To Have a Body
It frequently strikes me as quite absurd that the most intense object of human shame is one we did not choose, namely, our bodies. This is notwithstanding the obvious alterations we can achieve naturally. Of course, we yield agency over our weight and may exercise to enhance certain muscles, though our results vary depending on our unique genetic propensity to retain muscle or store fat in specific regions. However, our bone structure and facial features are inescapable. If one burned every inch of fat from their body, they could still not escape the slight asymmetry of their jaw or the width of their ribs.
In one sense, this fills me with a sense of awe and love. Just as children receive unconditional, unearned love from a parent merely for being alive, perhaps we should receive our bodies in similar spirits. For all the grief we may give them, they did not choose to be assigned to us; maybe, under the care of a different consciousness, they would have a different, better life. Just as a child didn’t choose what parents to have, your body did not choose to be yours. You are impossibly tied to one another for a while, consciousness and carcass. As parent to child, our biological tie to our bodies is indestructible. If only we were shown a conveyor belt of limbs, torsos, and faces to select from…the excessive praise and admiration of individuals purely for their physical appearance is just as nonsensical as shame over having a ‘wrong’ one. How can one be ‘wrong’ if they never chose in the first place?
In another sense, we do not choose our bodies, and this terrifies me. This is not for the obvious reasons you might think; a fear of being stuck with insecurities only amenable by cosmetic surgery. Rather, surrendering to the notion of God creating our bodies is a foundation for lasting peace. Everything else—external validation or a moment of positive self-appraisal—is all too transitory and arbitrary. Unfortunately, I have serious reasons to doubt God’s alleged involvement, supposing He exists.
If God created us, what was the nature of His involvement? Does He endow us with just a soul; is this the meaning of ‘God created you’? Our genetic composition determines the phenotype of our bodies, whether or not we get dad’s eyes or mom’s hair. If God is involved in the creation of our bodies on a more intimate level, He does not draw them up from nothing; our appearance is derived from our ancestors. Is it that God uses our genes as raw material, deciding which ones we inherit, which genotypes become expressed in our phenotypes? This is the only way in which His involvement in our physical appearance seems plausible to me.
Perhaps our bodies are the result of a random and arbitrary inheritance of genes that is not incompatible with God’s existence. If God created everything, then He also creates nature and every biological process, including meiosis. Does He ‘set the stage’ for a play, so to speak, then simply allow it to run? How genes are shuffled during meiosis, which egg is released, and which sperm reaches it—all of it occurs by chance. The outcome, though shaped within a divinely designed mechanism, is governed entirely by randomness. After all, one could argue randomness and chance are phenomena God permits.
I do not find inherent comfort or meaning in knowing the odds of my existence are 1 in 10^2,685,000. In keeping with my prior proposal, His divinely created biological machinery could have spit out a different person and God may be indifferent as to who it was. Does He celebrate us being here, or because we are chance products of His machine, retrospectively conferring significance on our bodies and shoving a soul in the confines of our arbitrarily flawed faces?
There are a myriad of problems with envisioning God as being involved with our creation on an excruciatingly intimate level. After fertilization, the zygote begins to divide and form a blastocyst, which must implant into the uterine wall to begin the next stage of development. Some zygotes fail to implant, resulting in an early stage miscarriage, which is incredibly common. For those that survive, was God’s hand steadying them to the uterine wall, and those that failed denied existence for a specific reason? Or does God have no influence over biological factors interfering with blastocyst implantation, including endometrium quality and uterine blood flow? In which case, why would He selectively yield His influence over certain things and not others? Isn’t the more likely conclusion that He does not have such in-depth involvement to begin with, supposing we are also children of God, and He would not intentionally deny us our first breath?
Further, there are certain characteristics men and women find historically appealing. Are these preferences from God and is He covertly communicating His own preferences through the nearly universal consensus that certain features are generally desirable (i.e., those that elicit neurochemical markers of attraction on fMRI studies)? For those born denied such features—and not just one or two, but several—why would God deny them features others prefer? If we are truly all beautiful in our own way, why did He design our minds with a propensity to find common standards of beauty through which to see ourselves and evaluate others? It is such a great cause of human suffering and is morally benign, as one cannot help what they visually prefer. Conversely, other forms of dark human inclination—egotism, laziness, addiction—may be conceived of as evils intentionally permitted to strengthen our attachment to God in overcoming them. The same cannot be said of preferring specific features, even if a cause of dissatisfaction when absent within oneself.
I struggle with disillusionment on two fronts. That is, I often become disillusioned with even my disillusionment. While I am posing these questions concerning appearance ruthlessly, it does not match at all my own feelings. I genuinely marvel at the idiosyncrasies and beauty of everyone passing me on the street, from an 80-year-old woman to a baby. I believe beauty isn’t justified in terms of whether or not you find someone attractive. There is certainly beauty to be found that isn’t motivated by or present merely because of a romantic desire. I do not think there is a single person I could find that I would not think is beautiful, all the more so if they doubt it themselves, save for those who have committed heinous crimes.
It is a thinly veiled secret at this point that I harbor grand fantasies of God’s hands painting all of man, from the crease of one’s eyelid to the ball of his foot. In this way, when one vehemently dislikes something, they may console themselves with the thought God created it on purpose. Who are we to question Him? However, if He created us in a secondary way, as described earlier, this idea is irredeemable even if others say it can still be so. Then, when one experiences a negative self-appraisal, they have justification to digest it, to wonder about the other range of bodies that could have been paired with their consciousness. At my worst, I wonder if God concurs with the superficial lens of our current culture. Since He is in all of us, He is seeing through us collectively; are there not figments of His preferences in our society’s fixation with specific aesthetics on social media, for instance?
Perhaps this doubt is born from fear that if we ‘shake off our chains,’ so to speak, we have actually bought into another lie, a self-indulgent fantasy that God wants us as we are. Maybe He wants us in a general sense, a chance product of a series of processes He invented generally but doesn’t interfere with specifically. For what it’s worth, I desperately wish He has created every inch of us with His bare hands.
