Table Talk: Contemplation

Cross mixed media by Phillip Hoyle

     Historically, we are not sure when Mary Magdalene became a mystic. We are not at all sure that she traveled to Provence to evangelize and stayed on to the end of her life, meditating and living as a hermit. But we can assert that she began her contemplation when she wouldn’t give up Jesus’s body, even though he had died.

     In an effort to understand her preoccupation, we recall that she rushed to his tomb to anoint his body as soon as the sun came up after Sabbath. We may wonder if she really was the appropriate one for this task. Wasn’t it his mother’s responsibility? Did Mary Magdalene volunteer on behalf of a grief-stricken mother who couldn’t pull herself out of her deep depression? Did she go to the tomb as a sister of Jesus, or as some interpreters read, his wife? We don’t know, but she hurried there, full of curiosity, grief, and need. She discovered the empty tomb.

     When she asked a man nearby where they had taken Jesus’ body, he called her by name. Recognizing Jesus’ voice, she reached out and embraced him. But Jesus said, “No. Don’t cling to me.” Never before had he rejected her anointments of oil and tears or her rapt attention to his teaching. He had praised her willingness to leave all and follow. But now the relationship was changing. He was going away. She would have to rely on her memories. Thus Mary Magdalene began to contemplate the body of Christ, a practice she continued for many years and that earned her the distinction of becoming patron saint to religious contemplatives.

     The word “contemplation” comes from an ancient Latin word that described the work of a class of Roman priests who, through observation and study of signs and portents, foretold events. The word connotes both great intensity of observation and a space dedicated to that work. Mary’s strength of observation and feeling seems matched only by that of two or three other disciples of Jesus, but unlike them, she didn’t wait for Jesus to wash her feet. No, she washed his and dedicated herself to his ministry in unparalleled fashion. Although she reputedly retired to a hermitage late in her life, her earlier contemplation focused on the space of Jesus’ body as the temple of the Holy Spirit of God. What did she see there? What revelations came her way? What indications of the future?

     I imagine that Mary, in her contemplation, regarded the body of Christ: its beauty, its calluses, its tired muscles, its responsiveness to touch, its desire to be washed, its need for anointing. From her vantage point in the maritime Alps of southern France, she recalled his rather normal body and saw there visions of loving service to all kinds of people. She reflected on Jesus’ skilled healing touch, and considered the meaning of his holy acceptance of the body even when it was diseased, despised, and rejected. She pondered experiences of his love communicated through unusual relationships with ordinary folk. Perhaps she augured the power of Jesus’ acceptance and love as a model for bodyworkers and other lovers of humanity.

     She had seen his resurrected body fixing food and sharing meals with his followers as well as teaching them, and she realized his intention was to teach them to do what he had done. Jesus made clear that his ministry would be continued by his followers, who were to do even greater things than he. Mary contemplated the body of Christ within the space of her own body. Surely she accepted that her love for him was a beautiful thing, a monument to his power, and a glorification of the human body that foresaw and experienced resurrection. The continuing work of Christ would be caught up by hands that, like hers, reached out, touched, ministered, fed, and loved in an amazing variety of ways among an even more amazing variety of people.

     Christians too often try to bypass the body in the quest for spiritual growth and maturity. We risk missing Mary’s insight. We forget the corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth, his daily interactions with disciples, his hands of healing love, his great compassion for individuals and crowds who thirsted after the kind of life he exemplified and taught. We eagerly hear St. Paul’s words of resurrection as a spiritualization and conveniently forget his other difficult teachings of the resurrected body. We want to resurrect a spirit ministry but forget the hands-on nature of Jesus’ and Mary’s love. The risen Christ taught, yes, but he also fixed fish over a fire, broke bread, and otherwise entered the daily lives of his faithful followers. He taught them to feed hungry people, give clothes to the naked, heal the ill, and wash one another’s feet. Mary’s contemplation valued these acts as the greater things Jesus’ disciples would accomplish in the divine name.

Mary, Saint and patron of contemplatives, 

bless us as we join you in humble service, anointing the body’s hurts and communicating divine love. May we too contemplate the body of the living, dying, deceased, and risen Christ and come to see his and our bodies 

as the temples of the Holy Spirit of the Divine. 

Amen.

Fee photos by P Hoyle.
Can you think of them as somehow communicators of divinity?

Table Talk: Time to Heal

     A very tired woman came for a massage at the spa. She had traveled for four weeks on business to China, Japan, and England and back to the US twice. Her muscles were tight, both from hours sitting on a jet plane and from having run on the treadmill just prior to coming to the spa. Given the development and shape of her muscles, I was working deeply. As I approached her lower leg, she told me she had a broken bone that wouldn’t heal. A hairline fracture on the inside of her fibula, near the ankle, kept giving her terrible pain when she ran--her nearly daily exercise. “Would you be careful there?” she asked.

     Carefully working the ankle and listening to her talk, I finished up the leg with some long strokes and moved to her other side. As I massaged her right leg, I tactfully suggested she could swim for exercise to let the bone heal. “Yes, I could,” she said, but went on to explain how running gave her a good workout and a high release of endorphins. “I like the way running makes me feel.” She had been a triathelon contender and, having swum a lot, knew she couldn’t get the same benefits from swimming. Since it didn’t sound like she was going to quit running, I let my comments rest a few minutes. She talked more and admitted to working twelve to eighteen hours a day on some international project, rarely taking time off for herself or her family. Later, when we were laughing about something else, I suggested she take off a month for a vacation to let her bone heal. She agreed that she had the month coming, but if she took it, she’d want to have a tummy tuck. She was thirty years old, in great shape, and quite attractive.

     A tummy tuck. Running on a broken leg. I didn’t get it. Was she a victim of Madison Avenue advertising, thinking she had to look like a model? Did she have some compulsive disorder that caused her to imagine herself as a fifty-year-old movie star? Had a parent harped at her for being an out-of-shape teenager? Perhaps she was an over-enthusiastic disciple of the apostle Paul, daily pummeling her body both physically and mentally. Her wound seemed more than a broken bone. Her body may have become her enemy.

     St. Paul presented images of runners and boxers as he explained how he made decisions about his ministry. He pictured himself as a runner who, throwing off every encumbrance, dedicated himself to winning the race. Like a runner, he didn’t run aimlessly. Like a boxer, he didn’t just jab at shadows. He was fixed on a goal, and he disciplined himself to reach it. He claimed to punish his body and encouraged his readers to do so likewise as they tried to live successfully in the light of the Good News. Over intervening centuries the Apostle’s words often have been isolated from their context of advice on how to balance one’s sense of freedom in Christ with the need to live together in society. They have been moralized into a kind of rule of discipline and spiritualized into a concept of body rejection and sometimes even body hate. Was my client hurting herself daily in some unholy allegiance to a holy image? Was she loving the running while hating her body, its breakdowns, its aging?

     The encouragement of a beloved coach or of a holy apostle can be heeded with healthy or unhealthy results. Pushing oneself to excellence, even with an appeal to the sports adage “No pain, no gain,” may help one build muscle, strength, and stamina. But to go too far, to pay no attention to what is happening to the whole body, is to invite accident and injury. The freedom-loving and daily-disciplining Paul regulated his behaviors and, perhaps, his body with what he called “the law of love.”

     He learned the law from Jesus’ words: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” If the idea is simple, its practice is not. It assumes that one loves oneself. In principle it says the best social behavior requires self-consideration. Jesus and Paul assumed their readers loved themselves. Such self-love can serve as a helpful monitor for reading the ancient words of the apostle and for following his advice, even in sports and exercise. Love yourself; love your body. Make your body your friend. Take your vocation seriously, your relationships realistically, and your workouts religiously. But in so doing, take a vacation, pay heed to the needs of your family and friends, and give yourself time to recover. It may mean that you must take yourself lightly and lovingly. It certainly means you will accept and love yourself--your body, your strength, your aging.

     My tired, over-worked client was getting a massage. I saw that as hopeful. Would she take time to rest, to be restored, or would she make massage another quick fix-up of a stressed self? I hoped for the best: that she would love herself, love her body. Perhaps she would even come to love her body as herself.

Open our imaginations, Divine Creator, so we can recognize opportunities for healing and love. Amen.

Abstract painting by Phillip Hoyle

Table Talk: Saints Rescue

This group of Artist Trading Cards are inspired by the shape of a bird's egg, one of the symbols associated with Saint Mary Magdalene who figures into this week's meditation on the body. Artistically the set was part of a larger group that comprised a study in contrast rather than making an illustration for Easter or an interpretation of a saint. I think I need to buy a better camera!

Behold, the body includes and is the meaning, the main

concern, and includes and is the soul;

Leaves of Grass, W. Whitman

     Growing up, I had never known saints religiously. I had never knelt at one’s shrine or addressed a saint to pray on my behalf. I had only known them as names of churches and towns: Saint “X” Catholic church and school in our city, the village St. Mary on the road to Topeka, and St. Paul’s Lutheran Church where our neighbors attended. Of course, I ran into more saints as I matured. In mid-life, I even told a few saint stories to children and used saint images in collages. I came to see the saints as icons of holiness. As such, the saints intrigued me.

     I started reading more about saints, wondering what perspectives they could lend my life and interests. I wanted saints to make statements that could bring together spirit and flesh, sacred and secular, and other pairs of contrasting values and experiences related to the human body and sexuality. I used (or misused, as one friend accused) saints in collage icons, showing advertising models as holy figures. I wanted to rescue saints from what, to my liberal Protestant self, seemed to be superstitious practices, and at the same time, to make symbolic statements that would communicate my own values.

     But I discovered saints don’t need rescuing. To my surprise, I found out that their lives, works, and legends could support life and work in the opening decades of a new millennium. Perhaps that’s too grandiose. What I needed to figure out was how they could guide, enrich, and, somehow, rescue me.

     For a while I had the notion that I might rescue Mary Magdalene by making her the patron saint of massage therapy. She got a bum rap over the course of both Catholic and Protestant centuries. She symbolized repentant sinners, not a bad thing in itself, but surely her patronage of them reflects the questionable assumption that she reformed after years of demon possession and prostitution, that her conversion into a follower of Jesus transformed her from a sex-focused individual to a spirit-filled person who didn’t need or want sex. The selling of sexual services has long been perceived, in Christian parlance, as one of the worst of sins, and Mary was saved from this awful life.

     I was surprised to discover that another long-standing tradition declared her to be patron of contemplatives. She supposedly became a mystic and a hermit, and if she did not really do so as a person, she did it as a saint, perhaps fulfilling some kind of Third or Fourth Century penance for having focused so much on the body in a prior lifestyle. To make her patron of massage therapists, I reasoned, might somehow rescue her by giving a positive slant on her body-centered activities and make a helpful statement about her continuing and important interest in Jesus’ body. The new assignment could honor Jesus’ words about this anointing female who for eons would be remembered for doing a beautiful thing.

     Whether or not Mary Magdalene was the anointer of this particular story, John’s gospel did picture her hurrying to the tomb to reverence Jesus’ dead body by anointing it. Neat switch. She, the corrupt turned clean, was to anoint the clean tragically turned corrupt. Mary was amazed to find that God had already rescued the corrupt body with the anointing of a new physical spiritual life. Still, her own work did not go unrecognized, and in John’s gospel, Mary became not only a rescued individual and an anointer of bodies, but also the first announcer of the good news of Christ’s resurrection.

     Since Mary was who she was and has come to symbolize both repentant sinners and contemplatives, my efforts really ought to aim at rescuing massage therapy and therapists, including myself. The saints represent holy values and have often rescued under-valued human experience. They show us how house cleaning, printing, hair dressing, carpentry, studying, and basket making are, in fact, sacred. Surely this is my present task. I want to help rescue massage therapy from its being equated by some with hired sex. I want to encourage people to see this work as communicating love, hope, and enthusiasm for life. I want to interpret massage therapists as caregivers to the holiness of the human body. 

Mary, dear Mary, as we give massages, may we honor you and ourselves with the same love Jesus showed you. In so doing, may we become bearers of the glad tidings of the body’s beauty, worth, and healing. Teach us not to fear touching the profane and the sacred in the human body. Help us anoint the lively and the dying with equal love and concern. Rescue us by becoming our symbol of acceptance, wholeness, and love. 

In the name of the lover of all humankind. 

Amen.

Table Talk: Zoo

One panel from triptych of big horn sheep painting
by Phillip Hoyle

     Dianne, a classmate in massage school, asked if I would go with her to the zoo. She had an invitation to give massage there at the Hep-Fest, an educational outreach for people who may have been exposed to or are living with Hepatitis C. She needed one other massage therapist. I agreed to accompany her.

     We unloaded our equipment and lugged it to the designated area near the pachyderm house. We set up our tables under a big tent. Since people were already waiting for massage, we began work immediately. Between clients we met our therapist neighbors. An acupuncturist, who worked next to me, was sticking willing people with needles. Some of the needles had clumps of moss on the end, which she set on fire. They smoked, adding heat to the treatment as well as an air of the exotic to the scene. On the other side of Dianne was a good-looking Asian-American jock at a booth promoting physical fitness through exercise. Dianne, bright and beautiful, worked in Swedish style, rubbing oil on people’s legs, backs, and arms. I worked in Thai style, compressing points along meridians and stretching joints. The regal trumpeting of elephants contrasted with the pitiful cries of peacocks. Ducks waddled past with their ducklings in queue. And people, lots of people, mingled in the mix, watching a magician, a storyteller, and a caricature artist. They visited information booths. Some got massage.

     My main massage teacher spoke of his therapy room as a sacred space. In it he provides symbols, ceremony, and an atmosphere of healing. Emulating him, I made my therapy room a kind of sanctuary, a space dedicated to the practice of massage. My clients climb the stairs and enter, discovering artwork, candles, a water fountain, incense, and plants. The subdued atmosphere assists in relaxation. Overseeing the sessions are patron saints Mary Magdalene and the wise woman of my massage vision. They bring holiness to the space and to the work.

     I imagine there may be saints who bless each place I work. At the zoo, surely one can sense the presence of St. Francis of Assisi; the animals have called him there. St. John the Baptist seems to hover over the spa, where people come for pain relief, image remakes, and water treatments. I’m sure I saw St. Martha, patron of servers, when I was giving a massage at the coffee shop. St. Hillary, patron of attorneys, walked down the hallway when I worked at the lawyer’s office. Presumably, scholar Saints Jerome and Bede oversaw the learning of techniques and traditions in the massage school classrooms and clinic.

     While massage does not depend upon the presence of holy figures, it seems always to be a holy undertaking that may be enhanced by visualization. Massage serves as an invitation into a sanctuary, a safe place for relaxation and perhaps reflection. The external setting may be important, but whatever the outward conditions, massage discovers and exalts the sacred space of the body and always recognizes the holy one who is receiving the work. At a conference, massage relieves tired muscles caused by too many hours sitting and concentrating. In a business office, it creates a calm place within the body. In a coffee shop, the client already has come aside for refreshment. Privacy is afforded by the face cradle and sanctity by the experience of the massage itself.

     Zoo, workplace, spa, clinic, or studio, all can be significant places for massage. Each space, whether everyday or extraordinary, teaches some new aspect of holiness and invites a novel reflection on the body itself. One’s body is the necessary space for any massage. Even so, I am still looking for new places and people to massage. Perhaps I could work on you in the Botanical Gardens. Will we discover the gardeners’ patron St. Fiacre there tending flower beds? Perhaps St. Francis surrounded by his bird friends? It doesn’t matter, but they may lend a sense of the sacredness of your own self, your body, your life.

Herd Leader painting by Phillip Hoyle
Native American petroglyphs across North America often
portray animals. Animal spirits were sought as power totems
and the animals themselves as a major food source. In Euro-
American tradition saints often have animal symbols
attached to their portrayals. I came to realize that the connection
may be as old as humanity itself. If saints are sensitive to
animals, why not the rest of uss? Well it's an idea. 

Table Talk: Miracle

Sunflowers mixed media with collage by Phillip Hoyle

     My primary massage teacher, Mark Manton, told our class we’d be lucky if we didn’t work miracles. I felt relieved, as if some expectation was lifted from me. I went into massage because I enjoyed the work and thought it to be a good way to make a living so I could afford to do my artwork. But in massage I had encountered assumptions about healing and miracles that paralleled those of some Christians. As a minister, I never wanted to be perceived as some kind of miracle worker. I understood events that some people considered miraculous simply to be experiences beyond our common understanding. Still, some people wanted their minister to perform miracles, and now I find myself dealing with the same issue in massage. Some clients want and even expect miracles. 

     Mark reasoned that people get the best results from massage therapy if they contribute to their healing by changing habits of posture, hydration, and more. But sometimes a therapist releases a trigger point, and a person who has endured pain for years walks away from the session pain-free. When that happens, all their relatives and friends may line up at the massage therapist’s door looking for the same instant healing. Always a teacher, Mark wanted his clients to learn responsibility for their own health, not dependence on him for miracle cures.

     Obviously, miraculous-seeming releases from pain do take place. They indicate something important about the wonders of the human body to heal and of the potential for human relationships to encourage that healing. That’s enough of an explanation for me. I don’t want to be responsible to perform or believe in miracles in massage. Still, I do my massage work in the context of Christian images and stories, a context full of miracles.

     Although I am not very interested in the miraculous as such, I do find a strong correlation between the traditional actions of Christian healers and the modern-day practice of massage therapists. Reading the Bible, the lives of saints, or church history, I pay close attention when a healer takes an ill person into his arms or uses oils to anoint. Such images spark my imagination. I like to picture the scene at the temple gate of the lame man, newly-healed by Jesus’ apostles, running and leaping and praising God. I take to heart the words of the blind man who, when questioned, said of Jesus’ miracle, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” This ancient story from John’s gospel intrigues me. And I am moved by the sight of a modern minister solemnly anointing a dying person as she refers to the ultimate healing of being gathered into the arms of the divine. The apostles had spoken powerful words; the lame walked. Jesus made a mud plaster and placed it in the man’s eyes; the blind could see. The minister touched the body of the terminally ill person; the patient found healing relief.

     Most of these images and traditions find a similar kind of expression in current massage practice. Massage creates a particular relationship between therapist and client, not unlike that of religious leader and follower. One approaches a massage with trusting faith that the practitioner will be prepared and the work will be effective. Entering a massage room may feel somewhat like entering a church for a religious ritual. The skilled touch takes a variety of forms, often anointing the skin with oil, an act akin to the sacrament of unction. The therapist’s words may appeal positively to a person’s faith and may further instruct the client in self-treatment and care. For me, the correlation is strong, at least in its movement and its faith content. And besides, I now want to imagine myself as somehow continuing a healing ministry in the tradition of Jesus. The difficulty comes in the recognition that, in addition to being a teacher, Jesus was known as a miracle worker.

     While I incorporate these healing images into my work, I still have no expectation to perform miracles. Rather, I tend to think of my massage as an art, and list it alongside my writing and painting. I sometimes worry about designating massage as artifice. Is art adequate to healing? Can assuming a dramatic role be authentic? Will it heal? The ancient Greeks thought so. Surely some of their traditions have survived in Eastern Orthodox churches although many practices have been lost. Perhaps the older way of mixing drama, music, incense, and ointments in relationship with healing holds the key to my own growing understanding of my healer self.

Rio Grande mixed media with collage
by Phillip Hoyle

     I, an artist, may teach, but I hope never to work a miracle. I will lay my hands on person after person in order to touch their pain and release their muscles. I hope at least some clients will realize the beauty of their own lives, and I suppose that might be considered a miracle.




Life symbols in my mixed media paintings speak of natural processes that sustain life. I have always been amazed to find sunflowers adorning the driest landscapes and have long been amazed at the long, life-sustaining course of the Rio Grande River from southern Colorado, through the center of New Mexico, along the southwestern border of Texas and Mexico, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Our lives likewise have great resources for both sustenance and meaning, even in life's most challenging moments.