Lent: Plants, Bodies, and Jesus
by Jennifer Tompos
(mom of 3, writer, leader, learner, maker, pastor, director of spiritual development, friend, and fellow #ezer)
I recently read an article advocating that house plants thrive when you talk to them. Now, I don’t know about all of you, but I have an awful habit of killing plants.
For the record: I can personally attest that the supposed correlation between one’s ability to keep a plant alive and one’s ability to keep children alive is a myth.
It has become a goal of mine to learn to keep a plant alive. I am an avid believer that daily practices of presence spiritually enrich our lives.
I want to be present to the simple things in life: touching creation, regular rest, caring for something beautiful and engaging daily practices that feed my body, mind, and spirit.
Also, I would like to not have to continually dust my fake IKEA plants.
Nearly 6 months ago I bought a small hanging plant. I read about how to care for it (it turns out I am drowning most of my plants... who knew?). I can successfully report that this plant is still thriving in my kitchen where it hangs above the sink. I have since bought a few other small houseplants that are also still alive! Admittedly, one of them shed all of its leaves in protest to living with me, but I digress.
This brings me back to talking to plants. I have begun referring to each of my plants as “little buddy” and checking in with them each day. Does it help at all? I don’t know! I felt like a crazy person. But I’m giving it an honest try.
The connection between the material and the immaterial is a great mystery.
If talking to a plant - an entity that has no auditory language skills in and of itself - can affect its ability to thrive, imagine how complicated human thriving must be.
A question my therapist often asks me in the midst of struggles is: “Where do you feel this in your body?”
It is a question that catches me off-guard every time. I don’t know where I feel it in my body. I have been too busy thinking and worrying about it, or stress-eating about it, to even notice my bodily experience. Interestingly, our bodies keep the score of all that we have been through.
We have to pay attention to our very bodies that house our thoughts, feelings, and memories in order to begin healing them.
Oftentimes, it is easy for us to conceive that our minds went through our experiences, traumas, joys, relationships, etc. Simultaneously we disassociate from our bodies, ignoring that they have been with us through all of those ups and downs as well. Either I remember my experiences and assume my body doesn’t. Or perhaps, in the case of trauma, I don’t remember my experience but my body has never been able to forget.
Human beings have a habit of thinking about things in binary, or dualistic, terms. It is either right or wrong. It is good or bad. It is broken or whole. It is healthy or unhealthy. It is either physical or spiritual.
Jesus offers us a different worldview.
He offers an escape from the oppression of dualism. Jesus gives grace; which is just another way of saying that he “makes room”. He makes room for our struggles and messiness. He holds the space we need to wrestle with human experience in all it’s complications.
There is a great freedom that comes from leaving a dualistic, either/or worldview behind. Jesus himself embodies this great mystery in his own personhood as he melds together the spiritual and the physical.
In the Easter story, Jesus takes the sin and separation problem that we have labeled “spiritual” and brings about a solution through physical means: death and bodily resurrection. The life and the death of Jesus are inextricable from both the spiritual and the physical. When Jesus’ spirit rose from the dead, his body rose too.
Jesus was resurrected into a healed body, yet interestingly, his body still bore the wounds. And the wounds testified to his journey.
As Father Richard Rohr writes, “‘Resurrection’ is another word for change, but particularly positive change - which we tend to see only in the long run, it often just looks like death.” Human growth in every way (physical, spiritual, emotional, relational) happens through a system of death and rebirth. It happens in our bodies and it happens in our souls.
My plant that lost all of its leaves in protest of coming to live with me… those same lost leaves made way for new growth. This is the resurrection story.
To think that we could achieve resurrection without embodiment is to sever our spiritual being from our physical, denying the truth that each needs the other for rebirth.
Maybe talking to plants does help them thrive. I wouldn’t put it past God to be that creative. And maybe my physical self affects my spiritual self. Or better yet, maybe my “self” cannot be bifurcated. Maybe everything is spiritual, even the physical. If an immaterial thing, such as connecting with my plant can help it grow, what are the implications for the way I speak to other people? What about the way I speak to myself?
The human experience requires that we integrate our own physical world with our emotional/spiritual world.
Engaging in growth requires a variety of conditions to be met; some tangible, some intangible. Most of these begin with being present to ourselves… our whole selves. Experiencing new life inevitably means engaging with both death and rebirth.
Life requires, like Jesus, that we endure the hard so that we can be made new in both body and soul.