Sex & Your Body: Reconnecting with Embodied Spirituality

A Guest Post from Dr. Kelly Edmiston

Guest Post from Dr. Kelly Edmiston.

Kelly is the lead pastor at the Vineyard Church in Stafford Texas. She is an expert in sexuality and spirituality. Her research equips parents to cultivate a healthy sexuality in their kids, free from shame. Kelly’s deepest desire is to see people set free from shame and walk in full and abundant life. Kelly lives in Sugarland, TX with her husband and three children.
——
Last week my 11-year-old son woke up with debilitating stomach pain. He told us that he felt nauseous and weak. Oh no, I thought. I noticed quickly that he could not walk or move around with ease. My husband immediately called the pediatrician. The pediatrician asked my son to try and jump in the air. He couldn’t. The pediatrician asked him to stand on one foot. He couldn’t. The pediatrician ordered us to go to the ER immediately. He suspected appendicitis. Appendicitis can be very dangerous once the appendix ruptures because the infection spills into the other internal organs, making kids very sick. If doctors don’t catch it early enough then kids have to stay in the hospital for days after surgery so they can get IV antibiotics. When the appendix ruptures, the infection leaks out and poisons the rest of the body. For my son, we wouldn’t know the state of his appendix until they got into surgery.

As I listened to the surgeon explain this reality and held my son’s hand, I prayed, “Please Jesus, stop the poison from leaking!”

After surgery, the surgeon got us from the waiting room and told us that we were lucky we brought my son to the ER when we did. We learned that he was hours away from a significant appendix rupture.

As Christians in 2024, we are experiencing a leaking poison when it comes to our sexuality.

Let me give you a few examples of this poison from my 20 years of pastoral ministry.

A young woman sat in my office a few weeks ago seeking help. She told me about her childhood abuse. She told me that since her abuse as a child, she has only been involved in sexual relationships with men who harm her body during sex. The stories she told me were devastating. I wept with her as she described the horror. At the end of our time together, she told me, “I still have this sneaking suspicion that all of this is my fault.”

A man in his 50s sat across from me and beside his wife in a coffee shop where he shared his desire to stay married to his wife and begin a new season with an “open marriage.” He said that he longs to stay “heart monogamous” with his wife but be free to have multiple sexual partners. The wife looked at me, bleary-eyed, and hesitantly agreed to this “new plan.” They were seeking my pastoral blessing.

A teenager seeking belonging and identity got in trouble with his parents for attending a party where the participants were “practicing” sex acts on each other. When his parents asked him about the party and why he went, he explained “It’s not a big deal. What I do with my body is my business. He went on to explain to them (and me), “I don’t love any of these people, it’s just a way to learn about sex with no commitments or drama.”  They ended up in my office asking me for counsel.

The poisonous, toxic sexuality is seeping into every nook and cranny of the Church. The primary symptom of this poison is how we view the body.

Over the next few weeks, I will explore what it means to reclaim the body in Christian spirituality.

In a quest to define Christian spirituality, many writers have focused on the believer's inner life and measured the “success” of one’s spirituality by how much someone prays, meditates, reads the bible, and sits in contemplative silence. In this narrowly defined spirituality, we have lost the embodied faith we were destined for. The embodied faith recognizes that God made a body out of the earth, breathed life into dry bones, and assigned the body to join with another body to make more bodies. The God of the Bible is a God who loves bodies. If we want to get really specific, the God of the Bible loves naked bodies. Can I get an amen? (See Genesis 1-3) We must never forget that God loved bodies so much that God became a body.

In this toxic spirituality focused only on the inner life, we have missed out on the spirituality of running, sleeping, eating, drinking, pleasure, and sexual expression.

Tragically, many of us have wrongly believed that our “sexuality” is the very thing that separates us from God, furthering the divide between body and soul. This dualism has robbed us of the life God created us for. It has led us to body abuse, to ridiculous sexual ethics (Open marriages!? For Christians? What?!), and to terrible choices that have not led us to flourishing, pleasure, or intimacy.

Author Thomas Ryan puts it like this: “Decades of socialization, dualistic anthropologies, and patriarchal theologies have conditioned both men and women to view the body as more of a liability than an asset in the search for holy.” (Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality)

To reclaim the body in Christian spirituality we must learn to view the body as a resource for knowing God, not a barrier between us and God. To do this, we must experience four primary values.

1.        I am my Body

2.        My Body is Holy

3.        Pleasure is Good

4.        God is Everywhere

5.        What I do with my body matters.

I am my Body

My daughter Ruth Cate (RC) is 7 years old in a few weeks. As an almost 7-year old RC does not know herself apart from her body. She is free, unaware, unself-conscious, uninhibited, and without shame when it comes to how she experiences her body and how she experiences her body in the world.

However, these unself-conscious days are numbered for her. Very soon, she will know herself not as a body but as having a body. Her body will move from being the subject of her identity to an object of her identity. This is disembodiment. Most children experience this disembodiment around age 10 or 11. Once this happens, her body will become something to be judged, controlled, contoured, manipulated, and perhaps even criticized (by herself, by her peers, by the culture she is in, etc.). As parents, it is our role to coach our children as they experienced things that divide their bodies from their souls. This is what I am writing a whole book about. Subscribe here for more. https://kellyedmiston.substack.com

As our body becomes an object and no longer the subject of our identity, we begin to see it as “it.” We see “it” compared to other bodies. This creates questions in our minds (and the minds of our children) like, Am I bigger or smaller? More muscular or leaner? How do I compare to the “perfect body” of Kylie Jenner, Taylor Swift, or some professional athlete? We make judgments on the body based on its abilities and strength.

To reclaim the body in Christian spirituality, we must recognize how we became disembodied. We can gently ask ourselves, When did that happen to me? What did I “learn” about my body? Who taught me? As we pinpoint our disembodiment and the practices related to that, we can begin to practice embodiment.

One simple way to practice embodiment today, thereby reclaiming the body in Christian spirituality, is simply to name your body as yourself. You can call your body “Her” or “Him.” What does she need today? What does she want to eat? What is she saying about sleep? How does he want to move today? etc.

In this reclaiming, we root into the reality that “I am My Body.” In the coming weeks, I will write on the remaining four values cultivate embodiment.