*
He had always been more Body than Soul, which meant: always in the grip of something bigger than himself. Even before the explicit conversion, he had always known of the “higher power” and the wider sense of intentionality. It was always higher and wider than his own never very impressive self.
Getting related to it was something else though. That was hard and that was continuous.
*
There was all the bed wetting when he was a child. He did not have any control over it. The parenting books in his mother’s closet suggested that he was doing this to punish or get back at his parents. So feeling bad was compounded with guilt. What is wrong with this little kid? his father would ask. Emil would try to hide in a corner. His mother seemed to be running the washing maching constantly.
Then in some amazing process the bedwetting stopped literally overnight. Emil said to himself: Look, I’m getting better. Meanwhile the Body, his Body, which was himself, had as if backed away to make space for new challenges, new lessons in control or lack of control. And soon enough puberty shook his body like a storm.
*
His mother, a beautiful woman, filled with hope, stood somewhere behind him, trying to face the storm by his side but that wasn’t possible. In America, the boy must go it alone.
*
As if to remind him how little control he had over it, Emil’s body bobbed between the state of being overweight and borderline obese. It was another thing one was obscurely blamed for – although many of us who do not even eat that much find our bodies overflowing into space, demonstrating a fleshly generosity that our spirit does not feel or does not want to feel.
*
His father in effect joined the gang of kids teasing him at school. Find him a diet that will get rid of some of that blubber. But doesn’t cause bed wetting!
*
Is it appropriate to hate your body when your body is who you are?
In the Andrew Marvell poem they read at school, a bright truth broke thru the cracks in the enamel:
BODY
“O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so,
That mine own precipice I go….”
*
Go that extra lap! Transcend yourself! his father said.
By the time he met and fell in love with Sarah, his soulful workaholic wife, Emil had tortured his body into trimness, fitness – the illusion of health perhaps. He became something that was considered desirable by all but himself, the little truth-teller inside that health could not fool. That obese weight of his hovered just outside of visibility, ready to manifest itself and become real, waiting for the appropriate occasion, such as the death of a loved one.
*
Meanwhile God was patient, as always, and waited for Body to inch closer in his humility. There are truths you can conceive in faith that you would never have been able even to own, to admit for your own, in your former state. These are the “bad” truths, the depressing truths that you find you can tolerate only insofar as God places them within a context of infinite love. Without that love even their truth seems to shrivel. So Emil, the gorgeous hunk, watched himself grieving after his mother’s dead and saw an ugly unlovable kid with urine stains rising to the surface of the mirror. The older kids kicked him around the playing field. And now he turned to God and said: I am still that kid. In myself, aside from whatever you have done, nothing has changed. And yet, truth be told, his newly found honesty even in itself represented a change.
Part 3 of the story to come.
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