body language

So often we don’t need words; we need an embodiment of love.  We need compassion as a posture, protection like a shielding movement, one body curling over another.

Let’s don’t just talk about love, the apostle John once wrote, let’s practice it.

“You need to learn to pay attention to more than just the words people say if you want to get an accurate idea of the situation,” Riley’s instructor explains, her voice rising and falling, a digital wave meandering through our home like wind.  “Remember to look for nonverbal communication.”

It takes a long time, a tremendous amount of work, extensively expended energy, and a considerable amount of practice for Autistic people like Riley to decode the body language of people around them.  Their own nonverbal cues, being either nonexistent or often disconnected from their thoughts, can contribute to a tangle of mysterious interpersonal exchanges when other people, reading them, take on incomprehensible shapes.

Most of us don’t think of this, how we’re all at least bi-lingual, because our bodies have language, too.

Lately I’ve been decoding the physical postures of Christ, His body language, while He walked the earth.  What do you make of His arms stretched wide against the rough crossbeam of a cross, His knees pressed into the dirt while His finger scrawled away shame in the dust, His hands reaching to touch putrefied, leprous flesh?  What do you make of His body halted mid-step, turning toward human need?  The body of Jesus made more than a few memorable speeches, and still does, or should, if we, who are now His limbs and organs, His skin and bones, haven’t forgotten to match His movements with our own.  Seems to me that I just can’t get an accurate read on the situation unless I read His body as well as His words.

From where I work in the kitchen, my knife flashing gleam as I dice a pile of carrots, I overhear Riley’s online class in progress, all the bold voices of her friends, how some of their syllables land hard, emphasized in unusual places.  From time to time, they get distracted and start talking amongst themselves, randomly discussing the happenings of a late-night spurt of group gaming—I only shot at you because you challenged me—and their teacher corrals their attention back to matters at hand.  I can’t help but think about how much of life happens online these days, no bodies, just voices sounding, like percussion, just virtual challenges, virtual aggression, virtually no actual reaching to place a warm hand on a cold shoulder.

Today, the students are learning what for most of them amounts to a foreign language, body language, one most of the rest of us imagine we know fluently.  I don’t know about you, but I can see a body move and still completely misinterpret what it’s saying to me, and most of this happens entirely below the level of my consciousness.  Like the students, I could use some practice in paying careful attention, in listening.

Ohhh, I hear someone in the class comment, in deep, throaty epiphany.  You mean people say a lot of things without words, too?

I’m with him, suddenly remembering, and wondering what it means to carry the love of God in the movement of my body, to let Him literally form me according to His own posture.  I want Him to show me how to move like He does, how to say what He says.  Teach me your body language, Lord.

Riley’s instructor shows the class pictures, asks them to discuss what a person in a potential job interview might be saying with crossed arms, with eyes glancing down and away, with raised eyebrows.  Not easy cues, even for those of us graced with more intuitive interpretation skills.

“What about this picture? You’re talking about your qualifications, and the interviewer makes this face, does this with her arms.  What does it mean, do you think?”  The instructor’s questions are gentle, her tone wide open with possibility.

Using the fine edge of my knife, I begin to peel the outer layer of papery skin from a red onion, thinking of people, how we contain multitudes, how our meanings layer protectively over the heart.  Juices stain my fingertips purple, and the fumes bring me to tears, but I lean in, sniffling, listening to the class discussion, remembering my own days in language classes, how in unison we students labeled photos with flourishing French that curled from our mouths in serifs; how we awkwardly tested syllables on our tongues.  In language class we learn surfaces, the hard, flat lines of fact.  It’s a necessary start, but one that never really leads to fluency, which only comes with experiential knowledge, with immersion.

How do I ever learn the language of heaven except to dwell with Christ, except in endless conversations, face to face with Him?  As John Mark Comer wrote in Practicing the Way, I must be with Him to become like Him so I can do what He did.

Uh, maybe she’s not interested?  Someone in the class says, tentatively.

Maybe I’m talking too much, maybe that’s why, someone else says.  I talk a lot.

I hear Riley murmur softly, a willing assent, never one to deny the truth.

“Well, yes.  Maybe,” the instructor says carefully.  “Let me ask you this: What does interest look like?  She’d be looking at your face, right?”

Except that Riley and Adam and other people with Autism almost always give everything their full attention without deciding that they want to, because they can’t prioritize attention.  They can listen carefully to all your words without making eye contact.  They can display no facial expressions and be thoroughly captivated.  Their own body language can be entirely compromised by an overloaded and disconnected central nervous system.

And how do the rest of us learn to interpret the tones and expressions and postures of love when our own hearts fumble the giving, when our brokenness garbles the receiving?  Perhaps we start, like these students do, with a model, watching Him move, thinking about what He means, and then, for fluency, moving with Him.  We practice speaking His language.

I’m immersed:  He stretches out His arms, so I put down the knife and stretch mine out, too.

It amazes me that God chose the universal embodiment of come into my love, that yielding, giving posture, to forever be the shape for conquering death.  That’s saying something.  His stance for battle invited an embrace, and watching Him, I understand that every kind of freedom begins just that way, those arms reaching wide, from east to west.

I can feel the tips of my fingers tingling as I inhale and exhale.

“Listen,” Riley’s instructor says from the other room, her voice suddenly bold.  “Don’t just think about what these nonverbal expressions mean.  Practice using them yourself.  Think about your body language.”