My Body is a Sacrifice: Surrender & Re-enactment

by Rebekah Vickery

(dear friend, writer, therapist-in-training, trauma practitioner, story-teller, artist, learner)

I watch her daily, the way her body is continually stretched and worn by the task of growing a new life. 

Over and over and over again. 

“It’s important to surrender our bodies to the Lord,” she says, “If Jesus is not Lord of all, then he’s not Lord of anything.” This logic makes sense to my young mind, and I worry about the ways I’m not surrendering.

Does my fear of what the Lord may ask of my body mean there’s something wrong with me?

Babies came again and again, and this is how the Gospel was embodied in my childhood home. Jesus was Lord over the family size, and it was the woman’s body that bore the cost. 

As a child, I am constantly reading and hearing stories of Christian martyrs and missionaries. I feel deep in my bones that this might happen to me someday. I’m terrified by that thought, and I also feel guilty, because it seems that if I am not willing to die for Christ, then I am not living in full surrender. As a child, I worry that one day I will deny Christ to save my own body. I imagine seeing Jesus’ face and I can’t bear the anger and betrayal on it. I began serving in full-time ministry at the tender age of nineteen. I lived on the property I served in. I was not prepared for the combination of vicarious trauma and the ways in which my own past traumas would resurface  in my mind and body without many places to receive care.

But I made meaning of this experience by reasoning that this was what surrender and denial of self looked like. I interpreted my weariness, my anxiety, and my overwhelm as a necessary suffering.

The Christian contexts in which I grew up talked openly about consent, but our conversations focused on our need to surrender our consent in submission to Christ. Our bodies were not our own, they were bought with a price. My family adhered to the Quiverfull ideology, which considers any form of birth control or family planning to be a lack of surrender to the Lord. We went to churches that emphasized a denial of self and laying down one’s life, both figuratively and sometimes literally, for the Gospel. Although we were in Charismatic faith traditions that believed in prosperity and physical healing, there was a certain kind of nobility reserved for those who chose to give it all up in order to follow Christ. It seemed that suffering because of surrender was the thing to aspire to.

And yet, my child self panicked about the ways I thought I would someday be surprised by a God that seemed demanding and abusive. 

This is, of course, wildly complex. I recognize that I am coming from a specific context, and can only speak from, and to, that context. I’m aware of many people of faith around the world that are suffering for what they have chosen to commit their lives to; for whom the call to surrender is one of literally laying down their life. I’m aware of Scriptures that emphasize the temporality of this embodied life. I’m aware that there are many cultural and generational influences that go into decisions about what surrendering looks like in terms of family size, finances, lifestyle, and so forth.

I have chosen to follow Jesus. So I must wrestle with my understanding of what that means, while also considering the dangerous ground I tread in asking questions that seem to indict people who are deeply committed for goodness. 

Most of the people I have known within my context of Christianity have endured a significant amount of trauma. Many Christians I know were drawn to the faith specifically because it offered a sense of containment and safety that they had not previously known. This has certainly been true in my own life. This is something to be honored.

And, perhaps we need to question how our trauma-responses of hypervigilance, terror, and boundary confusion have influenced our understanding of consent and surrender within our faith.  

I don’t necessarily blame the church or the Bible for the way that it seems we have arrived at a masochistic understanding of surrender, one that makes suffering and sacrifice the most noble thing. I wonder if our understanding of surrender simply gives us the language we need to make meaning of the suffering that we are already enduring. As a developing therapist who is learning to think with a clinical mind, I am constantly pondering how my trauma has impacted my theology. And, on a more collective scale, how have the generational traumas of systemic racism, patriarchy, torture, and colonialism impacted the theology of the American church?

How do our bodies continue to bear witness to our traumas by re-enacting them within the context of our faith? In what ways, as we pronounce that our bodies are living sacrifices, are we entering into a space similar to that of our abuse? In what ways, as we ask the Lord to be our All in All, are we allowing ourselves to be annihilated? In what ways, as we sing songs of surrender to Christ, are we actually surrendering to a form of masochism?  

Perhaps surrender is not meant to be a denial of our bodies and agency that leaves us isolated and afraid, but instead a response to an invitation of rest. Perhaps it means responding to the call: Come you weary ones, and I will give you rest.

You can follow Rebekah Vickery on The Seattle School blog and The Allender Center Blog

@joyfulbeka