reformation
“This is where your shoulders are actually supposed to rest,” my physical therapist says. She has taken muscle and bone in capable hands and has literally rotated my shoulders back and down, holding them carefully in place as I lay, yielded, on her therapy table.
“I’m sure it feels weird, though, because your muscles have been overcompensating for such a long time, trying to manage in whatever way they can, that they haven’t been allowing your shoulders to sit here. So, the dysfunctional position feels normal to you. Tell me, does it feel to you right now that your neck is where it’s supposed to be?”
I pause, considering.
“Yes?” I grin. My answer comes out a question, because I have guessed where she’s headed.
She shakes her head, pushing up her shirt sleeves, then draws a line down the center of my nose, my torso, with an outstretched arm, her hand flattened like a blade. A hank of long, dark hair slips from her ponytail and grazes her nose.
“This is the central line,” she says, unconsciously blowing that errant hair away, and I can’t help, knotted up as I am with God, but think of the prophet Isaiah all those years ago, calling us sheep, himself included, saying that we’ve all gone astray, turning to our own way. I imagine fluffy bodies dotting a thousand hills, spreading out away from the knot crowded around the shepherd, like syrup flowing down, following our every distraction, running from our fears, meandering into our isolation. I realize I, with my crooked, off-center neck, my shoulders habitually drifting up and curling in, embody the human condition. We are prone to leave, to walk right off the Way, to get lost without even knowing how far we’ve wandered.
“See, you think you’re holding your body according to its natural symmetry, but your neck is actually sitting way off to the left,” she says, gently lifting my neck, her fingers splayed along my spine, guiding the muscles up and over. “And…this is where it’s supposed to be.”
The dysfunctional position feels normal to you. Oh, if only it weren’t so, but what she says thrums with truth, because I know that even my motivations for doing good can be crooked at the root, and me completely blind to the malformation.
I murmur my agreement, appreciating her insight into the mysteries of pain and tension in my body, the reasons why, as nerves and veins along tangential pathways get squeezed by my inflamed muscles, I experience fatigue and discomfort in parts of my body that, according to my limited understanding, seem unrelated to the muscles under treatment. I appreciate how extensively she has mapped human musculature in her mind. Sometimes, she pulls up an app on her phone and with her fingers pushes away layers of muscle and tissue to show me the specific place she means to focus her attention.
Allowing myself to rest now in her hands, I try to memorize what a healthier posture feels like, imagining how my body will complain, how it will resist, when she’s no longer holding everything in its proper place. Briefly, I am determined to exert my will, to force the muscles to obey, even though years of battling these things has taught me about the limitations of my mind.
For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
“They don’t want to stay there either,” my physical therapist says, meaning my muscles, indicating the resistance she has felt against the work of her hands, as she gently releases her grip on my shoulders.
I feel my bones float forward as my muscles take over again, and it stuns me a little, this idea that I will not be able to think my way back into a healthy posture; that I am not even consciously aware, apart from help seeing, of the disharmony at work in my own body. I have learned that it will take months upon months of consistent, purposeful effort to retrain my muscles, and that on my therapist’s part even more than mine, to make incrementally fractional progress. More than likely I will need this, this appointment for resting beneath her forming, reshaping hands, indefinitely. And so, I make room every week to come to her, to yield to her work.
But I grew, as a tender shoot, out of the kind of philosophy that could clear cut a soul from the vine, the idea that just about every good pursuit in life really comes down to mind over matter, this a pervasive Western idea more than any particularly deliberate strategy of my upbringing, though the notion pretty much bled into everything. As a result, I’ve spent a lot of years yielding to the grip of God’s reforming hands as He moves my heart, shifting my posture back toward Him and that Knot following Him closely, in step with Him as we ascend the hills.
He keeps showing me, as of course a good shepherd would, that sin carries its implications far beyond my consciousness; that the break in human union with the divine has literally broken the harmony between body and soul, as it has the synergy intended in all creation. He keeps telling me, in pretty much any way He can, that it will take far more than the determination of my mind—for what I want to do I do not do—to keep my path straight. Moralism can’t restore my soul, because I can’t think my way into the kind of transformation that only happens as I yield to the washing of renewal and rebirth by the Holy Spirit.
I did some digging and discovered that the phrase mind over matter actually originated in geologist Charles Lyell’s mid-19th century book, The Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of Man, where he suggested the existence of geological evidence for distinct developmental periods for, or the evolution of, human cognition and its impact on the world, and thus, “we are presented with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter.” But the substance of the idea—the dominion, or the sovereignty of, the human mind—showed up hundreds of years before, as early as 19 B.C., in Virgil’s Aeneid, wherein the poet famously wrote that “the mind drives the mass.” We should be clear, though, that the idolatry of human intellect, of human power and self-reliance, began, according to scripture, all the way back at the beginning of human existence. For what enticed human beings at first, what broke our union with God, except the dangled carrot of knowledge, of an omniscience that would make us like God? What broke us except the hope that we could usurp sovereignty and take up the defining and providing, the creating, ourselves?
Even those of us who know better, who understand that our condition, our problem, our pain, has mushroomed well beyond our control, feel tempted to say, if only mind over matter were actually enough, and yet, if we can accept it, grace comes with the understanding that we need help beyond ourselves, for this leads us to intentional, appointed yielding, to a relationship with One who knows how we are put together, how we can be healed.
“Top three exercises this week?” I always ask this after my physical therapist has encouraged me to—very slowly—sit up at the edge of the table.
“You might feel dizzy for a minute or two,” she always cautions, watching my face, brows knitted.
I ask because I know that as I go, I’ll lose track of this time with her, that I’ll get distracted, that it will only be repeated, daily practices that at least keep me remembering the feel of her hands holding my shoulders down and back, lifting and shifting my neck back into alignment.
And so it is that the slow, continuous work of healing, of transformation, becomes both about attentive, appointed yielding, me showing up to be reformed, and active, practical remembrance, or what the philosopher K.A. Smith called, “micro-rituals that have macro significance.” I need daily rhythms that keep me coming back to an understanding of alignment, that remind me that I would, without care, fall way out of line. The author John Mark Comer said it well, “But the main function of self-effort in our formation is to do what we can do—make space to surrender to God via the practices of Jesus—so God can do what we can’t do: heal, liberate, and transform us into people of love (Practicing the Way, 85).”
My physical therapist smiles, that errant hair softly slipping out again from behind the ear where she tucked it, starts forming her body into an example for me, says, with a glinting wink, “Mainly this week, I just want you to practice doing this.”
