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Elaine Elizabeth Belz

HABITUS

Crossing this threshold, I dip my hand in water,
re-inscribe my birth. Stolid air
ushers me in, thick with dust
and smoke and resin

and with voices, shuffling feet,
creaking floorboard and pew—all music
to uncloak my solitude.
A votive wick receives my longing,

solid bench my hip’s ache.
I bring few words;
but words are given: prayer-book patterns,
labyrinthine cadences that know
the one path in
and out.

Like abrasions worn into icons and sculptures,
patina rubbed into pew and prie-dieu,

slowly, faith
is worked into me

by cobalt light through storied windows,
saints in stone and bronze and flesh,
hymnal, incense cloud, and kneeler,

plate and cup: Take,
and eat. I’m given God
to interpose between clenched teeth.

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I sometimes joke that when the Psalmist says, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” well, I’ll give him “fearfully.” I’d say I’m a one-woman argument against “intelligent design,” but really, the human body in general accomplishes that with or without me.

Before surgical intervention, I used to have an underbite. If I closed my mouth, but didn’t clench my teeth, only the very back teeth on the left—one on top and one on bottom – would touch. Even my front teeth didn’t touch; if they had, the ones on top would’ve been sitting right on the edges of the ones on bottom. Six months of braces in 4th grade and four years all through high school couldn’t fix that bite (or, lack thereof). So when I was 16, I had maxillofacial surgery to correct the underbite—and I actually looked more like my sisters afterward. But that spot in the back on the left remained a pressure point.

A few decades later, when I was in grad school, I started feeling strong pain in my jaw on the left. I’d often had jaw pain my whole life. I had it checked at a dental clinic with a sliding-scale fee; being a student, I had no dental insurance. Nothing showed on the x-ray, so I was told the tooth was fine. Probably referred pain from tension in my jaw. Since I’m the sort of person who carries stress in my body—particularly in my shoulders, neck, and jaw—it didn’t surprise me. At the time, I also had some weird tension in my left hip, which was hurting quite a bit.

This was while I had a part-time job working at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco as a verger.¹ Most of my work was in the cathedral proper, or in the Sacristy, Vestry, or a side chapel. In other words, I spent my time doing careful, quiet, and often solitary work inside sacred space. So not only would I be fully aware of every stupid ache in my body, I would think about it in the context of faith; in the context of the holy.

One Sunday, the sermon was about Jacob wrestling with the angel. The preacher made it very clear that she was puzzled by the fact that the angel wounded Jacob’s hip. Why his hip? Why not anywhere else? She didn’t have an answer. I did. Feeling hip pain during her sermon, I reflected on how a sore hip makes you literally walk differently in the world. It’s at least metaphorically, if not physically, an altered way of being in the world and in relation to your environment. And the hip is very close to the core of your body. It’s not far down on an appendage where you can feel like it’s somehow distinct from your very person. After his wounding, Jacob would have walked very differently in the world. He left that divine engagement with a blessing and a new name, but also with a limp. Should we expect no painful reminder of an encounter with the living God?

My hip pain was just due to injuring a long muscle thanks to tension I was holding in my body. Maybe God was involved, but probably not…until…

I was sitting quietly in the church before an evening service, thinking about my surroundings, and this poem began to take shape. The painful hip is in there; the sore tooth as well. Such visceral reminders of your embodied nature prompt even your spiritual reflection to center the material world.

I had encountered the term habitus through my studies with the late Alejandro García-Rivera. He tied it into the Catholic theological and philosophical tradition, describing it in terms of future-oriented habit-taking (if I may interject a phrase CS Peirce often used). To me, this seemed like a good way to describe the very physical aspect of the ritual actions of worship. Good liturgy, after all, trains us to orient ourselves toward God. Peirce says “esthetics,” or “the normative science of the admirable,” is the basis of ethics (and, in turn, logic) because it teaches us what to love, and we behave according to what we love. Or, I might say, we behave according to what we worship, since that word shares semantic space with the verb, to adore. In worship, we don’t simply listen and make intellectual notes about truths; we use our bodies and material things around us—candles, prayer books, hymnals, pews—to guide us in learning what to love. Religious Studies scholar Colleen McDannell has likened religious practices using material objects to pianists playing scales: both kinds of practice serve to make the practitioner better at what they do. And in both cases, the practices train the body as well as the mind.

Eventually, my lower tooth broke. The pain I’d been feeling at this time may have been a crack somewhere in the tooth, hiding from x-rays behind those old late-1970s fillings that still make up most of my molars. But, as I see it, I got a poem out of it. Two, even—the next one up also references the anxiety I hold in my teeth.

–Elaine

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1. As I’ve often said, vergers are like the butlers in the house of God. Or, in my less charitable moments, I’d say we were Jeeves to the clergy’s Wooster. ↩︎

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A few notes on the religious imagery in the poem, to help clarify things for non-Christian or non-religious folks:

reinscribe my birth. In some Christian traditions, upon entering a church, you dip your hand in holy water and make the sign of the Cross with it. This is a reminder of your baptism, and baptism is a sacrament of new birth.

smoke and resin. In church, resin incense is normally used (rather than those incense sticks you can buy just about anywhere in any college town). The resin—pretty much chunks of sap from aromatic trees—is placed on top of lit charcoal briquettes inside of a thurible (or “censer”), which may be free-standing or may be on a chain to be swung by a person called a “thurifer.” (The suffix -ifer means “bearer” in the sense of someone who carries something. We also have crucifers in church, who carry a processional Cross. The people who carry the candles (light) are called “torch-bearers,” because otherwise we’d have to call them “lucifers,” and, well…) Side note: I burn resin incense at home, using a small wax-incense burner, similar to a potpourri burner, with a votive candle underneath. There’s no charcoal smoke that way! When I lived in a studio apartment, this was how I avoided setting off the smoke detector.

votive wick. Votive candles—whether the tiny ones like I use in my incense burner, the large, glass-encased ones you find for sale in many Catholic churches, or the taper candles set in sand like you find in Orthodox churches—stem from ancient traditions used by the faithful to signify their presence in prayer. In antiquity, people would sometimes leave objects in a temple, perhaps in front of an idol representing their deity, to represent themselves because they could not spend all day in the temple. The votive candles feature rather prominently in another poem I have that won’t appear here—at least for a while—because I still hope a journal will pick it up at some point.

words are given: prayer-book patterns. In the Episcopal Church, and some others, a prayer book (we call it the Book of Common Prayer, or BCP) is used in public worship. The BCP is quite flexible, and is a treasure of our Anglican tradition. Since becoming Episcopalian in the late 1990s, I’ve grown to really appreciate the fact that much of the speaking we do in church comes from that book or a similar source. I needn’t bring words; sometimes, I have none. In addition, at times when I really need it, I often find that beautiful phrases from these prayers start running through my head like a song. The Very Rev’d. Dr. Scott Hunter, dean of the cathedral where I worship in Detroit, once likened the daily practice of prayer to making French toast—soaking the dry bread in the custard mixture until you can no longer tell the difference between the custard and the bread. That image has stuck with me. Our prayer practices can become indistinguishable from our very selves, or at least from our daily lives. #Goals.

labyrinthine cadences that know the one path in and out. Grace Cathedral is famous for its labyrinths; there is one outdoors (accessible day and night), and one indoors, in the liturgical “west end” of the cathedral. The labyrinth entered Christian tradition long ago, and is one of many ways Christians have meditated and prayed. It is thought to be a ritual form of pilgrimage, which allows you to more or less pray with your feet. The distinctive thing about a labyrinth is that there is only one path; it goes into the heart of the labyrinth, and you also follow it back out. Despite our usage of the word in popular culture, the labyrinth is not a maze, where you can get lost or hit a dead end. (And it’s not made from hedges or mowed into a corn field.) A traditional saying regarding the labyrinth is, “It is solved by walking.” You don’t need to figure out how to get from the outside in or the inside out; you simply have to follow the path, one foot in front of the other, focusing on where you are right now. Liturgy is similar. The procession going in and out of the service symbolizes that. We gather, we share stories, we build a fire (metaphorically, that is), we prepare a ritualized meal, we eat, we digest, we go out into the world having been formed into a new community of faith. One way to think about faith is that act of looking where your feet are, and where the path is just in front of you, and putting one foot in front of the other, trusting the path—the liturgy of the Church and of our lives—to take you where you need to go.

Like abrasions worn into icons and sculptures. Episcopalians don’t do this nearly enough, but Catholics and Orthodox Christians use the art in their churches devotionally. Statues are touched; icons are kissed. This necessarily wears them down. I talk about that feature in my article on the Virgin of Vladimir icon.

patina rubbed into pew. I love holding the back of the pew in front of me when I stand in church. So many people before me did the exact same thing. I am not only supporting myself as I stand (my balance is another “fearfully made” part of me) but I am also touching a physical reminder of the Communion of Saints, the whole people of God who have gone before, or, more precisely, that bit of the Communion of Saints that has been localized here over time.

prie-dieu. A prie-dieu is a piece of furniture that combines a kneeler with a small desk. They are often placed facing religious items of devotion such as a crucifix, an icon, or an altar, to aid in prayer.

cobalt light through storied windows. We are used to hearing that stained glass windows are meant to be the “Gospel for the illiterate,” illustrating biblical stories for medieval masses to learn. However, the stories in stained glass windows—when stories are present; often, the window is more iconographic—are only part of the reason for the stained glass. Alex García-Rivera wrote about this in chapter 4 of his book, A Wounded innocence: Sketches for a Theology of Art: Abbot Suger, designing the Abbey of St.-Denis, used stained glass to create an atmosphere of heavenly otherworldliness (much like the mosaics and murals of icons in Eastern churches do), and the blue light through cobalt glass was part of that design. (Alex goes into considerable detail on the theology of light Suger was using.) Cobalt still often features heavily in stained glass windows.

saints in stone and bronze and flesh. Statuary (not to mention windows & icons) and real, living people, in the flesh. The gathered community is the Body of Christ; and one pet-peeve of mine is the idea that other people—and in particular, other people’s children—in church are a distraction from individual, private devotion. Do that at home; that’s not the primary reason to come to church!

plate and cup. Or as we call them in the back room (Sacristy) at church, paten and chalice. They hold the elements of Bread and Wine as they are distributed to the faithful.

Take, and eat. The most basic ritual action, and Jesus’ instruction to his disciples. The Eucharist is a ritualized meal: a bite of bread and a sip of wine are enough. But the Eucharist is based in the everyday act of sharing a meal with others—what is thought to be a significant part of the origins of human culture and civilization.

I’m given God. As an Anglican, I believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist; but I also am agnostic (as are three out of four of the Eucharistic Prayers in the 1979 BCP) as to what exactly that means and how and when it is accomplished. When the people say AMEN (that typographic choice is intentional in the BCP) at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, we know Christ is present. We don’t need to dissect anything beyond that. That’s the “God” part of this line; as for “I’m given”—I like the almost passive aspect of receiving Eucharist. So little depends on me when I come to the altar to receive; I put out my hands, and what I need is placed in them.