What Kind of Body Are You?

pilgrimage, sabbath, and two German words

Good morning, Blue Roomies! 

As you read this, our family is celebrating our eldest’s college graduation, then I’m heading out for a weeklong pilgrimage in Scotland with members of the church I serve, including three nights on Iona. It will be my third trip to Iona, fourth time in Scotland.

Back in the sixth century, the legend goes, an Irish monk hopped aboard a boat with no steering system, convinced that God and providence would wash him ashore where he needed to be. That place was Iona, the tiny isle where Christianity touched Scotland for the first time. Columba, that monk, built an abbey church there. A nunnery came later, and for countless generations, Iona was a mission outpost for western Scotland. It is famously known as a “thin place,” where the veil is translucent between heaven and earth.

The Iona Abbey at night, 2013

Now fourteen hundred years later, Iona is a worldwide community committed to practicing justice and peace, and the location remains a popular spot for pilgrims, and tourists interested in more spiritual locales. Iona has a way of shifting people’s thinking in a wonderful way. It was the place where Robert and I first realized that something needed to change in our overcrowded life with three young kids, where we committed to taking the ancient practice of Sabbath-keeping more seriously. For a long season following that Iona pilgrimage, we made it a priority to observe a day-long time of rest and play every week. It was a precious, imperfect practice that changed our lives in untold ways, including launching a new vocation as an author of books. People still buy that book I wrote more than thirteen years ago when our kids were so very young, which is incredible to me. One of those little ones walks across a commencement stage tomorrow.  

On the island. These little tunky bears are graduating from college and high school this spring.

Sabbath, it turns out, is more than a recreational pause in one’s routine. It’s a counterprotest against a world that defines us based on what we produce. So is pilgrimage, for that matter. As sightseeing trips go, our group isn’t cramming our time full of excursions. The aim is to savor, to be formed, to make community. Someone at preacher camp two weeks ago said, “What is deepest in us is of God.” Pilgrimage helps us locate and nurture that deep sacred place.

I’m a frequent reader (and recommender) of Tim Snyder’s slim book On Tyranny. His latest volume is On Freedom, and it’s a much more expansive work, and one I’m taking in slowly. In the book, Snyder invokes two German words for “body.” The first and more basic of the two is Körper. Körper is the physical form: the bones and sinew and guts that make up the human form. 

Too often, and in too many places, people are seen as mere Körper—bodies to be exploited, means to an end. Objects. Valuable only to the extent that we can be busy, industrious, useful. Cogs in the empire’s machine. “A Körper might be alive,” Snyder writes, “but it need not be (compare corpse).” 

A Körper is not free.

A second German word for body is Leib. Leib is a subject, a fleshed-out, autonomous being. “A Leib can move, a Leib can feel, and a Leib has its own center... We can always see some of our Leib, but we can never see all of it." 

Our Leib has freedom, dignity, and worth outside of what our Körper contributes to the various systems to which we are beholden. As Cole Arthur Riley writes in her book Black Liturgies: “We grow weary of societies who view us as more machine than human, more product than soul. The fear that we won't survive without overworking stalks our days... When we pause or rest, we are restoring not only our own bodies but the very condition of a world held captive by greed and utility.”

My hope for you as we move into summer, whether a pilgrimage is in the cards or not, is that you would have space to get in touch with that deepest place where the Holy resides. That you would practice seeing and nurturing your Leib. Such work is not indulgent or selfish. Every bit of activism, every push of resistance, flows most authentically and effectively from that center.

Steady on.

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What I’m Up To

Here’s my sermon from last Sunday, on Peter’s healing of Tabitha in Acts 9:

And some more audio (and video!). Ed and I unpacked episodes 7-9 of Andor season 2:

Pop Culture Pastors Hour! Andor Season 2 Episodes 7-9

And here’s Monday’s installment of The Art of Onward for supporting subscribers. (I’ve extended the 50% discount for annual subscriptions for one more weekend.)

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Link Love

From the Blue Room archives—here’s a little more on pilgrimage: