Shrugging Off Uncertainties, Ready for the Next Sacred Moment
A few years ago, I joined a small group of friends on a short, silent retreat in a beautiful place, in the woods of Massachusetts, led by two Episcopal monks. On the second morning there, the monks led us on a guided outdoor walk. Our first stop was in front of a giant, very old white oak tree. We were asked to pause and really see this tree. Her trunk was stout, solid and brawny, with branches rising to the sky, as if in prayer.
One monk then asked us to consider: What in ourselves might feel like this rooted and rising tree? Playfully he invited us to settle more deeply into what we might share between us—the tree and ourselves—by imitating the shape of the tree with our bodies. We spread our feet wide on the dirt of the earth, with our arms lifted high, flexing our outstretched fingers, reaching toward cloud and bird.
We reach out, arms in exasperation, in tired anxiety, in worry, in unknowing—and God hands us back a feast. God plants flowers in our open palms.
Soon we continued our walk and came to another grand and giant tree. But this one was broken. Halfway up its mighty, twisting trunk, one of the biggest branches had splintered, fallen at a steep angle, and was barely attached, branch tips resting on the ground. The monk asked us to take this tree’s shape, and to consider what feels similarly broken in us, where we feel doubled over, jumbled, splitting, or barely hanging on.
We let ourselves fall, soft and tender, at leaden angles, bent this way or that, toward the ground.
Physio Divina
I still do this, when I’m walking in the woods. If something catches my attention—a squirrel, a rock, a rush of water, a plant—I’ll stretch, bend, or curl up and take their shape for a moment and contemplate: What is it like to be you, and what is it like to be me? This has become a kind of spiritual practice for me. I’ll even assume altered body shapes while reading scripture. In a kind of physio divina, I imagine the postures of the people in a scene, listen for their emotions and experiences, and then adjusting my own physical stance a bit, I imitate them. I let my own imagination be gently captured.
After many months of trying this practice, one posture in particular has emerged.
Over and over again, what is revealed to me is the shape of my life’s deepest questions, and my many replies of “I don’t know” even as I show up anyway, with my “and, yet here I am.” My body takes a particular shape when I just don’t know how to answer, or what to do, or how to make sense of something, even as I choose to stand there despite my uncertainty: That is, I shrug.
It’s not a shrug of indifference or defeat. I shrug with arms out wide, hands soft and open, lifting to the sky.
“Are We Going to be OK?”
Christian scriptures and church history show us we are in very good company in this matter of the shrugging body, the questioning soul. Whether it’s God-bearing Mary’s first searching questions of “How can this be?” or the many earnest inquiries the disciples pressed upon Jesus of “What must I do?”, the gospel stories reflect deeply human experiences of unknowingness, the “I don’t knows” about what’s next. Where are we going? Will we even make it? Are we ok? Are we going to be ok? What must I do?
The shrugging posture isn’t really new to me. All through seminary, for instance, my favorite response to big vocational questions—What made you come here? What to you plan to do?—was a grinning “I don’t exactly know,” with a gentle, open shrug as I cultivated my own sense of making space for the Spirit.
Panic Pantomime
In the Sacred Literature and Ethics class that I teach at an Episcopal boarding school in New Hampshire, we read together the gospel stories of Jesus’ miracles of feeding the crowds. The disciples are worrying, protesting even—“This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late.” They propose sending the crowds away, only to be met with Jesus’ iconic invitation: You give them something to eat.
The disciples seem in dismay. “We only have five loaves and two fish!” What on earth are you asking us to do? We have nothing! We have nothing to go on! Five loaves. Two fish. Thousands of people. How can this even be possible? I imagine them saying all this, while throwing their arms out in front of them, palms wide open, shoulders shrugging up towards their ears, emphatically.
To the students I pantomime this panic, and the room erupts in knowing laughter. These high school seniors are all quick to pick up on the anxiety in the scene. They are themselves full of their own deepest questions—their worry both for tomorrow’s chemistry test and for their own futures unfolding before them—yet also the deep hopes and dreams and commitments they hold in their arms and their hearts. It’s a lot to carry. Very few of them are “religious” in that very strict sense of regularly attending services in a particular tradition. Yet all of them are deeply drawn into this gospel story. They resonate with the “shrugging bodies” they see in this scene.
As, I think, do many people in our times.
Surely many sense themselves inside this posture of “I don’t know,” including those across the diverse ecosystem of Christianity and church. Folks throughout church and world feel the ground shifting, maybe sliding, even giving way beneath their toes and feet. Some feel excited by this, some feel defeated, some are scared, some are clinging. Though it might look like a deserted place, and the hour late, and the knowns are waning, something else is rising, the Spirit, though it may yet be hard to see or hear or smell upon the air. We are in the not-yet. We can feel the chaos.
A Little Chaos
I have a soft spot for a little bit of chaos. I love a church service that doesn’t quite go perfectly. I find there is much more room for grace when things don’t go exactly according to plan—when we let go of our need to constantly control and instead allow ourselves to be surprised by joy. Through it all, we remember we are held inside the loving desire and delight of God. A God who is doing something.
And that offers a clue to why, perhaps, I have come to appreciate the shrugging body. Because the shrugging body is more like prayer than almost anything I can think of.
Something unimaginable, and unimaginably good, happens through Jesus, in the chaos of all those people in the loaves-and-fishes story. The disciples are in doubt. They are honest in their uncertainty. The task set before them looks impossible. They can’t see how what they have to offer could possibly be enough. But they lean into their shrugging bodies, full of questions, hopes, and disbelief, and somehow everyone gets fed, with much left over.
Scraps and Fragments
We shrug—offering our deepest aches and longings, the scraps and fragments of what we have, our prayers connecting all of it to the body of Christ. And it is from there, in an open posture of confusion or doubt, but standing there anyway, that the miracles arise.
There are times in life that each of us is called to speak what we know—and live what we know, with the actions of our lives in witness to what is good and true and life-tending, in the face of real moral challenge, and even danger. In other circumstances the shrugging body stands ready to meet our fateful moments and challenges. It is an open posture: open to learning, open to wonder, to things we could never alone have imagined were possible. To shrug is to let go of certitude, hard grasps, and control. It takes courage to stay in this place of not yet knowing. and not run away, and not rush too quickly to an answer. It is open to receiving and giving, prepared to embrace someone, or take on what a friend needs help carrying. It recognizes the fundamental reality that we depend on one another, and are wholly and utterly dependent on God.
Like prayer, to shrug is to offer all this, all this uncertainty, to God.
In worship, too, the shrugging body finds its moment. To me, the pastor or priest suggests this shape during the Offertory, arms wide and palms open and reminding us that we walk in love as Christ loved us. I see the shape of courage as the minister prepares to celebrate communion or Eucharist, her gesture of lifting high the bread and the wine, holding the body and blood of God come to earth, God become embraceable.
Crossing an Unusual Sight
That day on retreat with the monks, after taking the shapes of trees, we passed through some deep woods to a small clearing that held a tree of a different sort: The monks had placed there a crucifix, the body of God, Jesus, in his own kind of shrugging body, on the cross.
The agonizing shrug of the cruciform shape led us to think about what has already been accomplished on Good Friday. It is nothing we are called to do, or be, except simply to be with. The call, our invitation, to be with Jesus. And to pass through.
Leaving the clearing in the woods, we were finally led to a green pasture. And as Jesus instructed those who had gathered who were hungry, those who were unsure how to go on—we, too, were invited to sit down in the grass and wait, just a short moment, for the miracle of something already arriving.
Laughter and Whimsy
As we sat, one of the monks snuck away down the hill. He returned with something surprising: he was holding a toy bubble gun sending out endless streams of bubbles, which the wind began blowing into our delighted faces and hands. It is hard to describe just how hard we all were laughing. Perhaps it was because we had all been silent for so long. Perhaps it was the hilariously absurd sight of a grinning monk, in his habit, spraying us with bubbles from a plastic toy. Our laughter was loud, and child-like, unbridled, spilling out of us. It was such utterly unexpected joy. Trying to hold them in our hands, to grasp them, we opened our arms wide to welcome the bubbles in. A body shaped by, and for, delight.
What is the tender shape of a body full of questions yet on the brink of being utterly amazed and transformed—on the verge of catching a glimpse of what God is already doing? We reach out, arms in exasperation, in tired anxiety, in worry, in unknowing—and God hands us back a feast. God plants flowers in our open palms. And rains down bubbles upon our laughing faces.
Caroline Blosser ’24 M.Div. teaches and serves as a chaplain at St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. Her YDS/Berkeley Divinity School studies included intersecting themes of Christian theology, imagination, and spiritual care. She has previously worked as a teaching fellow for Yale College, an interfaith hospital chaplain, a monastic intern with a Trappist sisters monastery, and a middle-school language teacher in rural Japan. She is currently discerning a possible call to ordination in the Episcopal Church.