Eve's Sermon: Suddenly...My Body

Eve Ensler gave a sermon recently, for us and the world, through her body. Unexpected, to say the least, to have the word "sermon" paired up with “Eve Ensler,” the tenacious poet-artist responsible for The Vagina Monologues and V-Day, a now global network working adamantly to end violence against women. But Ensler spoke with the refrain-rhythms of the best of Baptist preachers. You can listen to it here, if you’d like, about 13 minutes long.

It wasn’t a sermon in the disciplinary or religious sense, unless religious here refers to that which convicts, informs, enlightens, and demands something of you. The best religious sermons do all that. But rare is the male or homiletical-professor-preacher who will hear a sermon in what Ensler says so eloquently, with her "too-muchness" of wise passion we so need today. I heard: Our bodies are our intimate link with everything around us, within us, beyond us. Our bodies can awaken us to the interdependence of everything. They can awaken within us a strength beyond imagining, even if that strength comes at times of greatest physical weakness, even near death.

All this was serendipitous for me this past week, which often urges me to pay attention, to listen. I had spoken with a bodywise woman a couple days ago. We were lamenting together the abilities—sometimes the need—of women to dissociate from their bodies, to live a life of the mind with little reference to or awareness of the body. Many have much greater cause for this mind-body split than I—those facing rape, molestation, negotiating cultural demands for emaciated ‘beauty’ and more.  Nonetheless, I too had had a need to dissociate body from mind, my biological-fact from awareness. 

Earlier than anyone was prepared, awareness arrived in my young body of heightened emotional-intensities and sensate knowledge way “too much” for my family culture or school-town environments. This “too-muchness” was corralled in various socializing and religious fashion, hemmed into the darkest spots of shame and embarrassment available to a creative, young girl such as myself. During my junior year of high school, I was finally strong enough to vow suppression of it all forever. Live as if my body did not exist, except in moments of shaming weakness. I even ritualized the vow with words and action, just like any feminist would have shown me, had I known one “out of the closet.” (I realize I knew several—strong women who implicitly shaped my strength to respond to my needs like this—but none would ever name themselves in such fashion.)

Growing up in small-town life is reason enough for any girl to dissociate from her body, though my own home-life exceeded idyllic. I had all I needed, and more, except that which girlhood requires for healthy expression, acceptance, life. Communities under a (couple) twenty thousand population need all the skill-resourcing and shared labor they can muster. Families choose more often to live in closer proximity and things like women’s-equality or feminism have little entrance in places in which I grew up. Town sociability is strong, of course, but most women make their peace early with the inequalities, the sexual innuendoes, the body-slights from the old-boys. Sociable comfort requires swallowing a lot that seems unnecessary—was unnecessary—to most women of the town. So for nearly thirty years, or at least the twelve years of early womanhood from adolescence into age thirty, I lived solely in my head. I achieved in intellectual pursuits, through a terminal degree and a tenured professorship. And I love what I do, the way in which it provides both resources and spaciousness for me to explore life at large. But suddenly, I have a body…or better, it has me.

This is where Ensler got to me. Ensler’s sermon begins there. She became aware that when she was growing up, even through her mid-40’s, she “had no reference point for her body” at all. “For a long time,” her sermon begins, “there was me and my body.” … “Me was a floating head. For years I actually only wore hats. It was a way of keeping my head attached. It was a way of locating myself. If I took my hat off, I wouldn’t be here anymore.” What an apt description! Speaking now as a Protestant, as a Presbyterian Christian who loves her tradition, I can say with a sad smile we live as floating heads. Presbyterian heads in the South also wear hats to church. I’ll never see them going to church without Ensler’s words in my head. My head.

Then Ensler became aware of her body, before and after her creation/performances of The Vagina Monologues. Her body became a thing, an object, something to be conquered, “like the earth itself,” she observes. She now had a new commodity to use for entertainment, for work, for others. She notes that she did learn to take care of it—becoming vegetarian, staying sober, not smoking—but this was not unlike an abusive parent showing moments of kindness. “My father was kind to me on my 16^th birthday, for example,” she says. The man who beat and molested her for most of her young life had a kind moment, from time to time.

Then the cancer arrived. “Or I found out I had cancer”…“It was like a speeding bird, smashing into a windowpane. Suddenly, I had a body.” It was one to be poked with needles, burned from the inside-out with chemicals, weakened and threatened in its very life. But here’s the climax, so to speak. Here’s the turning point in her proclamation. “Cancer exploded the wall of my disconnection,” she confides. “I suddenly understood that the crisis in my body was happening in the world, and it wasn’t happening later. It was happening now.” Her greatest threat became her most startling awakening and call to action for the world. What had had no reference point at all became the opening life of passion, connection, interrelationship. Her rhythmic passions, now in prose: “Suddenly my cancer was the cancer that was everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed…the cancer of buried trauma. The cancer of caged chickens and polluted fish. … The cancer that is everywhere from our carelessness.” She quotes author Phillip Shepherd: “If you are divided from your body, you are also divided from the body of the world, which then appears to be other than you or separate from you rather than the living continuum to which you belong.” Ensler’s body is now Eve’s reference point of connection to all others, to the suffering of all, to the gifts and graces of all. Her body—selflessly, without reciprocity—offers her now belonging to the wide swath of creation, to everything that is.

Ensler concludes in classic "black-preaching" form, though I'll leave that for now. Words in prose fail to communicate it anyway. For my purposes, and in quieted tone, I note simply that I got a whiff of Ensler's proclamation last night as I walked quietly, slowly, in the dusky light, filled somehow with the harmonies of crickets and cicadas. I crafted a space of mindfulness-in-motion, attending to open-bellied posture and breaths that went all the way to my knees. And I knew something I don’t know how to articulate. It knocked against my mind in funny insights—that houses and yards actually smell differently from one another; that as many times as we forget the breath we can always be returned to it, remembering; that a strange oneness and wonder is always on the cusp of the next step. Perhaps Eve’s sermon had simply created its spaciousness in a body over-weary from under-bodied-ness in intellectual employment. Perhaps Eve’s passions blossomed through my bodied-self, pushing up into my awareness at just the right time, having germinating for recent hours.

Or perhaps this Eve is offering me a newly harvested fruit, with her wizened and impish smile of welcome. This time, she says to me, this time the fruit redeems, invites, reconnects. You and your body. All of our bodies—male and female and all those in between—with the world. Women giving new life to anyone who can receive it, like we do.