Imagine to Remember

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the matriarch, Baby Suggs tells her people in a sermon that the only grace they can have is the grace they can imagine. If they cannot see it, they will not have it. And yet the rest of her sermon focuses on the body. But what does the body have to do with our experience of grace? ⁣⁣She instructs the children to laugh, the men to dance and the women to cry. She tells them to love their flesh, the inside parts and the outside parts . To love their hearts, especially their hearts, for the heart is the prize. They must love themselves and each other especially and in spite of those who wish them harm. Her version of grace does not deny the body, but lives in the body, delighting in its joys and wonders. She tells her congregants “This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms”. ⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Her version of grace emphasizes the collective, and the necessity of loving relationships. Prayer is not only an embodied practice but also a communal one. Prayer can be silent and motionless but often prayer is physical; raising hands, holding hands, bowing, kneeling, prostrating, dancing, swaying, anointing, blowing, laying hands. One of the ways in which God’s grace is made manifest to us is through communion with one and other.

Profound loneliness is one of the defining features of modern life making this grace inaccessible to so many. In the 2017 the UK established its first ever Commission on Loneliness. Terms like “touch starvation” and “skin hunger” have entered the the culture as so many people yearn for loving embrace but have no one with whom they can share this tenderness. There is no need to cite one of the countless studies that demonstrate to what we already know to be true. This isolation is making us deeply sick. This separation is sort of collective violence we visit upon ourselves and one and other. It is entirely unprecedented in human history. Without connection, without communion there are parts of ourselves that we cannot access that remain unrealized and inaccessible. This is the loss of grace in our lives and what a terrible loss it is.