My body, my identity

I don't make New Year's resolutions, much less keep them. Well, once I did both. At the close of 2016, I resolved that, in 2017, I would learn to walk again. In recent days, when my FitBit counts my steps and documents my exercise, it's hard for me to fathom that, two years ago at this time, I was crippled. Every step hurt. Even walking from the bed to the bathroom in our hotel room; even taking a shower; even getting into the passenger seat of our rental car in Phoenix -- everything was effort and agony. Now, I'm looking toward another New Year. And I'm approaching it not with a resolution, but with a watchword. Three words, actually: "Because I Can." I swear, I thought of these words, and chose them for 2019, long before I saw (while watching "Beach Life" on HGTV on the gym's stationary recumbent bike) a commercial for the new Diet Coke campaign. Hey! They stole my slogan: "Because I Can." And as much as I like Diet Coke (th...

My husband Jay and I share a deeply-held wish, that this Christmas, and however many more Christmases we may have, may be transcendent. By "transcendent," we mean we seek a deeper connection with the awe-filled mystery of a Creator who is so much greater than ourselves, yet who knows what it means to inhabit a body of flesh, blood, nerves and bone. We seek to know better the First Cause, who set stars light-years apart in a universe more vast than we can fathom, yet who knows the number of hairs on the bodies of every creature the Creator made and loved. We crave paradox. We seek mystery. And miraculously, at times, we find it in ordinary life. Let me name the ways I have experienced transcendency in this holy Advent season. By participating in my church's Advent focus on eradicating hunger, I have food-shopped for struggling families and bought them foods that are more healthful and wholesome than many so-called "poverty foods" -- foods like apple sa...

Our church's Advent meditations on hunger will inevitably turn toward the topic of gluttony. I hope the discussion of this deadly sin includes more depth and nuance than simply asserting that some people starve because other people eat too much. And I hope it's clear that not all overweight people are gluttons, and not all gluttons are fat. If all that were true, then I would have, in my many years of living with extra weight, have been singularly responsible for the starvation of people who could have consumed all my excess calories, if only I'd said "no, thank you" to them. That kind of guilt-focused thinking doesn't feed the hungry, and it rarely changes behavior. Nor does it address the perception that is a day-to-day reality for the majority of people in this nation who carry excess weight. Large people tend to be perceived, even by health-care professionals who should know better, as waddling, indulgent, undisciplined images of their own greed and g...

The church where Jay and I belong is focusing its Advent observance on hunger. Our "tree" is made of cans of vegetables for the church's food pantry. Our "Advent calendar" at home is a cardboard box, into which I will insert one non-perishable food donation per day, until the congregation members bring the boxes to Christmas Eve worship and lay them at the foot of the manger. I applaud the idea. And, for the most part, I applaud the spiritual exercises that Pastor Dean has suggested -- including writing a letter to a politician to advocate for the hungry, and writing a letter of thanks to a farmer. (My letter will go to the Arlington Agricultural Research Station, where University of Wisconsin researchers continue to seek sustainable methods to feed the 9 billion people that will occupy our planet, maybe in my lifetime.) But there's an angle that's been overlooked -- the connection between poverty and obesity. In Pastor Dean's sermon, he cautione...