Guest Writer: Stephanie Cochrane
How Ignoring Our Bodies Is Harming Our Souls
As a preteen girl on the frantic cusp of puberty, the worst thing to shop for was pants. I grew to my current height of five feet eight inches at the age of twelve, with nary a fat cell to soften my bones. In the era of low-rise jeans (so low they almost had a zipper) my hip bones jutted into my waistband so aggressively that I often had friction burns. Pants designed for girls my age gapped and bagged in all the wrong places, while anything from the little girls’ section came short of covering my skeletal ankles. One disheartening shopping trip ended when, staring at myself in the mirror of the Walmart dressing room, I said to my mom over the lump in my throat, “I’m tired of looking like a bag of doorknobs.”
I wasn’t the only one disappointed with my body. A few years after the doorknob incident, when I’d discovered push-up bras and gained a whisper of curve around my hips, I squirmed under the disgusted gazes of the other girls in the gym locker room. “Ugh, STEPH!” one of them huffed. “You could be like a Victoria’s Secret model or something!” Maybe she was referring to the way my skin stretched over my visible rib cage, but she'd clearly forgotten about the other physical attributes a job like that requires, all of which I lack. It was easier to just ignore it—my body, and the outside commentary.
In this way I passed through childhood and early adulthood with barely a thought for my body. I cared for it the same way I care for my stand mixer: wipe it down after heavy use and oil when needed so it can keep serving my needs. Like my other tools, I took it for granted until it failed to perform. What else was there to consider?
Every now and then—in a church service or a theology class—I might remember that I’m supposedly getting a new body someday, and that one will be cooler? Have special powers? Never get stinky? But who has the time to think about something so far away? I just need this body to do its job today, so I can get on with the serious business of Christianity.
I can’t recall exactly where I first heard the term “psychosomatic” but I assume I came across it during my pop-psychology phase. Stories of horrific suffering drew me in as only a person who has yet to suffer horror can be. I was fascinated with anything written by Tory L. Hayden, and Sally Field’s performance in Sybil.. I pulled my definition of the word from content like this. “Psychosomatic” is a word that describes a set of symptoms. You don't experience these symptoms apart from pathology: in short, you’re crazy.
So imagine my surprise when—after years of collecting dust on the “early 2000s” shelves of my memory library—the word jumped off the page of my assigned theology reading. “Scripture witnesses,” writes Beth Felker Jones in her hospitable book Practicing Christian Doctrine, “to our constitution by God as psychosomatic unities, creatures who are always both physical and spiritual.” I was shocked. Surely my physicality is not something I am, but something I have. My body is a possession, but not part of my being, not essential to my humanity.
Considering my body as part of me was so… so secular. Yet these views did not serve me well for long. Bodies resist being possessed, used, and ignored, for that is not what they are made for. It was easy to suppress my body’s resistance when I was the only one intimately acquainted with her, but marriage and motherhood amplified her protestations. My body isn’t the real me falls flat in the shared nakedness of the marriage bed. The assumption that my body was a machine disconnected from my soul was shattered by the first press of movement in my womb and the responding squeeze of love and fear in my throat.
Suffering, too, waved banners and blared horns. I returned home from a church event where I had been with safe people who love me well, and fell to my knees on my living room floor. My body remembered a similar event, in a similar space, where I was not so safe. Sobs shuddered through me with grief and panic—my body surfacing the suppressed wounds of my soul.
“The human being,” Felker Jones continues, “is not a soul in hostile relationship with a body. The human being is always one thing, one creature, in life before God.” What does it look like to treat my body not as the sum of her functions, but as an integral part of my humanity?
My Sunday school teachers would be proud, because the answer is Jesus. Jesus entered into every part of humanity. He had to, for no part He did not enter could be redeemed. If body-soul oneness is part of what it means to be human, then Jesus too lived “as one creature in life before God.”
Jesus’ body was not in standby mode for thirty-three years until it was go time for Holy Week. He was human not only at the moments we view as most theologically significant. He was human, as a dear friend would say, “on a Tuesday.” Every obscure moment of the life He lived before anyone put pen to paper, He lived bodily. He did not just sit piously on a hill and read the Scriptures. He worked. He ate. He slept. He grew. He was a whole person. He lived (still lives) a whole life.
Jesus did not experience his emotions from a distance. They are in His body, as mine are in my body. Laughter squeezed tears from His eyes. Anger tensed His jaw and flared His nostrils. Anxiety forced drops of blood from his sweat glands. When He was raised to life on that first Easter morning, it was the resurrected version of the same body that had been crucified and buried three days prior. It was glorified, fresh, whole, free of decay, but still recognizable. Still scarred.
This same-but-resurrected body is the one He ascended with. He sits at the right hand of the Father in that body this very moment, advocating and praying for us as we live in our bodies. According to the Apostle John, when we see Him as He really is, we will be like Him. The body that will carry me through an eternity of unfettered, fully sanctified worship will not be a totally different make and model, but a resurrected, fully-restored version of the one I have now.
Without participation from that body, I cannot be obedient in worship. In Romans 12:1-2 Paul gives specific instructions to the Church on our manner and means of worship. Every believer—of every kind of body, every ability and sex and race—is commanded to worship by presenting their bodies to God. Fortunately for us this is not a typo. Paul did not intend to say “minds” or even “souls.” God asks for our bodies, because we have nowhere else to worship Him.
Take the hands, for instance. Whom do they touch, and in what spirit? What words do they type and text? What images do they enable my eyes to behold and my mind to meditate on? What food do they prepare, and with whom do they share it? We need only consider one or two body parts and what tasks they perform in the course of the day to see the practicality and immense scope of this command. Yet when we obey it, we are not dead sacrifices that burn to ash and drift away on the wind, nor poured-out sacrifices left empty and dry. We are alive with holy purpose, well-pleasing to God. And in this obedience, our whole person is formed into the image of Christ. In this daily, bodily surrender our souls are renewed and transformed.
Without my soul, my body has no life. Without my body, my soul has nowhere and no way to worship God, which is life’s purpose. Any attempt to ignore and suppress this body-soul oneness is an attempt to sever myself—a wish to be broken rather than whole. To live toward this goal is to cause harm, for it is to live in opposition to the good work of my Creator.
My body is represented in Christ's body—not merely in the past, but now and for all eternity future. My body, today and forever, is my means of expressing true worship. I can take in no encouragement from the family of God, nor impart any encouragement to the family of God apart from her. She is the means by which I experience connection.
When I see Jesus as He is, I will be like Him, raised to everlasting life in my body just as He was. I dare not treat her as if she is anything less than divinely beloved and appointed for good works. She is not expendable, disposable, or amoral. Soul care is not detached from her, but performed in and through her. In the thousands of obscure acts I carry out on a Tuesday, my body is beloved by God, created good and destined not for disposal, but resurrection.
I’ll try to remember that next time I need new pants.
Stephanie Cochrane is a Wyoming native with Mississippi roots who now shares her Fort Worth, Texas home with her husband, three young boys, parents, and dog. She loves writing and student ministry, and is blessed to spend most of her time doing one or the other. You can find her on Substack at The Paradox Paper, a monthly email designed to honor the paradox in life with Jesus.
 | A guest post by
|