A Sanctuary of Tissue and Bone by Elise Tegegne
How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of Hosts! (Psalm 84:1)
Take a moment to look at your body. The veins threading your forearms. The knots of bone at your knuckles. The chips in your nails. The scars that tell so many stories.
Ponder the complex palette of color in your eyes. The hollow just above your lips. How the shelf of your brow shadows your eyelids, how the cheek bones curve into your temples.
Just so.
***
In Exodus, God gives precise instructions for the construction of His tabernacle. The dimensions, colors, materials, objects, placement–every detail of God’s earthly abode must be exact.
Take the curtains for example: Make a curtain of blue, purple and scarlet yarn and finely twisted linen, with cherubim woven into it by a skilled worker. Hang it with gold hooks on four posts of acacia wood overlaid with gold and standing on four silver bases.
Exodus includes seven chapters of this kind of painstaking precision–down to the loops and clasps. Imagine not only reading the instructions–but carrying them out!
However rigorous its construction, the finished tabernacle was stunning: shimmering with gold and bronze, woven in scarlet, violet, blue. Its orderly proportions held the wild glory of a holy God.
It was a glimpse of Eden–that first earthly dwelling-place of God–restored.
It was an image of heaven.
***
Heaven is not normally what I think of when I look at my body. As a little girl, I lamented the lumps of fat at the tops of my thighs, how my cheek bones hid in the soft rounds of my face, the awkward frizz of my curly brown hair. I dreamed of skinny legs and Kiera Knightly cheeks and the sleek, straight locks of Pantene Pro-V commercials. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to appreciate the skill of the One who formed me.
Reading Psalm 139, I am struck with the manual nature of the unborn’s formation: each of us was knitted together, intricately woven. Or as the Orthodox Jewish Bible expresses it: skillfully wrought. I imagine the Universe Maker huddled over each unborn child, knitting needles in hand, laboring to weave together a human being.
The God who envisioned the exact angles and dimensions of the tabernacle wove each of us with the same intentional precision. Though our bodies bear the brokenness of the world, they also glow with the luminescence of the Creator. The bridge of your nose, the weave of your hair, the planes of your shins–all reveal divine artistry.
Truly, we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
How lovely is your dwelling place, O LORD of hosts!
Lovely.
***
The loveliness of our bodies was never meant to fan our own vanity. Each of us was divinely fashioned for a much higher purpose: to be a little sanctuary. A Garden of Eden radiant with divine presence. A tabernacle where God would dwell. An image of heaven: sacred not because of our own worthiness, but because of the glory of the One who indwells us.
I wonder what being a little sanctuary might look like in the weave and bustle of everyday life.
Last month at Walmart, I was blocking the cheese aisle, my son Jeremiah sandwiched in the wire seat of our giant cart. An elderly woman in a mask and trench coat was waiting to pass by. “I’m sorry,” I said, as I tried to maneuver out of her way.
“I’m a patient person,” she replied. And she slowly began to walk past until our carts were side by side. Then she paused. “Galatians chapter five, verses twenty-two and twenty-three. Patience,” she said. “We’ve got to live it out.”
Here in the Walmart cheese aisle–fluorescent lights, unwieldy carts and all–a tiny church unfolded. This ordinary woman became a little sanctuary. She invited me in to hear truth. She gave a busy mother a loving reminder to slow down. She exuded the kind of uncanny peace I hunger for. In this stranger, I felt the presence of God. A glimmer of Eden. A glimpse of heaven.
She was an imperfect tabernacle–we all are. But even jars of clay can tremble with the radiance of God.
***
Only one person was a perfect tabernacle: Jesus. Jesus wore human skin and moved with human muscle. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, / and no beauty that we should desire him.
I wonder if He was ever embarrassed by the shape of his nose or the unruly curl of his hair. I wonder if kids ever teased him for the size of his ears. One thing is sure: He was no Mr. GQ.
Yet Emanuel inhabited the limitations of human bones out of a desire to dwell with humanity. To tabernacle with us. Can you imagine the humility of God to empty himself, by taking the form of a servant,–all out of love?
***
The thought of being a little sanctuary, a dwelling place of God, is inspiring–and also terrifying. But we do not do this alone. The God who skillfully and intricately formed each of us with exquisite precision, who crafted our bodies of bones and muscle to become His dwelling place, is the same One who keeps us.
Recalling pilgrims journeying towards the temple in Jerusalem, Solomon writes:
The Lord is your keeper.
He who keeps you will not slumber.
The Lord will keep you from all evil
The Lord will keep your life.
The Lord will keep
your going out and your coming in
from this time forth and forevermore.
Shamar, the Hebrew word for keep, is the same word describing how Adam and Eve were to keep the Garden of Eden. It is also the same word describing how the priests were to guard the tabernacle, the second earthly dwelling place of God. And it is the same word expressing how God cares for the new tabernacle: believers. Us.
Can you fathom what this kind of divine keeping would be? I imagine Adam and Eve laboring to cultivate the Garden of Eden. Pruning roses. Clearing space for saplings to breathe. Giving each creature a name. Perhaps even talking to the tomatoes as they gardened. How they worked to create a place of beauty!
Then I think of the priests laboring in the tabernacle. How gingerly they would have stepped through the entrance each day. How carefully they would have baked the bread of presence. How they must have polished the golden lampstand with fear and trembling. Because they walked on holy ground.
Is this–the gentle pruning, the ginger touches, the trembling tenderness–how we are called to care for our own bodies? How we are called to care for the bodies of others? How God cares for us?
***
In a world where bodies are considered cheap: where girls are forced to be objects of pleasure, where boys are forced to be weapons of death, where bodies of color are ignored or killed again and again and again, where this year six human beings at an elementary school became breathing targets, we, as temples of the living God, have a grand, counter-cultural responsibility. We are called to be sacred gardens, holy tabernacles shook with the presence of Jehovah. Little sanctuaries. Walking glimmers of heaven. The resurrected body of Christ on earth.
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which He looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are His body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours. ~St. Theresa of Avila
Elise Tegegne lives in Indianapolis with her husband and energetic two-year-old. Her work has appeared at Fathom, The Windhover, Plough, Dappled Things, Risen Motherhood, and (in)courage, among others. She is writing a blog series called “Experiments in Inefficiency,” which seeks to find out what it means to live a Spirit-paced life. Read more of her words at elisetegegne.com or reach out on Instagram @elisetegegne.