We are rushing from church on a Sunday afternoon, in the rain, to find parking for the penultimate performance of the new pop-rock musical Mythic. Premiering in the US at the Cincinnati Playhouse, the Hamilton-styled show brings to life the Greek myth of Persephone, goddess of spring and the underworld.
Recast for the modern stage, the myth is a recognizable human story of parental love and adolescent self-will. Earth-loving Demeter, goddess of the harvest, forbids Persephone, her teenage daughter, from attending a very publicized party at the Acropolis. But Persephone, undeterred, wants her “own place in the Pantheon.” This craving for celebrity, attended by sexual desire, lures Persephone into Hades’s arms, and she is trapped in the underworld with no hope of escape.
There, Persephone sets out on an unexpected and highly implausible mission: She will improve hell’s landscape. “You’d be surprised,” she sings. “Some things grow even though skies are bleak.” There’s a palpable vibe shift with Persephone’s generative efforts. The gardener succeeds in growing beets. Charon, hell’s ferryman, begins giving lively tours to recently arrived guests. Persephone even invites Hades to consider the possibility of his own transformation, should he choose it.
At first, her optimism is rebuffed, taken for a cruel naiveté. “I’m a pest,” Hades sings, glittering in a sparkly black tracksuit and frowning behind a pair of dark shades. “A deadly, messed-up, cruel, unruly freak.” Hades wallows in the mire of his own depravity, seeing no chance in hell to redeem a doomed future, fixed in place because of a damaged past. “There ain’t a heart here. There’s a hole. I’m a deep, dark, damaged soul.” But gradually, hopefully, Hades begins to tussle with “rival desires” for a kind of moral rebirth.
“Is there a chance in hell?” the god of the dead sings.
On the one hand, Mythic traces the typical plot lines of familiar Disney movies. Destiny is a future seized and self-made. Yet on the other hand, wanting to make a bad life right, Hades entertains the hope of his own glory. In this way, perhaps unwittingly, Mythic invokes a Christian truth about the body—that though it is sown perishable, it might be raised imperishable (1 Cor. 15:42). Christian hope is always actionable: a thing with feet.
It makes me think of the first time I read On the Incarnation by fourth-century Christian theologian Athanasius of Alexandria. Athanasius can’t help but see a dilemma facing God in humanity’s rebellion. If God destroys the people he’s created, visiting upon them the just punishment for their transgression, he will subject his image bearers—and his image—to corruption. This would mean overseeing “the ruin of His own work.”
Yet if God stays his hand, he cannot be trusted as true. His mercy would make him a promise breaker. The incarnation of God, then, could be the only solution to the divine bind. Only by assuming our form could God die our death. And only by dying our death could God restore the grandeur meant to shine from the shook foil of human flesh. God would take on a body—because human bodies, in the grand scale of creation, mattered that much.
This, then, is always true: What we do and say with our bodies is a decidedly spiritual affair.
The body speaks its many “truths” in Jen Hatmaker’s recent memoir Awake.
Beginning with a section titled “The End,” Hatmaker, once a widely popular evangelical author and speaker, travels the back roads of her 2020 divorce. She attempts to make sense of the gradual-then-sudden end of her 26-year marriage, which leads to the spiritual “orphaning” from a movement (and Austin, Texas, church) she once led with her ex-husband. Follow me, the body calls to Hatmaker (and the reader) throughout the book, as if with divine authority.
When Hatmaker and her husband married, at 19 and 21, respectively, both understood the strict terms set by purity culture—that marriage must be swift lest sin be swifter and the budding rose of feminine virtue be prematurely plucked.
But after her divorce, biblical chastity as traditionally defined came to seem as ridiculous and arbitrary to Hatmaker as purity culture’s prudish definitions of female modesty. (Hatmaker tells the story of the time when she, as a youth leader, was turned away from a worship gathering at summer camp because of the length of her shorts.) Our bodies, says Hatmaker, are not a scandal; they speak our desires and deserve our rapt attention. She casts them as “the most trustworthy character in the play.”
Yet not all the bodies in this story deserve such unqualified trust. At 2:30 a.m. on July 11, 2020, Hatmaker woke up to the bombshell revelation of her husband’s infidelity. “I just can’t quit you,” he voice-texts his lover in the dark, five words that gut the house the Hatmakers have been building together for almost three decades.
The next hours are spent uncovering years of duplicity, and for the briefest of moments, Hatmaker remembers that the world isn’t yet shattered for her children, who are still sleeping. “They don’t know. I don’t want to know. I want to go upstairs with them and not know.” The world is cleaved into before and after, and soon enough, everyone is “flayed by betrayal.” One body, living its “truth,” has wreaked havoc on the body of his family—and grief, in all its tumbling disorientation, spills from these pages in the author’s sleepless panic, manic fixing, and worn-out despair.
As Hatmaker tells the story, a mercy was yet found on the other side of that middle-of-the-night revelation. The body’s pain is redeemed by the body’s self-love. The betrayal that broke her life wide open finally shattered religious commitments that she would no longer defend, especially a joyless Christianity.
Hatmaker ultimately rejects a theology that purportedly rejects the body, especially its premonitions and pleasures. She piles up biblical proof texts to claim how untenable—and dangerous—suspicion of the body proves to be: The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves. I no longer live. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
“What source of authority are we left with,” Hatmaker asks, examining Jeremiah 17:9, “when the enemy of goodness and truth beats inside our own chests? When we cannot trust our own instincts, whose do we trust instead?” To dispel with misgivings about the body is, of course, necessary for the “sexual renaissance” Hatmaker wants now to enjoy in midlife. And while it’s a move that permits, more importantly, it self-protects. Only self-belonging can, in her estimation, recover the security and safety Hatmaker tragically failed to find in her one-flesh marriage.
“I physically run my hands gently up and down my arms,” she says in the early days of grief. “I hold my face between my fingers. I wrap my arms around myself and say out loud: ‘I am my own best friend. I am safe with me. I am home.’ ” Only the body is a girl’s best friend.
Hatmaker is a gifted storyteller, and Awake surges with the electricity of her humor and intimate candor. As someone told Hatmaker in the earliest days of her burgeoning ministry, “I like you. You’re funny and smart. You have a power about you.” That person wasn’t wrong.
Hatmaker’s rise as a spiritual leader figures into a longer history detailed in Molly Worthen’s sweeping book Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump. Charisma, writes Worthen, represents the “contentious invitation to let some great and ungovernable power work through you.”
In ancient mythology, charisma illuminated the gifts of the gods: beauty, poetic skill, prowess on the battlefield. In the Christian Scriptures, Worthen writes, charisma indicates the filling of the Holy Spirit, “the sudden shower of grace . . . which [gives] ordinary Christians a role in God’s plan to restore the sinful world.”
Charisma, however, is not just a religious phenomenon. As Worthen details, it is a power mediated between any spellbinding leader and set of adoring fans, any riveting storyteller and dazzled crowd. In our digital age, charisma sells books and generates huge social media followings. Despite sometimes-obvious vice, it even wins elections. The difference, then, between divine gift and cheap counterfeit is as slight and slender as a knotted red tie.
According to Worthen, the history of charisma, in America, has led to certain telltale patterns: “the primacy of private experience over external evidence, concern for authenticity rather than moral character, skepticism of institutions, and the inclination to trust a story that ‘feels true’ instead of reasoned argument.”
In Hatmaker’s memoir, which sounds like an anthem to the sound judgment of the body, those patterns are unmistakable. But Hatmaker’s confusion is hardly uncommon among those who call themselves Christians. We all struggle to discern when the Spirit speaks through the body—and when the body speaks
for itself.
Worthen begins her engrossing history of charisma in the Puritan era, with the tragic story of Anne Hutchinson in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1630s. Hutchinson was a reputable midwife, and her experience in the birthing room with its many griefs, along with her facility in Scripture, gained her a reputation as a doctor of the soul.
Unfortunately for her, Hutchinson was also a woman gifted in courage and the plain-speaking “too-muchness” to which Hatmaker often alludes in her own story. “When [John Winthrop, the colony’s former governor,] called her ‘a woman of ready wit and bold spirit,’ ” writes Worthen, “he did not say it in admiration.”
The trouble began for Hutchinson when the meetings she hosted in her home to discuss the Sunday sermon grew in popularity and even began attracting men. Religious and political authorities alike took worried notice. They were especially disheartened to learn that Hutchinson openly criticized local Puritan clergy, who enjoined the anxious spiritual practice of keeping diaries as proof of one’s salvation. In those pages, congregants were supposed to record any hopeful signs of their election and any foreboding evidence of their unregeneration. Eventually, with enough empirical evidence in their favor, those written testimonies were read aloud before the congregation, the male eldership voting to confirm the “visible saints.”
Hutchinson saw the practice as a blasphemous display of works-based righteousness. She believed that Christians should instead rely on the direct, interior witness of the Holy Spirit to assure them of their election. Though hers was a theological conviction that might hardly be considered controversial today in most evangelical churches, it pitted the “truth” of the individual’s body against the orthodoxies of the body of gathered saints.
Until the end of 1636, she had the support of the majority of her Boston congregation and one-quarter of the colony’s voting church members. But political machinations were unleashed, and Hutchinson was eventually excommunicated and exiled, her presumptions of personal spiritual revelation declared dangerous and seen as foreboding of a greater evil—namely fornication.
“That filthy Sin of the Community of Women and all promiscuous and filthy coming together of men and Women without Distinction or Relation of Marriage, will necessarily
follow,” proclaimed John Cotton at the end of Hutchinson’s trial.
Heresy, it was assumed, would eventually show up in the bedroom—because vice, like virtue, acts as a unified whole. As the Scripture teaches, to break one law is to be lawless (James 2:10). In Hutchinson’s case, however, vice never showed in the bedroom.
She was a widow when, in the fall of 1643, she received a revelation to buy land in what is now the Bronx. The Dutch warned her of the dangers of resettling in land owned by the Wecqueasgeek people, with whom they were at war, but she ignored them. After the corrupt political official to whom she made payment for the land pocketed the money, Hutchinson and several of her children were murdered in a Wecqueasgeek attack.
As a matter of bodily conviction, Hutchinson had been sure of God’s guidance and protection—and she’d been dead wrong.
The body, it seems, famously speaks out of both sides of its proverbial mouth. It tells its truth, and it also tells convincing lies. The body’s knowledge is both instructive and incomplete. Until the day when our faith is made sight, we must rely on truths external to the body about what is life-preserving and life-destroying.
While intuition can serve as a kind of physical spidey-sense, it is also an impoverished source of moral knowledge. And this shortcoming is why we need to be taught to live in the reality of the world.
Appealingly, the return to older traditions of virtue offered by Alan Noble in his new book, To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times, provides more solid ground on which to stand than the instincts of the body or the gut preferences of the cultural moment. The virtues, as moral categories, draw clear and important boundaries around the true and beautiful and good. Providing objective criteria for good and for evil, virtue tells us when to call a woman a saint—or a man a fool—because the body, like a tree, bears its obvious fruit.
There is so much we misunderstand about the nature of our moral responsibilities, Noble writes in the opening of To Live Well. Morally, we’re “winging it,” he indicts. Exploring the four cardinal virtues (justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence) and the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and love), Noble endeavors to help us as Christians get our bearings in our God-created, God-haunted world as we face a near infinitude of choices and suffer a paucity of moral knowledge.
What’s better—and best? What may seem right—but ultimately leads to death? To be clear, these aren’t guiding questions for Hatmaker. In contrast, Hatmaker notes her own domineering mind: “God, the amount of work it takes to exit my head and live in my body is colossal,” she writes.
Clear moral thinking, which Noble models in his book, isn’t just a rescue from the muddled moral reasoning philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”—a reasoning that is painstakingly obvious in Hatmaker’s own appeal to follow the body wherever it leads. It’s also a lifeline out of the burdens of evangelicalism’s “emotionalism,” this idea that faith is most trustworthy when felt. Our body can, in fact, be our worst enemy. Noble, who has written publicly of his battle with OCD, understands that faith can falter in the morning when it’s time to get out of bed, especially if the body gets to talking.
There is nothing retrograde or nostalgic here in Noble’s treatment of the virtues, as if we might imagine returning to a simpler era where people knew the good and did it. Rather, Noble constructs a picture of virtue as hard work, shored up by the grace of God and exhibited as a coherent whole. Daily choices and small gestures, practiced today and tomorrow and the day after that. With enough repetition, virtue, like the act of brushing of our teeth, can become a commonplace rather than considered action, gloriously routine in the movements of work and friendship, marriage and parenting.
In particular, I’m taken with Noble’s exploration of justice (as Hatmaker might herself be). This virtue, Noble argues, reminds us of what is owed to our neighbor. Acting justly includes, as we might expect, submitting to governing authorities; protecting the weak; and daily, regularly mending relationships. “We have an obligation to seek the common good,” Noble writes.
But this isn’t the most surprising element of justice, as he describes it. “Part of justice is giving what is due to the broader community, which is you living a righteous, virtuous life.” Your honesty, your fidelity, your humility, your meekness, your patience, your long-suffering, your love—these are also your just acts, acted out in bodies and in places, not blasted on social media. To act justly is to create a society in which every body, made in the image of God, flourishes.
Justice would have ensured the kind of fair trial Hutchinson was denied. And considering the betrayal in Hatmaker’s story, justice would have kept its promises, even when the body insists it can’t quit its temptations.
To reconsider justice in this way, as owing our neighbor our virtuous life, is to see these truths about being human: To be human is to have a body—and to have a body is to have incurred great debt. None is righteous, no, not one. A cursory glance inward, and I can see I owe so much to so many: to my parents, for whom I have often been profoundly ungrateful; to my husband, from whom I have often, in fearful self-preservation, withheld myself and my love; to my five children, whom I’ve raised to be as broken as me; to my suffering neighbor, with whose needs I can’t be bothered.
There’s not a single chance in hell that I, or anyone else, can pay down a balance of wrongs done and rights left undone—unless another pays it for us for the sake of a love that binds justice to mercy. Virtue, as a lexicon of the good, allows me to name my sin with unflinching honesty. Then, the good news of the gospel allows me to hope that my vice will not be the final word—because hope is the thing with feet. In the words
of Athanasius:
[Christ] saw how the surpassing wickedness of men was mounting up against them; He saw also their universal liability to death. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should perish and the work of His Father for us men come to nought, he took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own.
Hatmaker seems to quietly pine for a love that measures as wide and as deep and as long and as high as God’s reckless love for the world. Quoting Maggie Smith’s poem “Rain, New Year’s Eve,” Hatmaker wants to “love the world the way I love / my young son, not only when / he cups my face in his sticky hands, / but when, roughhousing, / he accidentally splits my lip.” She seems to instinctively know that bodies have a way of breaking things—and that some loving way must make repair possible.
I can’t help but remember the moment I left Cincinnati’s playhouse, in the rain, and mused on Hades’s prospects. What if, enfolded into a love we have not chosen, we could become another version of ourselves? What if, in hearing the voice of God, we could hear our bodies speak more than shame, self-disgust, or even deluded self-love?
Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col. 1:27). You’d be surprised. I mean, truly surprised.
Jen Pollock Michel is an author, speaker, and spiritual writing mentor for Whitworth University’s MFA program. Her most recent book is In Good Time, and her forthcoming book publishing this fall is A Rule for the Rest of Us.
