Skin and bone deep

I have now come clean to the people around me. They’ve known I’ve had a problem for a while now, but I’m able to admit it. I’ve said the words out loud and am now in the stage of asking for help.

I’m a fashion disaster.

First, I’m double-Libra which makes all fashion decisions paralyzing. Every Christmas my mother takes us shopping and my sister has to decide what pieces I want. There are a million beautiful things and choosing one feels impossible.

I’ve also chalked up my attire situation as good character – the ability to not care what I look like, to prance about with clothes that don’t match, fit well or – as one friend politely pointed out – are worn inside out. The fact that I paid little attention to my appearance meant I could focus on more “important” things – holy things, meaning-filled things, the stuff that makes life worth living. I was raised with a legacy of beauty that I haven’t always understood or appreciated.

I’ve always left beauty at the door to make more space for utility – is it useful? weighed more heavily on my Kon-Mari-ing. I would choose a builder’s grade faucet over something I loved to save a few dollars because my sensible nature elevated function over form.

Fashion, I told myself, would be a distraction, fluff and filler. To care about what things look like, rather than the nature of things, seemed a futile endeavor. After all, Jesus taught me that things aren’t what they seem.

There’s a salon nearby named Vanity. I enjoyed a fair amount of judgement upon this naming from a high perch; when I think about the meaning of being vain, it’s an illusion, being without the substance. Don’t you know vanity isn’t to be celebrated?

My early adulthood religious training instilled a strong fear of vanity. First and most obvious, the letters from Peter and Paul warning the ladies to not be tempting, to just cover it up already. And then my word-nerd self dug into the commandments and and admonishment against taking the Lord’s name in vain. Don’t you dare speak of (or for) the Lord without also having the Lord’s weight behind it. Don’t just say things that sound holy: be holy. Vanity is a grave sin, indeed.

Somewhere, in adulthood, largely by influence of Mary Oliver, I’ve questioned my inferred sense that God doesn’t bother with beauty. Have you seen the sunset from my front porch? What about the endless waves of an ocean? An old tree, roots dug deep in the middle of a bean field, refusing to be moved for the sake of efficient agri-business. Molly’s curls falling from her messy bun. The twinkle in Corri’s eye when she knows she’s funny. The Amalfi coast.

Why does God get to love beauty but I don’t?

Vanity is not the same is beauty. My fear of vanity seems to have created a practice of avoiding beauty.

Beauty magazine language of “fixing flaws” and “covering problem areas” make my toes curl. That’s vanity talking. That’s a lack of substance needing fluffed and covered. What if beauty, unlike vanity, isn’t about fluffing – or more accurately, slimming – and covering? What if beauty is about noticing? Highlighting? Celebrating?

I’m a little tired of looking terrible. At 40+ I’d like to leave my house wearing clothing without logos and team names. I want to spend a modicum of time putting myself together so that when I walk out into the world I know my worth – not because I’ve covered things up but because I spent the time framing, staging, honoring everything I’m made of. A fear of false image is fine, but the fact remains: I am made of substance. I’m here: in a body, with organs and bones and brains and matter.

I am not skin deep and neither is beauty.

Perhaps, I’ve acknowledged to myself recently, it’s time to appreciate beauty in all its forms, including my own.

Word in Flesh

So here’s a fun little experiment: pick up a book of essays written in the late 1990s about the intersection of faith and science and parse the references to impending Artificial Intelligence against the podcast you just heard about the current AI’s place within human existence. And then do a little Hebrew word study. That, my friends, is what I call a Thursday.

The quote that caught me was found in Barbara Brown Taylor’s The Luminous Web: Essays on Science and Religion (of which its second publishing was the year 2000 – you know, that time when we were stock-piling dry goods because of Y2K?) She was quoting another scientist, Rodney Brooks, who said, “a disembodied intelligence cannot experience the world as humans do… Only through experience as a physical being can smart robots develop emotions… which are essential for a truly intelligent being.”

This is not something that Yuval Noah Harari highlighted in his interview on Armchair Expert. Harari didn’t bring up embodiment, but he did make my heart beat faster when he spoke of the power of editing as an essential feature throughout human history. He reminds us that not all thoughts need elevated. The role of the editor – be it in journalism or otherwise – is holding ideas and asking if they need to be created into a thing.

This is a deeply spiritual and ancient idea. In the ancient Hebrew language, the word for “word” is davar, which also means “thing.” In the Hebrew mind, words have as much substance any thing. Indeed, words are the creative energy of the world. In the Genesis story, it’s all about how God uses a word and a thing appeared.

But it’s more than just abracadabra (a mismash of Hebrew believed to mean “I will create as I speak”). That creative energy orders things. The emergence of the heavens and the Earth of Genesis 1 is an ordering of Chaos (the Tohu Va-Vohu).

When you take this idea, that you speak things into existence, and you hold it against the function of AI at the current day – a chatGPT that you command, with words, what you’re looking for and it uses an expansive knowledgebase from the digital world to create a document or image – and we’re starting to get a lot more God-like.

Of course, we’ve always held the power the create with words; they mostly developed in the mental/emotional world before emerging into the physical. We could speak a complement into a person, but it had to be circulated through their heart and mind before we saw the physical manifestation with a light in their eyes or a lift of their posture. Coaches and teachers have that magical power to create with words – I had the most fascinating conversation with a higher-level coach about how changing the way she spoke to her player changed the way the player was able to perform physically at the game. We humans have always joined God in the co-creative power to make things – and we’ve used human bodies to see them created. (And now you know why becoming a yoga teacher was the natural next progression of ministry.)

So join me for a moment in John 1:14: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

John starts his letter reminding folks that In the Beginning (literally: Genesis), the Word was with God and the Word was God…. through him all things were made; without him nothing was made.

Creation involves bodies. Bodies of water, bodies of land, bodies of flesh, bodies of thought, bodies of work. Words become things. God said it, and it was. We speak it, and it becomes.

If Brooks was right, way back before I was learning to drive, then AI’s power remains useless without humans. The entire enterprise is built upon the human initiative to give it orders. My cousin, who professionally dwells in the digital world, told me post-podcast share, “AI cannot invent a lie. It doesn’t invent, it can only decide among what it knows. And it employs that decision making mechanically without emotion.”

Humans remain supreme over AI as long as they lack bodies, where emotion lives. This is the difference between intelligence and actual life: embodiment.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

That which creates became created. The very act of creation becomes created. The source of the idea that a two-footed creature needed approximately 10 individual toes – bones, muscle, tendons, nerves, with a little protective nail on top that we can decorate if we wish – in order to balance upright, that source put on toes and walked around in them. That source experienced the plight of ingrown toenails and wondered, “whose idea was this?!” That source of such an idea did not just command it from above – that source lived it from within.

Barbara Brown Taylor writes in this outdated but delightful little book, “When truth and belief come into conflict, it is better to change one’s belief to fit the truth than to change the truth to fit one’s belief.” She’s citing a scientist there, who I’m sure had no idea what the movement of faith deconstruction would look like 30 years later.

As one who has rode the waves of deconstruction yet remains tethered to a buoy of truth, these ancient but essential ideas are much of what continues to anchor me to Jesus: Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.

Creative, generative energy that gives me life also lives within me and also lives beside me.

As Eugene Peterson wrote it in his translation of John 1: The Word became flesh and blood, and moved into the neighborhood.

I continue to read and pursue science not as a reason to continue to deconstruct my faith, but rather to give me insight on exactly what I’m choosing to believe as I understand truth. Our technology and human development in general will continue to take us down a path of asking how the notion of God is relevant when so much can be artificially be created. If AI can make an image on command, why would we cozy up to the idea of a celestial being that doesn’t have a predictable alogorithm?

For me, it’s the word becoming flesh. AI doesn’t stay up at night fearing for the future of its children. ChatGPT doesn’t relive its mistakes with a sense of regret. The experience in a body of feeling tension and ease, delight and remorse are where we find life. The tears that fall when holding a yearned-for newborn or grieving a practically-perfect mother are what remind us that we are human and this matters.

My only way to experience this world is through my body. The space/time continuum requires a physicality and flesh and blood is its vehicle. Our ability to feel it all keeps us human.

Remix

what I want my daughter to know about relationships with men What I want my children to know about relationships with a partner

Originally posted January 16, 2011

The right guy person at the wrong time is still the wrong guy person.
You need to be “me” before you can be “we”.
You become like the people you are around the most; ask, “do I want to become more like him this person?”
If s/he loves you, s/he’ll never say “If you love me…”
People can change. Not all of them do.
Never use sex as a weapon or a tool.
It’s better to be alone and content than with someone and miserable.
If you have to lie to your family and friends about him a person, he’s the person is probably not a great catch.
It’s never okay to [be] hit.
There’s NOTHING wrong with you.
Sometimes, “like the other girls” shouldn’t be the goal.
Don’t look at his the resume, look at his the heart. Just because s/he meets “minimum qualifications” or “seems perfect for you” doesn’t mean you have to date.
Yes, sometimes “good guys” are boring. And keeping up with a rebel can be exhausting.
Most divorces result from arguments about money and sex. Watch carefully how s/he talks about, uses or values these things.
There’s a difference between “perfect” and “healthy”.
Learn how to fight fair.
Stand up for yourself. And learn to say “I’m sorry.”
If s/he doesn’t encourage (which can include challenging) your faith, you’ll probably end up bored or frustrated.

Edited to add:
You will change. So will they.
A person will never solve your problems.
You are your own hero.
It’s always okay to ask for help.

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