Cyborgs,SuperModels+ Billy the Billboard:10 Ways to Hack the Body (of Christ)
I dreaded going to bed that year. Every night I would lie down tentatively, my stomach gnawing. I knew I wouldn't sleep without food. I could function during the day without food, but not at night. And, of course, I couldn't eat. That's the sickness. It is almost impossible to eat.
I had no food in my room or money to buy food----but my roommates had a fridge. And one of them had peanut butter. I would wait until everyone was in bed and would sneak to the fridge, my toes cracking in the silence. Furtively, I would grab the jar and a spoon, my heart pounding, and eat several mouthfuls, then put it back and slink to my room and bed, finally to sleep. I did not do this every night, just the nights I had to. One night I opened the jar and found a note inside: "Be sure your sins will find you out."
I was caught. Guilty. I never ate her peanut butter again. I just kept starving myself. But the sin I felt guilty for was the wrong sin. My sin wasn't stealing. It was hating my body and trying to make it disappear.
We have so many ways of hating our bodies. Have you seen them?
Bestselling books tell us how:
The 4-Hour Body:
From the website:
"Thinner, bigger, faster, stronger . . . . Is it possible to reach your genetic potential in 6 months?
Sleep 2 hours a day and perform better than on 8 hours?
Indeed, and much more! The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body."
For women, hacking the body looks a little different.
So we have competitive shows –the Biggest Loser---that hack the body in alarmingly short periods of time. (And now poor Rachel is the object of worry and scorn.) But what do we expect when the body is the enemy that must be starved and hacked and exercised 6 hours a day?
Or-----simply starved.
But we know that perfect, hacked bodies are very useful---for selling things:
And we don't need whole bodies and faces. Just pieces of bodies are enough.
These perfect bodies can be used to sell anything, even
Yes, cancer research . ....
(But, thank goodness, some industries are safe, beyond sexualizing. What can they do to my family's occupation----commercial salmon fishing in Alaska??)
Who knew??
And—down that same road, instead of using bodies in ads, why not use the body AS an ad, like "Billy the Billboard," who auctions off space on his face and body to the highest bidder.
And—down that same road, instead of using bodies in ads, why not use the body AS an ad, like "Billy the Billboard," who auctions off space on his face and body to the highest bidder.
OR---there’s another direction we can go. We can overcome the limits of these fleshly bodies by slicing them open and inserting transdermal implants.
These are real life people—who do indeed call themselves cyborgs,
a subset of transhumananism: man and machine as one being. Man's mind is really only the useful part. The body? Oh so much better as a machine.
And when the body and face start aging, we can hack that another way too:
Some of this is new---but under the skin of it, we’ve been doing it for millennia.
We've believed for thousands of years that this body is mine. Your body is yours. It's my property. I can do what I like with it. I can hack it, starve it, sell it, pierce it, scar it, ink it, magnetize it …. It’s mine. (And after 6 years of pregnancies and 6 years of nursing,I wanted my own body back soooo badly!!)
At the heart of all of this, in what might look like a glorification of the body and the celebration of the body and its beauty and sexuality---in fact, it’s the opposite. For all of our modernity and all of our technological advances---we hate our bodies now more than ever. The faster and further we pursue technology, the more we resent our fleshly mortal humanness, which limits our true potential. (We could be so much MORE!! 2 hours of sleep!)
It
sounds just a little familiar . …
"One bright morning when this life is over, I'll fly away
WHen the shadows of this life have gone, I'll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly . . .
I'll fly away . . .. "
And there we are----us good Christian people dreaming of wings and halos and a fleecy airy heaven in the same company with cyborgs, transhumanists, supermodels and Madison Avenue, all of us either turning the body into a commodity, or ignoring it altogether, and eating whatever we want, allowing ourselves to mushroom into diabetes and ill health, unable even to climb the stairs. We long for another because we're wasting the gift we've been given.
Dear Friends, as someone has said, "We do not have bodies; we are bodies."
Dear Friends, as someone has said, "We do not have bodies; we are bodies."
And so shall we ever be. We will never not be a body.
Nor do we own our bodies, ourselves.
"Or -----didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. So let people see God in and through your body." (1 Cor. 6, The Message)
Did you hear that?
"
"Let people see God in and through your body."
I am working on this, too.
Friend, don't punish what God loves.
Don’t despise what God made.
Don’t trash what God cherishes.
When you do that, when you hurt your body, you’re hurting all of us, the Body of Christ. Our body.
Don’t you know?
Don’t you know??
Don’t you know??
Your body’s not yours. Love it like it’s God’s.
Because it is.
Because it is.
