“A Head Like a Bowling Ball”
Psalm 139:1-18; John 1:1-5, 14-16
Rev. Dr. Deborah L. Clark
October 12, 2014
It starts with a simple primordial cell, whose only purpose in life is to absorb nutrients from the sea around it. A pretty straight-forward life purpose, unless of course some parts of its environment are richer in nutrients than others. In that case, a cell that develops the ability to change shape in order to come closer to the richer spots is more successful.
Eventually, shape-changing evolves into the ability to move to a new environment, and organisms begin to develop more complexity, even having flagella, microscopic precursors to tails. The next step is the beginning of a central nervous system, so that an organism can respond to information about food and danger around it. That leads to the need for something to protect those delicate nerves, and a skeletal spine begins to develop.
Scientists believe the first spines were probably straight, with the capacity for lateral movement, as in a modern-day fish. As creatures ventured onto land and developed legs that lifted their bodies off the ground, spines gradually developed a curve, for an arch is stronger than a straight line. That first curve is called the thoracic spine in humans, the primary curve in the middle of our backs. It is the only curve in the spine of a human fetus.
As land animals evolved, it became advantageous to have a raised head, in order to see both danger and opportunity. That necessitated a second spinal curve—what in humans has become the cervical spine. It is the second curve to develop after a baby is born, about the time the baby starts to hold his or her head up.
The advantage of a creature being able to use front limbs for grasping objects necessitated yet another spinal curve—the lumbar spine in our lower backs, which led to our capacity to stand upright. As tails became less valuable and began to disappear, we ended up with the final curve—the sacrum. Children don’t fully develop their lumbar and sacral spines until they are about six years old.
The human spine must be stable enough to enable us to stand upright, necessitating a delicate balance of four different curves–thoracic, cervical, lumbar and sacral. It must be strong enough to protect the spinal cord and hold up our 10-pound heads, and flexible enough for us to move forward, backward, side to side and to twist. And so we find this elaborate spinal structure, composed of strong, solid bones connected by soft malleable tissue, arranged into four different curves.
As Leslie Kaminoff and Amy Matthews write in their book, Yoga Anatomy, “The full glory of nature’s ingenuity is apparent in the human spine…From an engineering perspective it is clear that we have the smallest base of support, the highest center of gravity, and the heaviest cranium (proportional to our body weight) of any other mammal. As the only true bipeds on the planet, we are also earth’s least mechanically stable creatures. Fortunately, the disadvantage of having a cranium as heavy as a bowling ball balancing on top of the whole system is offset by the advantage of having that big brain…”
The fact that our spines hold us up is nothing short of miraculous. And that’s just our spines. We haven’t talked about the rest of our skeletal systems—joints that move in multiple ways. And what about our muscles? Every time we move, a muscle pair automatically coordinates just the right balance of contracting and lengthening. In most cases a whole host of other muscle pairs make delicate adjustments at the same time. Then there’s our endocrine system, and our respiratory, circulatory, nervous, and glandular systems, which all interact with each other in complex and precise ways.
Whether we see our bodies from an evolutionary perspective or as a medical specimen, whether we are drawn to the poetry of the Psalmist, the only appropriate response is awe. Awe at the intricate, elaborate systems that enable us to hold up our bowling ball heads; awe that all these systems work together so we can lead lives of meaning, hope, and even joy.
***
Yoga Anatomy was a recommended text for my Yoga Teacher Training this summer. I began reading it early on in my sabbatical. My immediate response was awe.
And then, just as we were getting ready to go to Costa Rica, I caught a cold. It was a bad one. I did everything right, and I just couldn’t shake it. We were in the cloud forest of Costa Rica, where I had intended to spend my days running up and down the mountain to find elusive rare birds and my evenings working on a writing project. With this cold, though, I barely felt like moving off the back porch. I sat on the porch swing outside our little cottage, trying not to cough as I breathed through my mouth. I picked up my yoga anatomy book to read the next chapter; suddenly it was just another text book with more information to memorize. I didn’t feel awe at the amazing intricacies of my body. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t make my body do what I wanted to do.
Eventually my cold got better. It reminded me, though, that the amazing complexity of our bodies has a down side. With such an interconnected series of systems, there’s a lot that can go wrong. A cold is a trivial example. Too many of us deal with much more significant disruptions to the carefully attuned intricacies of our bodies. A disk bulging out of that amazing spine. An immune system that gets the wrong signals and starts attacking healthy tissue. Cells that multiply out of control, causing cancer. Seratonin that fluctuates wildly, causing debilitating depression. Arthritis, Parkinsons, diabetes, alzheimers. There is a lot that can go wrong.
In light of all that can go wrong, as we face limitation and pain, there seems to be a human inclination to try to transcend our bodies. Sometimes that inclination becomes intertwined with our understanding of faith.
In the early Christian church, there was a strain of thought that developed into what we call Gnosticism. The body, gnostics believed, was a prison in which our souls were trapped. Only through secret knowledge could the soul be released from the bodily prison and returned to its true home, reunited with God. Some gnostics went so far as to suggest that a lesser god created the world, because they could not conceive of the God they worshipped creating this troubled world and these flawed bodies.
Gnosticism was ultimately declared to be heresy. The history of Christian thought over the millennia, though, still reflects that impulse to devalue our bodies. It is expressed in the ways we sometimes suggest that our bodies are not part of “who we really are.” We see it played out in the ways Western medicine has assumed separation between body, mind, and spirit.
This inclination to devalue our bodies is deeply rooted both in Christian tradition and in Western culture. But it is antithetical to the witness of today’s scripture. Unlike the gnostics, we join with the Psalmist in worshiping God as creator of the whole of who we are, weaver of that intricate interconnectedness of body, mind, and spirit that defines us. We believe that when God looked at creation and saw that it was good, God was including our bodies.
Our gospel reading takes this affirmation a step further. “And the word became flesh and lived among us.” If we can get past our desire to figure out the literal meaning of those words, we hear in this poetry an expression of the sacredness of the human body. God loves human beings so much that God chooses to share in our lives, body, mind, spirit. John doesn’t write about the Word of God putting on a costume of human flesh—the holy pretending to be human. Instead, John writes, the Word becomes flesh. Our bodies are sacred, for God is in them.
This profound expression of the holiness of our human bodies calls me back to that morning sitting on the porch swing in Costa Rica nursing a cold. My body didn’t seem particularly wondrous; in truth it was as worthy of awe that day as on a day filled with fancy yoga postures or graceful tennis court saves. It was annoying to be so congested I couldn’t breathe through my nose, and it’s pretty remarkable that I could breathe through my mouth instead. It was frustrating to feel so listless, but that was because my body was hard at word, marshaling all my energy in the service of healing.
Our bodies are amazing when everything is working just right. They are even more amazing when something is awry. When one muscle isn’t firing quite right, other muscles around it pick up the slack. When our eyes aren’t working optimally, our hearing becomes more acute. When an injury blocks a neural pathway, our bodies often figure out how to re-route the information. When necessary, our bowling-ball sized heads kick into gear, and we use our intellect to help our bodies adapt. We invent canes and walkers to supplement our body’s sense of balance. We wear glasses to improve our vision. We bring our giant brains together to discover even more ways to help our bodies adapt: medication to stabilize blood sugar, radiation and chemotherapy to fight cancer, yoga and qi gong to stimulate our natural healing energy.
And so, with or without a cold, I come back to awe. The four curves in our spines that enable us to hold up our heads….the interconnections between muscles and nerves and circulatory systems…our bodies’ capacity to heal and adapt—truly awe-inspiring.
How would your life be different if you approached your body with a sense of awe and wonder? What would change if you honored your body as sacred? I invite you to try it and see. Amen.