I recently took a spiritual development class which culminated in a day-long silent retreat. We spent an entire day in silence, including eating our meal together without speaking, only exchanging glances as we chose our seats, ate our fill, and cleared our places to return to our work. It might surprise those of you who know me well, but in a full day of silence, refraining from talk was not the most difficult part for me. Lunch actually provided the greatest challenge, with all the sounds of eating, so conspicuous in silence--the clinking of forks against teeth and plates, the chewing and swallowing, the parting of lips to take another drink or bite. None of these things bother me in others, but because of my own personal history, it's very easy for them to trigger self-consciousness, embarrassment, and shame in myself. (This is one of the reasons why, if you have a lunch meeting with me, you might notice that I don't eat much. Well, that and I'm probably talking too much.) But at a silent meal, there was no place to hide. I simply had to be present for the experience of my own eating, in the company of others.
However, it made me think about the purpose, the propriety, of food and eating. How we are actually made for this, messy and earthy process though it is, and it is made for us. And how it's nothing but pretense and self-deception for someone to act or believe as though they are somehow above it, or it is below them, because eating is one of the common identifiers that marks the human experience, part of our shared identity and mortality, along with the other functions of our physical human bodies. As a result, we can know that shame is an inappropriate reaction.
In fact, on Christmas, we celebrate the fact that even the very God of the Universe took on this human frame--the vulnerable, messy, real, imperfect, and amazing body that eats, sleeps, drools, bleeds, and that he himself created. He not only thought us up, put us together, and graced our humble, fleshly selves with his blessing, but dignified our human carriage with his divine soul for the years of his earthly walk among us. The Incarnation is nothing more and nothing less than the eternal Creator, "robed in flesh", as the old hymn says.
And the markers of our flesh are so much more than this, than the bodily functions that make up our life. The Psalms tell us that this Creator, this infant Jesus, "knows our frame"--he understands that we are only made from dust. His expectations for us, and his acceptance of us, never hinge on more than that.
In my preschool teaching days, when someone expected one of my students to be able to sit still, or know when to shout and when to whisper, or not to pick their nose, my work was to help people understand that these expectations are not developmentally appropriate. They will learn these things in time, of course, as we all grow to maturity when the time is right. But for the time being, no child--no person--should ever feel that what is expected of them in order to be accepted, or to be acceptable, is something beyond what is appropriate for the body they are in. Little children should never feel shame for their preschool-ness. No more then should we for our humanness, from making sounds when we chew, to sometimes forgetting to pick our noses in private, to laughing when it turned out not to be a joke, to spouting off angry before counting to ten, to not knowing when to speak and when to SHUT UP.
We are not who we will be, it's true, when we reach our destination someday; and that day is coming. But for the time being, this imperfect world is made for us, and we are made for it--us and the bodies we are in--imperfect but loved, exactly and appropriately as we are.
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