Seeing the Sacred….in a hip operation

(10 minute read)

I heard someone say that the work of a priest is naming the Holy. I liked and remembered that. If I can see – and name – the sacred in the everyday, and in my own life, then perhaps, in a tiny way, I can make it easier for others to see the sacred too, in their own lives and in the lives of those around them.

For centuries the task of naming – and indeed controlling – what counts as sacred has been the work largely (though not exclusively), of elite men. And elite men have reflected on and named as universal their own experiences of God. And this continues to this day.

There are female voices that have come to us from across the centuries but they are few in number, women like Julian of Norwich or Hildegard of Bingen, who widened the kind of experiences claimed as holy and therefore our understanding of what Sacredness means.

Today more voices are claiming their own experiences – their black experiences, their queer experiences, their disabled experiences, their refugee or living in poverty experiences as events where Sacredness happens, where the Spirit is at work. And that means that our sense of what words like ‘God’ mean can, potentially, widen all the more.

So I follow in that tradition by reflecting here on my own experience as a site of the Sacred. And in particular, and in common with other women theologians, I reflect on my own embodied and very physical experience as the place where I encounter the divine. And my everyday embodied and very physical experience recently has involved ….having an operation for a new hip. I have been experiencing bodily aging and fragility, pain and helplessness…. and then the gradual return of health and strength and ease of movement. And for me the question is, how is that sacred?

And firstly, I want to say it is sacred precisely because it has been a physical experience. Centuries of male theology, following Plato, has wanted the sacred to be purely transcendent, purely disembodied spirit, somehow beyond this messy, ordinary life, these imperfect, frail, beautiful bodies. I was undergoing a physical procedure, a medical experience, yes. But I felt profoundly that it was, at the same time, a spiritual experience too.

We only experience the world and God in and through our senses. My Christian tradition says that the Divine nestled in a woman’s womb, walked around, ate, drank, partied (went to the toilet), wept, suffered, died. And the doctrine of the Resurrection of Yeshua, Mary’s son, takes all of that human, wonderful, messiness back into the heart of God and says that it’s the stuff of eternity.

I certainly found myself preparing, very physically, for my hip operation – a little as I remember ‘nesting’ before childbirth – physically preparing the house, clearing space in my study, picking up trip hazards, sorting out and giving away unread books, recycling lecture notes. I felt I was approaching a liminal moment, a before and after experience, and I wanted to create space for that – physically and emotionally and spiritually.

Post-operatively, the physical experience of being ‘off balance’, of not being able to use one of my legs for the first time in nearly 60 years was deeply frightening and unsettling. So at that point I experienced a very physical helplessness and had to, very literally, lean on the kindness of strangers – on the medical staff in the hospital. On the kindness of friends and family, on my husband especially. I had to let go of independence for a while and ask for help, physical help and, indivisible from that, emotional and spiritual help too.

Now as mobility and balance return, I feel a deep physical relief and joy and simple awe at the miraculous – and spiritual – healing properties of the human body.

And I am conscious that this healing is a miracle, that it is grace, pure gift. I don’t make my body heal – it just does. I haven’t somehow earned my hip replacement – throughout history and round the less developed world still, people have to live with the debilitating pain that was my reality just a month ago. So I experience my operation as a sacred gift.

And it is one of the many gifts I have received through this experience. The deeply professional kindness of doctors, nurses, health care assistants was deeply healing. Likewise my dear husband’s kindness and that of the rest of my family and friends. Flowers, cards that arrived unexpectedly. A hip replacement has become routine but it wasn’t routine to ME and I have been so moved and grateful at being thought about, and cared for and prayed for.

And I have received the sacred gift of time in which to heal and the gift of permission to care for myself, for my physical, fleshy self and to prioritize my own needs – something our society grants to women, and perhaps mothers especially, all too rarely.

And it has been an experience of wanting to explore Spirit, to experience God, as female, too. Theologians like Elizabeth Johnson have been calling, for years, for the importance of naming God as She as well as He. And I found myself needing that gift more than ever through this time. Usually I just gently push  back at the near exclusively male language for God in our scriptures, sometimes cheerfully, sometimes crossly, quietly and internally changing many of the ‘He’s’ to ‘She’s’, the ‘Lords’ to ‘God’. But through this experience I just didn’t have the energy for that. So I ordered a copy of the Inclusive Bible from my hospital bed and have simply loved being able to read without having to do the substitutions. Someone else had done the work for me and I could thankfully lean on that gift, too.

Johnson says that the Spirit (which in both Hebrew and Aramaic IS linguistically female but is often not translated as such) has always been associated with creativity, with healing, with the movement of God in the world, with care and labour and beauty and liberation. And I have played creatively with my prayers during this time. I have linked my daily exercises with the beautiful, and for me very female, Angelus prayer, so that my exercise becomes prayer and my prayer becomes exercise – my body/spirit finding strength together.

I cultivated beauty in my prayer space and, to help myself cope with the sense of fear and instability I felt early on, I physically wrapped myself in my late mother’s care, wearing a jumper she knitted me and rubbing lavender oil, her favourite scent, into my bruised and battered leg. I lit candles and prayed the rosary by warm comforting light during wakeful nights. I let myself stop worrying about my weight, a lifelong struggle, and ate the nourishing food I craved. I wore clothes and jewellery that were not only comfortable but lifted my spirits because of their colour or links to people and places I loved.

Elizabeth Johnson says, of the Holy Spirit, ‘She is life, movement, colour, radiance, restorative stillness….she purifies, absolves, strengthens, heals…She awakens mighty hope…and this is the mystery of God, in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Johnson, 1992, 2020, p 135.).

If the Spirit is about healing, then this entire experience, the extraordinary skill of the medical profession, the kindness of family and friends, the physical pain, the fear, the need for my mum’s touch, the exploring of creative, female prayer have all been the work of that same Spirit. Psalm 143 prays ‘Let your nurturing Spirit guide me on a safe and level path’. That has been my daily, lived and very physical experience.

In a rather wonderful passage in the book of Ecclesiasticus, (also called Sirach) in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, we are told to ‘Give physicians the respect due their services …Their skill was given to them by God’ and, when ill, advised ‘Pray to YHWH….Then call your physician’ (Ecclesiasticus 38). I think there is a wonderful balance there. Our more secular society wants to split the physical from the spiritual, the medical and scientific from the Holy, the Sacred. I have found throughout this experience that I have wanted to put them back together, where I feel they belong.

Johnson, Elizabeth, (1992, 2020). She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. The Crossroad Publishing Company