"What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the cancer cell."
That's Annie Dillard's memorable aphorism in her short, wonderful book, Holy the Firm. It's a meditation on what it means to hold to a faith that the Divine is wholly present in the material world, and in our bodies.
It ain't all sweetness and light. If God sings in our bodies when they're strong, able, and energetic, God is also in our bodies when we're weak, disabled, wounded, exhausted. God is there in the emergency room, the cancer ward, the nursing home, the occupational therapist's office.
It's wired into us to resist our limitations and vulnerabilities, to strive for strength, wholeness, performance, and beauty. It's natural to rejoice in those qualities. But we get hooked, so easily hooked, into believing that losing those things somehow separates us from the Holy. Images of God looking like an Olympic athlete are more seductive than God bent over and leaning on a cane.
But the body is our teacher as profoundly in its weakness and its failures as in its strength and its pleasures. "Everything that arises is subject to dissolution," the Buddha told his disciple. It's scary to embrace that truth. But within it are the jewels of wisdom and compassion.
