The call to service and sacrifice can be difficult enough without bringing our bodies into it. And yet, there it is in Scripture, an invitation to “to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” (Rom. 12:1, ESV). Paul describes physical sacrifice as our “spiritual act of worship.” He unifies our spiritual with our physical selves, grounding the spirit in real life and making sacred the body.
Many of us have an ambivalent relationship with our physical forms. Glamour mags infamously deepen the wedge between beauty and beholder. The post-fall body itself betrays us with aches, scars, sicknesses, and disease. I think of my sweet friend, whose womb denies her the children she longs for, and of my ever-strong grandfather’s astonishment when his legs at last refused to bear him.
It’s easier for us to push our bodies to the wayside. It’s easier to capitulate to the lingering Gnosticism that divides what God has joined—the spiritual from the physical—and falsely elevates the former. The Age of the Enlightenment is centuries behind us, but our worship of reason continues; I know of no seminary courses covering the theology of bunions and orgasm.
Yet our bodies, no less than our minds and spirits, are the instruments God uses to bring life to the world. Last month, I knelt on the cold tile of a bathroom floor, lowing and rocking, my cervix burning fiercely as I worked to deliver the tiny stranger who turned out to be my son. My whole mental, emotional, and particularly physical self labored to give life to another.
I believe every man and woman of us is called to a similar labor. While childbirth provides a visceral image of the demands of giving life, partnering with God to nurture others extends beyond biological parenting. If mothering means bringing life to others through acts of love that involve our whole person, then God charges each believer with mothering. It is our honor and our responsibility to love, as mothers do, with all we have: minds, hearts, and bodies.
“Being a body is intimately bound up with being a follower of God,” Lauren Winner says in Mudhouse Sabbath. “The New Testament makes clear that God cares about bodies very much.” Our bodies are as crucial to God’s plan as Mary’s was. Like Mary, whether single, married, parents, or otherwise, we are called to bear Christ’s life into the world.
Christ himself is the ultimate example of a whole self sacrificed for the lives of others. As Winner points out, Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection set the pattern for our own embodied loving. In bearing life we emulate the Author of our faith. Jesus gave life with his body, with his obedience to God, with his suffering. He gave life when he fed, healed, encouraged people, and told them the truth. If we would be like him, we will nurture as he did on earth.
Anglican bishop Stewart Ruch defines true motherhood as “saying yes to life.” A person dedicated to saying yes to life fights for the vulnerable. She exhorts, naming and developing her hearer’s best self. She models a Creator-honoring delight in her body. She leads in ways that protect the good and fortify the faltering.
Nurturing is not a task only for women, nor a woman’s only task. But we are gifted with feminine ways of going about it, from wombs and breasts to a leg up on language proficiency and brains hard-wired for relationship. And we are gifted with distinctly personal ways of nurturing. Each person’s yes will look different. It may or may not involve childrearing, but it will certainly involve the relationships with which we are entrusted.
We cry the yes in shared, angry tears with the neighbor whose boyfriend just left her. We vacuum up the yes of a million crushed Cheerios after babysitting for a couple desperate for a date night. We breathe yes in our silent intersession for the marriages, lay-offs, and chemo rounds of the people God has put in our path.
Mother’s Day traditionally honors moms, stepmoms, mothers-in-law, grandmothers, and other women who raise children. As believers, we celebrate with a view to God’s broader invitation to serve, sacrifice, and bring life to the dying world. On Mother’s Day, we glory in the varied and beautiful ways Jesus’ followers die to self and bear life as he does.
So I sing of Amelia’s generous baking, whose salted caramel cheesecake is grace, the un-earnable joy, in its edible form. I bless the Lord for Anna, whose marriage has granted her two little children she could not have conceived, whom she mothers tenderly and faithfully. I marvel at Laura’s unwavering testimony to God’s goodness as she struggles to regain mobility, memory, and speech in the wake of her near-fatal accident. I stand amazed at women like Reggie and Prune, who fight fiercely and creatively to save girls’ lives around the world. And I thank God for the pelvic bones that mercifully expanded when my son exploded into the world, and for the ache in my arms as they learn his heft.
This motley mélange of mood, synapse, muscle, and soul is all I have to offer. How astonishing that God uses it to bring life to the world.
Jeannie Whitlock writes about travel, parenting, and poetry from the San Francisco Bay area. In the rare quiet spaces between raising two littles, she has written for Roads & Kingdoms, Backpacker Magazine, and occasionally over at her own blog, PoetJeans.
