Embodied: a letter from K.J. Ramsey
Dear Friend,
As Winter uncurls her frosty fingers from the trees, and the days grow ever so slightly longer, you and I are making our slow, steady trek to the undoing of the winter of our hearts. It is Lent—the long journey to Easter, to resurrection, by which our hearts better hold the mystery and majesty of what Christ’s life really accomplished.
Whether you observe Lent or not, I pray that in these weeks you would walk alongside Jesus, curious about what he lived and curious about what you are living too. I pray this short reflection from my forthcoming book, This Too Shall Last, will guide you in curiosity and compassion toward your story and help you invite the Breath of God to touch you exactly where you feel like you are frozen, fearful, or failing.
With gratitude for the space we share here in walking with Jesus,
—KJ
(An excerpt from Chapter 7 of This Too Shall Last, "Beautiful Union: Christ's Life Becomes Our Own." And that's Merton, my sidekick German Shorthaired Pointer on an ordinary evening walk in our nearby park turned extraordinary by the sky's brilliant dance of light.)
Jesus came close to bring us close, to enfold us back into the love for which we were created. In him we participate in a new reality and a grand story. We hold a living hope.
Yet if you are like me, sometimes you don’t know how to derive comfort from Christ’s story. With depression that isn’t lifting or pain that’s still present, God can feel more absent than near. Sometimes the sheer volume of suffering in our stories makes it hard to see how we could be participating in a story bigger and better than pain, a story that won’t end in defeat.
Our neural networks tend to reinforce the story that suffering is a barren desert, and we’ll continue to experience it as such unless we encounter another person standing there with us.
We cannot make sense of our stories on our own.
Attachment researchers measure the extent to which an adult has made sense of their life story, through a tool called the Adult Attachment Interview. Those who have a coherent grasp of their life story have what is called secure attachment. Secure attachment is reflected and expressed in an integrated prefrontal cortex, a mind and life like a tree planted by streams of water.
We didn’t become withered trees with eroded roots on our own. Our patterns of relating often become insecure through inadequate formative relationships with our caregivers early in life and through traumatic experiences even into adulthood. This is why we might believe God is good but feel he is cruel. Without secure attachment, we will struggle to make sense of our stories, including our suffering, and our minds will continue to stay knotted, disintegrated, and discouraged.
We don’t become rooted, fruitful trees by thinking harder.
As psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk has commented about trauma, this is not “something you figure out. This is about your body, your organism, having been reset to interpret the world as a terrifying place and yourself as being unsafe.”
Many of us have come to experience
our suffering as scorched earth,
our bodies as betrayers,
and God as negligent,
even if our churchy goodness
makes us afraid to admit it.*|TWITTER:TWEET [$text="Many of us have come to experience our suffering as scorched earth, our bodies as betrayers, and God as negligent, even if our churchy goodness makes us afraid to admit it." @kjramseywrites #ThisTooShallLast]|*
We can only develop the capacity to make sense of our stories and renew our minds to greater wholeness through encountering an outside relationship. The field of psychology describes this process as earned secure attachment. Theology describes it as union with Christ.
God is inviting us into a paradox of great possibility.
Becoming whole in and through suffering requires experiencing the presence, power, and story of the Person we most fear has abandoned and neglected us—God himself.*|TWITTER:TWEET [$text="God is inviting us into a paradox of great possibility. Becoming whole in and through suffering requires experiencing the presence, power, and story of the Person we most fear has abandoned us—God himself." @kjramseywrites #ThisTooShallLast]|*
Our suffering only makes sense alongside the story of the risen, reigning Christ.
Suffering roars with lies about who we are. Forgotten. Forsaken. Unloved.
When suffering lingers, we’ll only hear the sound of love and the harmony of hope in the rhythm of Christ’s breath, which is nearer than you might expect.
In Jesus we have been united with a presence, memory, and story that touches and transforms our stories of sorrow into stories of life.
In Christ the suffering we want to escape becomes the place of more fully participating in the reality of the kingdom of God. Our union with Christ does not rescue us from our earthy existence. Rather it plants our feet on the arid soil of suffering and makes it fertile ground.
We can only experience stories including suffering and prolonged waiting as good by encountering the story and person of Jesus, not once but over and over in the myriad moments when life leaves us breathless, bereaved, or bored.
Remembering Jesus’ entire, embodied life changes how we live our entire, embodied lives. The presence, memory, and story of Jesus can and will re-member us into people who know they are loved.*|TWITTER:TWEET [$text="Remembering Jesus' entire, embodied life changes how we live our entire, embodied lives. The presence, memory, and story of Jesus can and will re-member us into people who know they are loved." @kjramseywrites #ThisTooShallLast]|*
Remembering Christ and being re-membered by him is a matter not simply of recounting his story but of re-experiencing his life in the most mundane and maddening moments of our lives. Our memory, our stories, and the vast neural networks propelling us toward either health or death must all be touched by the presence, memory, and story of the only Man who died but still lives.
Practice Being Re-memberd by Christ...Right here, right now
The Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead lives in you—the Breath of God.
God made you with a body that can only live and move by breathing.
The very function of your physiology that keeps you alive can be a vehicle to remembering that the Breath of God is in you no matter where you go. As you slow your breathing, your body experiences the regulating calm it needs to more fully experience this present moment as a place of grace. (Breathing slowly and mindfully helps integrate your brain, coaxing your prefrontal cortex stay online and in charge instead of any stress or situation ruling you.)
So, be re-membered, recreated, reshaped by the Breath of God.
Take this moment to remember your union with Christ:
1. Plant your feet on the ground, where you are right now while reading this.
Whatever chaos may be swirling around you—the kids yelling, the emails chiming, Instagram beckoning, or the bills piling up—this is also true: God dwells within you.
2. Offer this moment as a holy acknowledgement that your resurrection is coming.
With your breath and attention, let this moment be an acknowledgement that your life is hidden in Christ’s, part of his story of redemption, and filled with a Power past your perception.
3. Breathe in and out. Slow and long.
4. Pray as you breathe**:
Lord,
We* breathe in your Peace. [inhale]
We breathe out our stress. [exhale]
We breathe in that you are with us. [inhale]
And we breathe out the lie that you aren’t. [exhale]
5. Return to this prayer whenever you need to remember God is with you.
Gently slowing down the pace of your breathing offers your body a chance to slow down to the speed of God walking with you in this moment. (I seriously do this probably at least 50 or more times a day.)
God is taking every inch of scorched earth
from cursed to blessed
through you embracing
your body
as his home.
*I say "we" because I'm praying this this week with you. And I hope many others reading this will be too. We are a body, and we are praying as one.
**(for more on Breath Prayer, you might enjoy this old article of mine with Relevant Magazine, "Why Learning to Breathe May Be the Best Way to Pray")
Finally, a Few Good Things...
1. We are going to have a book launch team! I'm going to be inviting you first (and everyone's getting a free advanced reader copy! Yesssss), so if you want to invite a friend to be part of this with you, make sure they are signed up to get these emails. I'll be sharing a launch team application + details here toward the end of March!
2. I'm feeling pretty blown away by the response to #ThisTooShallLast the podcast! It's been out for a month and episodes have been downloaded just a hair under 5,000 times! (So, even more are streaming!) I'm so grateful you are enjoying these conversations. Listen here.
2. I'm so happy to share that my mentor Kelly Kapic (professor of theology at Covenant College) wrote my book's foreword! He's shaped me theologically more than anyone else, and it means the world to have his words go out with mine into the world for my first book.
2. Here's sneak peek of the final cover! This is how it looked when it headed to the printer last week (hence the weird layout). And, yes, it felt weird + amazing for it to go to the printer. It has Kelly's name + some really encouraging endorsements... Super secret fun fact is that the book is going to have beautiful glossy/embossed details on it. I can't wait for all of us to hold the final thing!
Forward this edition of Embodied to a friend + encourage them to subscribe