Let the Bones Dance

This book is about what it means to have a body in the Christian tradition. And this book engages the problem of why the body has been ignored and even reviled in much of the Christian theological tradition.  When we are attentive to the wisdom, ambiguity, pain, and promise of our bodies, what do we learn about how we are made and who we can be?

I wrote this book because of my own embodied experience as a Christian and as a human being.  I also wrote this book because of all the pain and promise I feel and see in the bodies of the people I love and serve in churches and communities across the country.  My experiences as a survivor of sexual violence, as a mother, and a child of God sent me deep into a quest for new language for my faith tradition and for more life-giving ways to be present to the spaces where language is inadequate to the task of hearing and heeding the stories our bodies have to tell.  The why of this book is, at its core, about healing–not just my healing, but the church’s and the world’s.

This book addresses those issues, but in ways that are not often explored in the current conversations of the church. While I do not directly explore the question of sexuality and ordination and marriage, for instance, my work on bodies directly relates to those questions. Let the Bones Dance goes to root causes and conditions that give rise to the church’s most vexing problems. The book let bodies speak to us–with story, with poetics, with metaphors of tragedy, relationship, and ambiguity, in order to create space for exploring things like race, sexuality, and what it means to be a welcoming community. Befriending the stranger within our own embodied mystery cultivates generosity toward the strangers we encounter each day in the world.

Yes, it was profoundly challenging. And working with churches and individuals on these issues continues to be challenging.  And writing this book and engaging in the work that flows out of this book are also life-giving realties beyond measure for me. The book really wrote itself in my body. Putting it to paper was a spiritual practice, and radically healing for me as well.

This book was not written exclusively for women, but it was written by a woman.  Like my theological forefathers and foremothers, I write out of my faith tradition and formation and out of my experiences as a human being. My book is written for every body, just like John Calvin wrote his Institutes for everyone and Augustine wrote his Confessions for everyone. The experiences many women have (that some men have as well, like rape and parenting) are windows into more general human embodied experience (tragedy, relationally, and ambiguity). And they are vivid windows; and, more importantly, windows that have been shuttered and even shattered in the patriarchal patterns of the Christian theological tradition, especially in the Western church.

This book is a healing invitation to all bodies and to the church, as the Body of Christ.

Any body can find something in this book. It may particularly resonate with people of faith, and with those formed in Mainline Protestant traditions. But, I have heard from people from all over the world who have been formed by very different cultures and traditions than my own who resonate with Let the Bones Dance.