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.
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| Abstract painting by Phillip Hoyle |
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