lullaby as it is a protest song as it is a hymn.
So too are Octavia Butler’s verses in Parable of the Sower. In this chilling text, Butler tells the story of a near-future where environmental and economic chaos opens up a socio-political unsettling. There is no new normal, and there’s no going back to the way things were. In fact, this book recently just made it to the best sellers list. It don’t take all day to recognize sunshine, but damn! WHY IT TOOK SO LONG, YALL?
And in this world, she draws up a character named Lauren Olamina,a Black teenage girl who designs a faith practice she calls EarthSeed. Her Earthseed verses are examples of lullabies that feel like protest songs that feel like hymns, just like Mary’s Magnificat.
Here’s one:
“Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Change— Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolving— forever Changing. The universe is God’s self-portrait.”
Her verses are so powerful because they get you right in your gut. They’re not cerebral, they’re not just clever turns of phrase, they’re not intended to just be tweetable. Lauren can speak right to the heart of the matter because she has a condition called “hyperempathy.” It’s a condition that allows (or perhaps even curses) her to feel what others feel. She can physically feel when other people are being hurt.
She said this about her condition:
“I’ve never thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but the way things are, I think it would help. I wish I could give it to people. Failing that, I wish I could find other people who have it, and live among them. A biological conscience is better than no conscience at all.”
Do you sometimes wish that you could make other people feel what you feel?
The body tells us something that classes, conferences, and workshops cannot. Lauren knew, intimately, what it felt like to be connected to someone else’s condition. Whether through joy or pain, she could feel what others felt. Her feeling was a foundation.
Don’t ever be afraid to… feel. This, coming from me, who has a hard time telling people I’m crushing on what I ACTUALLY feel. Because I just feel like you should know what I think! WHY YOU DON’T KNOW I LOVE YOU! I TOLD YOU IN MY BLINKS! I sent you a meme at 1:43, that was code for I LOVE YOU, what’s not CLICKING!
Basically, an angel tells teenage Mary that she’s about to be pregnant. Then she goes to visit her kin Elizabeth, who is also pregnant. We don’t know what happened when they got together. There is not much dialogue between them. All we know is that when Elizabeth heard Mary’s voice, the child leaped in Elizabeth’s womb. And Mary responds with an Earthseed verse of her own called “The Magnificat.”
She speaks a future blessing over her not-yet here child. We do not get a Jesus who says the first shall be last, without a mother who first says, “he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
It’s a beautiful song. All mediated by the flesh. It’s a blessing that starts with the reminder that God dances within us. Of course, though, I’m not referring to the baby leaping within Mary or Elizabeth. I’m referring to the fleshly dance between two Black women gathering to talk about the ways of the world. But if these women are anything like the sisters I know, Mary showed up on Elizabeth’s doorstep like “girl.”
And Elizabeth probably said, “Girl I know, come in.”
And Mary probably dropped her bags off at the door, and left her shoes in the mudroom. And sat on the couch.
And like that scene in waiting to exhale, they just, the two of them, sat on the floor drinking tea and eating pizza.
I see them hugging. I see them grabbing each other’s knees. I see them braiding each other’s hair down. Maybe they played in wigs. I see Mary rummaging through Elizabeth’s closet for something fun. I see Elizabeth lighting scented candles. I see them praying together.
If there is anything that we can learn from Mary and Elizabeth, it is that God can give us a song of praise if we listen to our bodies and the bodies of others. Where would we be today in this pandemic if our government listened to the work of disability activists? Of Black birthing folk who sounded alarms about the healthcare system? The precariousness of the US Healthcare system did not JUST come in to being. People BEEN tryna say it’s an Anti-Black system.
But instead of listening, they went out of their way to legislate it on behalf of insurance companies and Big Pharma.
I think of women like 30 year old Brooklyn teacher Rana Zoe Mungin, who was turned away twice with COVID symptoms. She was even told that it was just a panic attack. Sadly, she passed due to complications of a racist system. She should have been met with compassion and trust. She Should still be here. And she is not, because this world has not taken the needs of her flesh seriously. Where would we be if someone had listened to her as she listened to her body?
It is not just the body of Christ we should be concerned about, dear peers. It is the bodies of Christ. Bus drivers, healthcare workers, sex workers, artists, teachers, uber drivers, chaplains, social workers, grocery workers, children, elders, aunties, uncles, cousins, neighbors.
God meets us right at the very point of our flesh. This is the place where the world forgets us.
I want Mary’s song to come true. “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.”
One of the reasons why I started this podcast was, I wanted to reclaim stories and ideas that had been absorbed by the colonizers. When we really learn what happened to some of these stories, we learn that some of these texts are actually quite useful in dismantling power and principalities.
So here are some fun facts.
This is the longest amount of time a woman speaks in the New Testament.
This passage was actually banned in India under British rule. Now, Currently there’s a massive strike happening in India.
I’m not going to go TOOO too much into it, because you know here at the Fish Sandwich Heaven Podcast, I always encourage you to do your own homework. So research the Strikes in India, happening as in, right now.
Because this is such a significant amount of text for a woman to say, It’s worth exploring.
I must admit, that I am, and have been, concerned about Mary’s journey into motherhood. My instinct is to ask her, “Sis, you wanna talk about it?” Because something about what she says sounds familiar. The silence between the “you will be with child” and her celebration at Elizabeth’s AirBnB says something to me.
I have heard people say, “Everything happens for a reason,” and, “I’ll be okay eventually.” and “This will be a testimony.” Because let’s really get into it.
The angel Gabriel comes to Mary’s house. Before even asking how her day was, he disrupts her afternoon with life-changing information. He says she’ll have a son who will be called the Son of the Most High and His Kingdom will never end. Perplexed, Mary’s first question is, “How? I’m a virgin.” Gabriel responds, “The Holy Spirit. The power of the Most High will overshadow you.” After this, Mary goes to visit her relative Elizabeth, who is also pregnant. Shortly thereafter, something prompts Mary to burst out in a song of praise. And that’s the hymn we’ve read today. Something happened at Elizabeth’s house to help Mary process what was going on with her.
If you have the capacity, I highly recommend Dr. Wil Gafney’s essay, on Mary and Me Too. Dr. Delores WIlliams also writes about this in “Sisters in the Wilderness.” And then of course, there’s Dr. Renita Weems and her “Just a Sister Away.”
However, I do know that it’s damn near impossible to consent to an angel in my living room.
A child cannot consent to an adult, an inebriated/drugged person cannot consent to a sober one, someone being arrested cannot consent to a Cop (and I’m thinking specifically of Officer Daniel Holzclaw) a student cannot consent to a teacher, and an intern cannot consent to the CEO who signs the checks. And so It matters that Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel, who happens to be the same angel that puts a silencing curse on Zechariah for months. He is a powerful being, far from our imagination of a Hallmark card angel with rosy cheeks and fluffy wings.
Can you imagine her telling Gabriel, “No thanks, but I heard my neighbor Denise was trying. Why don’t you go visit her?”
Now usually, when I ask this question about Mary and consent, people point me to the Magnificat. In nine verses, she exclaims that “generations will call me blessed” and her “soul magnifies the Lord.” She sounds happy. She sounds okay.
But this happens AFTER the fact. She needed some time to process this news. She is not immediately happy.
Mary was a young woman with relatively little power in a world that privileged the interests of the Empire. She might not be a Black U.S. American woman in 2020, but her story is familiar. Her story does resonate. In an essay published in the Black Feminist Anthology Words of Fire, Darlene Clark Hine writes:
“Because of the interplay of racial animosity, class tensions, gender role differentiation, and regional economic variations, black women, as a rule, developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.”
What is Mary doing in this hymn? Who is she convincing, and of what? Who is she speaking to?
I have those same questions of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.”
“Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.”
Mother Angelou, too, lived a very difficult life. One that she came to understand through her writing, through her poetry. She learned to use writing to protect the sanctity of her inner life. When I read the Magnificat, I hear the same instinct that drives “Still I Rise.”
What I hear in these words is the sense that, it’s really messed up that we’re here, but since we’re here, we might as well turn up. If I’m gon raise a Baby in this world, watch this baby see worlds i can’t even see for myself.
It makes me think of the lullaby protest song that Assata Shakur wrote for her daughter. It’s called “For my daughter Kakuya.”
i have shabby dreams for you
of some vague freedom
i have never known.
Baby,
i don’t want you hungry or thirsty
or out in the cold.
and i don’t want the frost
to kill your fruit
before it ripens.
i can see a sunny place-
Life exploding green.
i can see your bright, bronze skin at ease with all the flowers
and the centipedes.
i can hear laughter,
not grown from ridicule
And words not prompted
by ego or greed or jealousy.
i see a world where hatred
has been replaced by love.
and ME replaced by WE.
And I can see a world replaced
where you,
building and exploring,
strong and fulfilled,
will understand.
And go beyond
my little shabby dreams..
Here is a woman who was forced to make meaning out of a series of events that didn’t make any good godly sense. Hines’ work on the “culture of dissemblance” compels me to believe that Mother Mary, Mother Assata and Mother Maya were busy creating “positive alternative images of their sexual selves” as a way of facilitating “mental and physical survival in a hostile world.” Yes, people of marginalized genders are often forced to make sense of nonsense. That doesn’t mean they’re alright. This process of reorienting the world is a survival strategy. What else can you do when you’re dealt an unexpected hand? You play it.
Why not use the tale of Mary to re-imagine reproductive justice? Is this the story we are owed, or can we want more? Can we get something else?
What would the story have sounded like if Mary was in a position to truly consent with an enthusiastic “YES!”
Why is it, that every year, mostly cisgender men who are preachers take the opportunity to talk about Mary as a disembodied vessel? Why can’t we, and why won’t we, sit with the dreams of this mother? The mother who preached at her own baby dedication. The mother who saw things she imagined. This mother knew that this baby was gon be doing something magnificent. She knew he’d be smashing power. That he’d be humbling the proud and elevating the downtrodden. That he’d take what was and change it into what ought be. That he and his ministry would necessitate a year of jubilee, one in which the rich would be taxed to the point of losing their identity as The rich. Ya know, I don’t know how you read this passage and STILL think billionaires fit into an ethical model of the world. This mother, in her lullaby, saw a future where the rich were sent away. Can you really be surprised that Jesus believed that it’d be easier to get a camel through a needle than to be a rich man entering heaven? I mean, this is the material. Look at his mama. His abolitionist, communist mama, who had a lullaby for him and for us.
That’s the kind of world I want to live in.
To Go Bag:
Go and listen to Mary’s Canticle, by Leon C. Roberts. What mood feels most prevalent for you? Where do you see people like Mary in your everyday life? What powers need to be brought down? Who needs to be lifted up? What good things should the hungry be filled with? What do you envision when you hear, “sent the rich away empty?”
Alright friends, I love you much. Again, thanks for trusting me to walk with you in this.
I will make sure to add some resources in the transcript so you can get what you need. You matter to me, deeply.
Be well, my loves.
Black Mommas Doing Mary Proud
Alisha Gordon’s “The Current Project.”
Lady Tournament’s Mutual Aid Fundraiser
Catherine Francis’ Housing Fundraiser
Erica Caines’ Liberation Through Reading
Resources for Healing and Support
Embodied Sensual Rituals, from the heart of Jade T. Perry
Sanctuary of the Seeking, a religious trauma support resource from Indhira Udofia
FreeXone4Us, a QTPOC collective for spiritual care and peer support from Chaplain Q Hailey
(Listen to Indhira and Q on the Sacred Spot Podcast
A Note: The Featured image is of Assata Shakur. She gave birth to her daughter Kakuya while in prison. Read more of her story in her autobiography, Assata.