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    This Is My Body: Embracing the Messiness of Faith and Motherhood
    This Is My Body: Embracing the Messiness of Faith and Motherhood
    This Is My Body: Embracing the Messiness of Faith and Motherhood
    Ebook120 pages4 hours

    This Is My Body: Embracing the Messiness of Faith and Motherhood

    By Hannah Shanks

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    About this ebook

    Kneeling at the Communion rail, Hannah Shanks trembled as she received the bread and cup. Hours before, she had discovered she was pregnant. She heard the familiar words—"The body of Christ, broken for you; The blood of Christ, shed for you" as if for the first time. She remembered Jesus' words: "This is my body." Shanks realized that these words not only describe Jesus' death but also apply to every birth that has taken place. Suddenly, she felt a closer connection to God.

    This Is My Body is organized around the framework of Communion, a central act of the Christian faith. Part personal narrative and part reflection on scripture from a woman's point of view, this book is about finding a new relationship to the acts of Christian community through the experiences of a woman's body, including pregnancy and childbirth.

    Though the book centers on women's experiences, it offers an opportunity for women and men to consider how they too might be freed in the gospel proclamation, "This is my body; This is my blood." The author approaches motherhood with an understanding of its sacred nature and its profound ability to change her identity. She battles church stereotypes attached to mothering and emerges with a deeper understanding of herself and her relationship to the Holy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFresh Air Books
    Release dateMay 1, 2018
    ISBN9781935205302
    This Is My Body: Embracing the Messiness of Faith and Motherhood
    Author

    Hannah Shanks

    Hannah Shanks is assistant professor of social work and director of the social work program at Greenville University, Greenville, Illinois. She is a storyteller and has participated in the St. Louis chapter of Listen to Your Mother, a live reading series and video sharing company. Hannah is a member of Anam Cara St. Louis, an intentional ecumenical community formed around a shared Rule of Life and weekly observance of prayer and communion.

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      Book preview

      This Is My Body - Hannah Shanks

      This is my body that is for you.

      —1 Corinthians 11:24

      Bodies are important to God.

      Our bodies, whatever state they are in right now, are beautiful images of God in the world. God values our bodies—what we do with them and what has been done against them. I believe that we can understand God better when we understand our bodies better, but we must first examine why so many of us—and especially so many women—have a hard time imagining our bodies as anything but a disappointment or afterthought to God.

      Wherever and whoever we are, we’ve inherited scars that we carry, and we need to address them up front. Not because they are obstacles but because they are stories that are too often untold, overlooked, or hidden in shame. And we cannot receive the truth that our bodies are the image of God in the world if we are hiding them from ourselves. We cannot proclaim that God values our bodies when we’ve been programmed to add too many caveats to that value: God values my body if it is covered. If it is thin. If it is chaste. If it is flawless. If it is blemish-free. If it is pretty. If it is healthy. If it is young. If it is fair-skinned. Understanding that our bodies matter to God is way bigger than how we eat or move or heal or look. Understanding that my body—a woman’s body—matters deeply to God and reveals God in the world has flown in the face of what I picked up from church teaching and preaching.

      Most of us are taught that our bodies belong to us; our bodies, on their own, are not us but rather vessels or transports, a home for our spirits. This isn’t a new idea. This way of thinking is called dualism, and it was practiced by ancient Greeks. Our thoughts about spirit being something separate from the body began with them, and their thoughts about denying the body in order to attain higher spiritual insight have stuck around through much of Western thought and Christianity. It also gave rise to the tradition of Gnosticism, which holds the idea that all things of the body are lesser, while things of the spirit are the only true and desirable things worth seeking. Truthfully, most of us probably have some Gnosticism working in our hearts.

      The separation of body and spirit is often central to what we learn about our bodies. We are taught to master, escape, tame, train, ignore, use, cover, care for, and guard them. Implicit in this teaching lies the idea that we are doing something to our bodies rather than with them. We’re taught that our bodies are separate from our being but indicators about the goodness of our being. And to this end, we’re taught heresy—a thorny word, especially for those of us who can hear it in our memories, shouted at us from behind a wagging finger and a scowl of disapproval. But in this instance, we’re talking about the literal sense of the

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