The words come quickly, in the night, you would think, but actually in broad daylight with family, friends, and loved ones abound. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? Obviously, it’s just a fairytale (my mirror NEVER said one thing to me, although I wish it emitted green glow-in-the-dark smoke), but in reality, we don’t need a theater mask in the looking glass to tell us what we see. We hear those voices everytime we look, because it’s the voices in our heads doing all the talking and pointing out the pimples and acting as if we shouldn’t have crescent moons under our eyes, as if the world shouldn’t know we stayed up watching the stars or arose before dawn to run between the willows. It’s the voices in our heads telling us we’re not thin enough, suggesting to us that we should put on some lipstick and rogue, and reinforcing the subtle yet strong patriarchal norms that fill the beauty market’s pocket and shatters God’s heart – our worth is in our body, our body will never fit Disney princess screenplays, thus we are never good enough.
The Poisoned Apple
Okay, in order to push forward on such a triggering topic for women (and men, too, though to a significantly lesser extent), let’s take a couple steps back to see what exactly God does think about our bodies. In the beginning of creation, God saw that Adam couldn’t do this life alone, so Yahweh created a “helper” for him, although according to Dr. Joel Muddamalle of Proverbs 31 Ministries, the word, here, for “helpers,” translates from the Hebrew as “to stand opposing” or “opposite.” In other words, God created women to balance out the male with the female. And like any scale, both sides must weigh the same in order to create such balance, meaning both genders not only need to have equal roles, in quality and quantity, but that both are equal in God’s eyes. That means both Adam and Eve got to talk with God, got to walk with God, got to spend every single day with God and take pleasure and purpose in overseeing everything God placed under their care. And you know something else? After the original sin, we learn that both Adam and Eve were naked the entire time and both felt shame. There was no discrimination in their self-consciousness or poor body image. Because all that time, God didn’t see either body as a sexualized object, as troublesome for the other gender; Yahweh didn’t see Eve’s body as too much in some areas or not enough in others. God saw her as a whole person. Flawed, just like her husband, and still an image bearer in the divine’s name. Her sin didin’t change the fact that God had called her body “very good.” Her body wasn’t the fault for her sins or Adam’s nor stripped of its goodness because of her poor decision. Rather, like Jesus with the sick woman grasping for one touch of His robe, God saw beyond a body labeled by the world as “not enough,” and poured out pure love onto her battered frame, whispering, “I see your faith, not your body, when I look at you.”
True Love’s Look
Over the past several weeks, I promised myself (and God) that I would stop seeing myself as a body, first, and then as a person. If I wore makeup, it would only be as a fun, artistic endeavor, not a mandatory face painting. I would avoid as many reflective surfaces as possible (i.e. selfie mode on my camera, store windows, and terribly lit bathroom mirrors) and I wouldn’t say anything negative about my body (even in pictures). And you know what started happening? I started seeing how big my smile was in a photo with my dad right before he dropped me off at college instead of worrying that my lipstick wasn’t completely even. I stopped caring so much about my acne and started remembering how the sun felt on my cheeks first thing in the morning as I watched the golden rays light up the Lincoln Memorial. And I started focusing on the way I see the world as I walk in between ivy-grown colonial homes, not the other way around. It’s still a work in progress, but that’s what life is. Always moving, always going, always flying to the exact place where we are meant to be in that exact moment. And it all makes me more grateful to HaShem, the Hagia Sophia that reminds me that my body is good, that my body is enough, and that, most of all, my body is a mirror of God’s miracles.
Last Love 