Posted on

More on Body And Soul

Hi pigeons.

I am not your effervescent PeaceBang of late, I am struggling. Summer is my “creaturely” time, where I do more interior work and am mostly off from the daily rounds of parish life. It’s a time for reading, for reflecting, for planning, for prayer, for wearing sundresses around the house, for letting my hair get greasy, for wearing Crocs and Tevas (oops, I admitted it!)

This summer I have done a summer musical or the first time in seven years and it’s been lots of fun. I am playing Grandma Rosie in “The Wedding Singer” and working with a marvelous cast and crew. The show is adorable and we get a standing ovation every night.

But I see photos of myself in this role and I don’t recognize my own body!
It is the body of an old woman, and it doesn’t at all resemble what I FEEL like.

Some of that is image and costume, of course: I wear grandmotherly things. I wear a polyester floral dress with pearls and orthodpedic shoes. I wear 1980’s styles and an enormous polyester housedress three sizes too big. I wear a (shudder) SWEATSHIRT and sweat pants (my own) with old-school Reeboks as I work out to “Sweating To the Oldies.” It gets a laugh every night. The ridiculous rap song and dance I do with my friend James is hilarious and the audience cheers every night. I am fine with “shaking my thang” to entertain and make people laugh – it’s joyful and a lot of fun. I don’t mind that much of that humor comes from my being the fat granny because Granny’s got the moves, baby!

The theatre is tough on my knees and hips and back — we have to climb several flights to get from the stage to the Green Room where we change costumes, and then back down the cement stairs to either the stage level, or down yet ANOTHER flight where we cross under the stage through the orchestra pit if we have an entrance Stage Right. I climb and descend the stairs about 10 times per performance. I wake totally stiff in the mornings. The show is over at 11 pm and we go out to eat (it takes an hour to drive to the theatre, so I don’t eat from at least 4-11 pm) at gross places like TGIFridays or the 99. I eat what I want to eat, and it ain’t salad!

I am about 20 years older than most of the cast.

It’s like, “Who is this woman? What is this body?” I weighed the same when I played Emma Goldman 7 years ago but I. HAVE. AGED. since then. My energy feels different. My emotions are different. My relationship with Dionysus has changed so much since I started doing theatre at the tender age of 6. Now it’s not so much about me, it’s for the experience of creating something special with a community of other artists.

But I see the photos and videos and ask myself, who is that woman of such size and bulk? What happened to my upper arms, full of cellulite (ironically, I have none at all on the back of my thighs)? Is that really my rear end? Unrecognizable! It isn’t just that I’m being mean to myself, it’s also that I genuinely had no idea that I looked like that. We call this body dysmorphia and it affects the overweight as well as convincing anorexic people that they look chubby.

And this isn’t just about fat and the struggle for health, it’s about aging and the confusion that I find comes with it. I am truly middle aged. I am the age my parents were when I started to be really aware of them as people in their own right. I have arrived here, six years of teaching, 13 years of parish ministry, a long resume of theatre roles, a resident of 9 different states and at least 15 different dwelling places, feeling strangely alien to my own body.

I am trying not to obsess about it, but this has been a year of wondering, of feeling slightly confused, of trying to figure out how one “does” middle age without the relationships of marriage/partnering or parenting to ground oneself in clear identities.

One thing that helps, I’ll tell you, is simple prayer. To God, I am ageless, and I feel that when I pray. In God’s sight I am an incarnate soul and God’s boundless compassion and cosmic disinterest (for God is both to me: totally inaccessible but intensely intimate) comfort me. Prayer informs me simply that the body is a reflection of one’s habits and desires. No judgment necessary. I am free to change or to continue as I am.
It is not required to view myself with the critical eyes of the world but to marvel at the history of my life written on face and figure. The accumulated years have — well, I could say “taken their toll” or I could say “sculpted quite a work of art.” If Truth is Beauty, I can say I am a beautiful woman. Because I will say this: as amazed (I am trying not to say “shocked”) as I am by where my bod is at this point in my life, I can claim with great certainty that it is an honest reflection of how I have spent my 44 years.

So how are you, my dears?


(with my marvelous director and friend, Michael Hammond)


(In “Anything Goes” junior year in college — oh heavens, I thought I was enormous!!)

Posted on

An Addendum to Fat, Rage and Old Gods… Fighting a Helluva Good Fight

I get many of my insights for this analysis from Jungian depth psychology. Marion Woodman, for instance, and James Hollis.

So with that in mind, I want to say that the rage/rebellion factor I’m talking about with fat women is really shadow material that I am trying to bring to consciousness in myself and then hopefully for some of you as well.
If your comment about what you’re doing to be healthy/lose weight/feel terrific made me “stabby” please understand that that’s MY shadow projection of the angry dragon deep within me breathing sulfuric fumes and grumping in her cave about how she’s already tried all that s***. That’s MY shadow, not yours. That’s why you don’t need to apologize or feel badly for anything you say, and I hope you won’t. I’m just sharing a reality that I think very few women feel we have permission to talk about.

We all have shadow sides. Mine is all about anger and enormity and insatiability and domesticated wildness. I’m not walking around every day feeling angry — that’s not my conscious persona or my everyday emotional reality. My everyday reality is much more about humor, joy, creativity, expression, community, gratitude and faith. However, I constantly keep in touch with my shadow side because I feel that it’s my responsibility to do so, especially as I’ve seen the destruction that can come of people refusing to own their own shadows and projecting them onto others. Everything from the medieval witch burnings to the McCarthy hearings to the Nazi Holocaust to the genocide in Sudan comes from mass projections. It seems fair to say that those of us who are working toward the evolution of human consciousness should be willing to confront our own shadow material.

A commenter said, rightfully so, that eating fries and burgers isn’t counter-cultural, and I agree. What it may be, however, is an expression of the domesticated wild woman having her way between the minutes of 5:45 and 5:53 on a Wednesday night, you know what I mean? Jungian author James Hollis recently said that being aware of our unconscious material DOES NOT lead to our overcoming it. I used to think it would. “Oh, I know about all this anger and Dionysian stuff within me, now I can lose weight!” What Dr. Hollis said last weekend was, “We don’t overcome it, but we do become aware that we’re fighting a helluva good fight.”

xoxo PB

Posted on

Fat, Rage and The Old Gods

In my last post on getting out and moving the old bod, many of you offered advice on things that work for you to keep you active and healthy. That’s wonderful. What’s less wonderful is the assumption (and I know that we’ve been around this block many times before) that we all keep making that fat women (and to a lesser extent, men) haven’t heard about or tried the special thing that worked for you.

I do encourage all of us to remember remember remember, please, that that’s often not the case, and to remember remember remember, please to use “I” language when testifying to your best practices. I, for instance, HAVE tried and loved Zumba, water aerobics, Jazzercise, and practically every book ever written about women and food. I have also heard of that latest diet, and I have sometimes even tried it (although probably not). I, as do most fat people, know darn well that it’s “just” a matter of eating less and moving more.

When you (in the generic, of course), describe your self-care practices in such a tone as to suggest that said practice hasn’t occurred to me/us, well, it just makes me stabby — even though I’m too nice to tell you that to your face. Like many non-traditional women with no husband, no kids, and other commitments that make me an usual specimens among the female population of my age, location and socio-economic status, I am basically enraged by the boxes women are expected to fit in on ALL levels, body size being just one of those boxes.

So I think sometimes that being fat is a statement, even if a self-harming one. People make statements with their lives all the time that are harmful. They harm the Earth, they harm their children, they harm institutions, they harm themselves. And yet, in our time, obesity is constantly identified as a social problem, while other such statements are not. It’s a convenient scapegoat, with the blame being placed on people who often have a poor sense of self and can’t critique the cultural pathology being projected onto their bodies.

Fat can be a a way for women to be insistently outlaw in a culture that still has tremendous ambivalence about women with big mouths, big brains, big personalities, big appetites, big strength, big ideas, and big talent. Did I say “ambivalence?” Sometimes it’s outright hostility and hatred. And … surprise, surprise, much of that hostility comes from other women. It enrages me that so many girls and women are so focused on having the right size body, they don’t realize how that quest diminishes everything else about their being. They have signed themselves up for willing participation in their own oppression. Their fat sisters are a reminder of how much time and attention they spend avoiding the same “terrible” fate.

This is important: I assume that most of my readers are beyond that, and that what we’re talking about is health, wholeness, integration, vitality and juiciness. So please don’t think that I’m equating all y’all with “the ordinary woman” out there who looks pityingly on me when she’s having an iced tea with her starving friends and I’m happily devouring a huge avocado and turkey bagel with fries. I know that you know that being or staying thin is not a moral achievement, and that you too deride this kind of shallow, materialistic theology.

But a reader and I exchanged this comment about Geneen Roth’s new book, and I wanted to highlight it to share with you just how outlaw I really do feel in this culture, and where I tend to locate my own analysis of fat and overeating and hunger:

And for the extra weight the body carries…I cannot recommend highly enough Women, Food and God by Geneen Roth. Beautiful. And it works (in many, many ways) if you work it.
[I am one of the few who found very little to work with in Roth’s book. She lacks a feminist analysis, she doesn’t touch on rage, and her model of femininity is still very traditional. In fact, her book made me angry. However, she is the prevailing expert on women and food in our time, and most BTFM readers will likely find a lot of wisdom in her insights. I’m waiting for another level of this conversation: one that includes rage, unapologetic enormity of personhood, insatiability and ravenousness, sexual frustration, power, generational hatred and body-control between women, and did I mention rage at the misogynist planet we live on? – PB]

I am glad that Roth’s new book was such a help to many of you. My own dear friend from college said it changed her life, and that’s wonderful. It did not change mine. Note here the reader’s 12-Step language, “It works if you work it,” ( a slogan used by Overeaters Anonymous, as well as other 12-step groups, and which is often followed up by “And even if you don’t!”).
It is true for some of us, however, that when we “work” whatever steps or process prescribed by any number of such self-help books, it DOESN’T WORK. In fact, we are left feeling even more misunderstood, more outlaw, and more frustrated than we did before we picked up the damned thing. This can lead some of us to a deeper sense of isolation, sadness, accusation against us by the wider culture, and more prone to shut down our mind-body connection to protect our authentic Self from further harm.

Marion Woodman, whose work in this area I highly respect, writes, “Obesity is a manifestation of a soul that has more energy than the body can deal with.” (The Pregnant Virgin) She also says that all addictions are an expression of religious yearning. The old gods of wildness, sexuality, ecstasy and madness are dead in Western culture. I believe that many common addictions are forms of worship that have long been suppressed and demonized. The gods, however, are still alive in the unacknowledged unconscious.

This issue is extraordinarily complicated and difficult. I appreciate your listening, and I appreciate even more hearing from those of you for whom my words and experience resonate. I would appreciate your reading this post through again before commenting, as I am so often misinterpreted by anxious readers on this subject that I recommend slowing down and breathing before you join the conversation.


In the zoo with the other caged wild things.

Posted on

Existential Musings and Blood Sugar

Hello kittens,

PeaceBang has just returned from a lovely, if very short, retreat with her colleagues. It was in a beautiful rural setting in an old farmhouse. The bed was a twin with a mattress apparently designed to especially torment fat middle aged pastors with bad hips, a function which it fulfilled brilliantly for Sister PeaceBang.

PeaceBang is aging rapidly, darlings, and she is baffled by the phenomenon. Nothing is particularly wrong with her that losing 60 lbs. wouldn’t cure, but it’s more the spiritual issues that come with middle age that confound her. No one prepared us for this time in life! We were supposed to do well in school, get through college, get a job and become Adults. I’ve done all that, and my age peers and I are asking each other “…and then what?” Continue to learn, to grow, to serve, to nurture and to mentor young ‘uns as we were mentored, that much is clear. After that… retirement and then death?

Please don’t feel you should respond to this rhetorical reflection. I just wanted you to know where PB is at these days. She is thinking about the Big Questions. She is also very worried about Mother Earth, who seems very angry and upset at all of us and is trying to shake us off of her like a dog shakes off fleas. PeaceBang wanders around with large, nervous eyes wondering what part of the planet is going to flood over or explode or shake to rubble next, and what she is supposed to do about it. She is frankly not thinking much about clergy image these days, unless it is to hope that the Church can remain relevant and prophetic in such times, bringing people together to confront our profligate ways and to repent as the Prodigal repented. Will Mother Earth ever welcome us back after such abuses of her inheritance? Can she afford to? Perhaps we have focused too intently on God’s everlasting love and forgiveness and not enough on our responsibility within God’s creation.

Well. On top of all THAT, PeaceBang has learned the hard and embarrassing way that she simply must eat breakfast on Sunday mornings. It is my custom to have a cup of coffee early in the morning while I finalize the service before printing it out, and to skip food until later in the day. I’m picky in the morning and don’t want to put just anything in my stomach; especially not before preaching. I have noticed of late, however, that I get shaky mid-way through the service and obviously need some nourishment more than java and 8 oz. of coconut water (PeaceBang LOVES coconut water!).

This past weekend I realized that I was shaky and seriously nauseated while singing the opening hymn, and actually left the sanctuary during the Offertory to grab a chunk of Luna Bar from my office desk that I had thankfully brought with me to church. I wolfed down a bite and hustled back to the sanctuary just in time to accept the offering, surreptitiously chewing and swallowing before settling down for the time of prayer. Geez, did I feel like a dolt!

So perhaps the take-away here, darlings, is that it does no good to fret about the condition of the planet unless we are attending to our own personal condition. Making the assumption that I can do God’s work better above ground than 6’ under it, it behooves me – and by extension all of us – to take care of PeaceBang before I attempt to do anything else on behalf of creation.

Take good care of you, pigeons!

Posted on

How Colors Grab Us

Yesterday I was looking at a friend’s vacation photos of her trip out West and was totally transported by an image of evergreen trees reflected in water. I just looked and looked at that wonderful, healing green — my favorite color — and it was like a long, quenching drink to my wintery soul. Ahhh, green. I knew there was a reason I painted my parsonage study a hue that could most accurately be described as Screaming Kermit Green. I need color.

Color has an energy and inspiration all its own. Lately, I have been wearing lots of black and grey. It’s not necessarily because I want to, it’s more that the garments I like (and that FIT!) come in that color, they go with everything, they’re practical, I can jazz them up with a scarf or tights or something. I cannot bring myself to wear colors that don’t feel good to my eyes and heart. I could no more don a bright red garment than I could paint my lips purple — it would actually hurt. I don’t like most reds on me, they’re all wrong, it throws me off even to try on red garments. Please pigeons, don’t ever force a garment on yourself just because it fits or is “pretty much” what you want. What we wear does affect our mood; don’t abuse yourself by wearing something that offends your spirit.

Cheap colors depress me and that’s another reason to stick to grey, black and other neutrals: they’re less expensive to produce. I’d rather have a luxe-feeling black shirt than a cheap saturation of a potentially beautiful blue or green any day.

One of the reasons I love to travel to Central America in the wintertime is that Latino culture is so gorgeously colorful, it’s like receiving a dose of Soul Vitamins just being around all of that vibrant splendor. Oranges and pinks and yellows and reds and bright blues and …such a brilliant contrast to the austerity of our New England winter landscape, where sage green is really a “pop” of color.

Lately I find myself particularly drawn to this color, which the magazines call “cerulean” ( what a beautiful word! CERULEAN). I don’t love these earrings but oh, the color!

That’s all I really wanted to say. It’s early and pre-coffee, so that’s why I sound less effervescent than usual. I ain’t quite awake.

Colors are food for the soul. Eat wisely.


Suzani from The Loaded Trunk, my cousin Roni’s online store.


Roni is in India right now shopping for the store. A sari vendor in Delhi.