Seeing Our Bodies - Part 1

Seeing our Bodies

Part 1 –Response to someone’s confession that they were fat and ugly

 

Mirror, Mirror, tell me am I pretty?

“Girl at Mirror” taken from the cover of a Saturday Evening Post, 1954

 

            Today I am beginning a series of blogs on three different scenes of how Adam and Eve perceived their own bodies, according to the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis.  I will start with a blog today telling you why I decided to write about the three word pictures found in the account of Adam and Eve relating to how they saw their beings and bodies.

            I recently read a woman’s blog of how at age twenty-three she read a letter written to her by a thirteen year old girl she had known in her past.  The thirteen year old girl confessed to the twenty-three year old young woman how she was a fat and ugly thirteen year old.  The younger girl then asked the young woman, “Did you grow up to be beautiful?”  The young woman’s roommates expressed how sad it was for a young girl to think about herself that way.  Everyone present knew that the thirteen year-old girl had written the letter to be read by her twenty-three year old self in ten years’ time.  So the twenty-three year old woman who read the letter to her roommates was the grown up version of the young girl who had suffered as she thought of how she looked.  The twenty-three year old tried to assure her roommates that she no longer felt that way about herself.

            But the same woman, presenting her story in the blogosphere went on to acknowledge that a couple of years later she had gained twenty pounds in one year’s time and now her perspective regarding how she looked was once more being tested.

            I appreciate so much of what is written in this story.  I appreciate that a thirteen year old would write a letter to be read by her older self in ten years’ time.  I wonder if the thirteen year old realized how few of us adults really understand or remember how we thought or felt about our lives at age thirteen.   I remember, in my high school years vowing that I would never tell a young person that their lives in grade, junior, or high school were the best years of their lives.  For me, getting through those growing up years was painful.  Still I don’t remember much about the pain, mostly the vow that I would not tell a high school student these were the best years of their life.  Life for me got better after I got out of high school.  The twenty-three year old lady who received this letter from her thirteen year old counterpart was given a precious gift.  There it was in black and white, the feelings and thoughts of a child at age thirteen.  I also admire the twenty-something year old who read the letter to her roommates, and then blogged about her experience leaving the truth about what she was experiencing so that others could know they were not alone in feeling some of the same things.  I thought of how Adam and Eve, in the Bible stories about them, saw themselves and their bodies in at least three different ways according to the Book of Genesis.  I couldn’t help but think that these word pictures in the Bible were themselves ancient expressions of the same sort of feelings we think now to be modern forms of angst and self-doubt.  Perhaps the account in Genesis has something to say to these sort of feelings.  I decided to write a series of blogs and express what I see and others can decide if what I see contributes to understanding this phenomenon or if I am just another Christian thinking he has some insights when all he really has is some opinions and clichés.

            So I will be blogging on the stories of how Adam and Eve viewed their bodies.  In one setting, they were described as “naked and they were unashamed.”  But shortly thereafter they were desperately covering their nakedness with fig leaves and hiding from God lest he should see them.  Then at the last God makes garments for them out of animal skins.  It seems to me that these pictures of Adam and Eve are poignant portraits of some of the ways we human beings view our own beings and especially our bodies.

            Today is the beginning.  I will try to keep things short so that the reader is not bombarded by too many thoughts.  But as you look forward to other blogs in this series think of what you have felt about your bodies.  Are you comfortable with them?  Do you feel they are beautiful, ugly, or that thinking of your own bodies in these ways just seems strange?  Think about how you perceive your bodies.

            Tomorrow I will be writing about how I view the creation account in Genesis.  You may want to know how I view the Bible’s expression on creation before you can trust me with handling the Bible’s creation stories.  I can understand that no matter what your perspective on the Book of Genesis is.  So I will do that tomorrow.  Then we will begin our series of blogs on these three perceptions of their own bodies in the stories about Adam and Eve.  I do not plan on having anything good enough to say to make this the final word on the subject.  So I hope that you will know I invite thoughts and viewpoints on what I say.  I hope until then that God will help give to you a way of viewing yourself, which will help create in you a sense of joy, fulfillment, direction and purpose.  These words have bearing on my own life for I am medically classified as “morbidly obese.”  I begin this series sure of one thing.  Success in life morally or spiritually is not built on a foundation of our being ashamed.