The Joyful Widower

Christmas went well. There were moments of strong feelings, but only at the very end did I start to feel so overwhelmed, that I might not be able to pull together everything that “needed” to be done. At that point I took a deep breath, made to-do lists for the last couple days before Christmas (shopping; baking/cooking; wrapping presents; tidying up the “crucial places” in the house where pictures would be taken of present-opening…), and then I set to with getting up and doing what needed to be done (even without the benefit of Powder Milk Biscuits!).

Everything came together, and without a feeling of being rushed. We made it to Christmas Eve vigil, no problem. I found my place in the congregation and settled in to worship.

In five minutes after stilling myself, I realized my body was tight. I felt it first in my shoulders and arms, but realized that my whole body was a gentle, persistent ache. Though I hadn’t had any big emotional breakdowns in the run-up to Christmas, all that emotional energy was there, trapped and needing a way to flow out.

The day after Christmas saw me at the gym for the first day in forever, then again on Thursday of that week. I didn’t (couldn’t!) do as much as I had been doing a year ago, but something is better than nothing. Those couple days I got in some cardio followed by about 5-10 minutes of lifting. New Year’s Eve I had an appointment with the massage therapist I’ve been seeing twice a month since Tracy died. I told him about feeling all the emotional energy balled-up in my body, especially my shoulders and arms. He gave me a right good going-over. Afterwards I felt like a noodle, and the next day my whole upper body felt sore like after a good workout but much more relaxed.

Eight months before Tracy’s death I joined a gym in town (we canceled our memberships when COVID hit), because I was at my heaviest weight ever and felt terrible. In the months that followed I’d gotten up to the point where I was going 3 days a week, doing Zumba and Pilates, some resistance training, and had gotten back into swimming. I had dropped 20 pounds and felt much better. After her death I let all that go, mostly because of scheduling constraints (solo-dadding takes a lot of time), but also partly due to inertia. Once a routine is broken, it’s hard to get it going again. In that time I erased what I had achieved. My weight is back to where it was (plus 2 or 3 pounds, adding insult to injury!), and I’ve definitely lost endurance.

I’m not kidding myself into thinking that a couple days back to the gym is going to erase months of not going. There are no quick fixes, and it’s going to take months of commitment and hard work to get back to where I was, let alone to where I want to be. But even if it takes me time to figure out how I’m going to fit exercise into my new schedule, in the meantime something is better than nothing. Just getting a bit more movement, a bit more activity, has been so beneficial in improving my mood and dealing with the emotional energy.

Our culture likes to split body, soul, and spirit into compartments, then try to treat these aspects of who we are in isolation (prayer becomes a merely mental exercise; medicine can be almost like putting a body up on a rack like a car and fixing mechanical stuff), but it’s really not that simple. We’re not ghosts animating corpses. We’re not “spiritual beings trapped in a shell.” God created us as integrated, whole beings. Body and soul are knit together, not one a prison and the other a prisoner. The tragedy of death is that it is a ripping apart of what was never intended to be sundered. The joy of the disciples at Jesus’ resurrection is that they saw in Christ the hope of body and soul reintegrated after death into something new, something even greater, and that Jesus promised them a share in that reality.

What we do with our bodies impacts our souls. Likewise, what we do with our thoughts and emotions has an impact on our body and our spirit. Something undealt with in one aspect of our person will have implications for the rest of who we are, because all these aspects participate in each other. Emotion repressed or improperly expressed will have ramifications for our bodies, and also for our relationship with God and with the people around us. Giving our bodily appetites free rein will definitely affect our feelings and our will, our ability to choose, and usually have very deleterious effects for our bodies. Trying to be “all spiritual” without thinking how our bodies participate in the reality of who we are will hobble all our efforts.

This past year, for better or worse, I’ve let fasting go by the wayside. Mourning Tracy’s death has been ascesis enough of its own. I miss the back and forth of fasting in preparation for a feast. It’s time to move back into this discipline, of teaching my body that its appetites don’t get to govern all my choices. It’s a form of training, of working the “self-control muscle.” It’s not about earning anything (there is no “earning” anything when it comes to God), nor is it dieting, but it’s about conforming myself to what God has created me to be, a man in control of momentary impulses and desires and able to think clearly, to choose what He would have me do in every situation in which I find myself. Not fasting does to the soul what not exercising does to the body. A day here or there, or a period of time due to extenuating circumstances is okay (like forgoing exercise because you’re ill or recovering from a broken bone), but there comes a time to get back into the routine.

Lest anyone think that the body is a bad thing or something to be “beaten” into submission, remember that God created us embodied creatures, and everything He created is good. When we are baptized we are united to Christ, but it is our bodies that are submerged into the waters of baptism. When we receive communion, it is not a merely intellectual exercise, but we receive the Body and Blood of Christ via our mouths. When we die, the body should be treated with reverence. Though body and soul are separated, the body is still part of the person we know and love (present tense). The body is not a thing to be abused or denigrated, but brought into proper service of our personhood and honored, all the way up to the end.

Our bodies participate in our salvation, in our prayers. I’ve found that making the sign of the cross is a powerful form of prayer. Demons hate it. When I’ve faced temptation, when I’ve been in situations where I feel the need to pray but no words come, simply making the sign of the cross is enough to “thaw my mind,” to help me to follow bodily prayer with mental and “heart” prayer. Praying out loud, whether my own words or the words of a prayer from a prayer book or that I’ve memorized, even just saying the name of Jesus, can achieve the same thing. The smell of incense can draw our minds back to church, to other times of prayer, and pull our minds in that direction (a friend of mine jokingly says of incense, “it smells like Jesus was in here,” but he’s not wrong; God is, after all, everywhere present and fills all things, and anything that reminds us of that truth is a good thing). Learning the feel of a prayer rope in the hand and developing that “reflex” of prayer is another way of training the body to serve us, in bringing all of who we are to God.

So, it’s time to remember that my body needs to participate in my salvation, and it’s time to do the things it needs to be healthy, to work together with soul and spirit to offer the entirety of my being to God. And that includes “leg day.”