My body is no temple. It’s not lined with pews for resting in prayer or fueled by quiet morning meditation. It’s simply overfilled with the kind of gluttony that set Jesus into a rage at the sight of His Father’s house misused for the desires of this life. 

I first knew my overweight body was sinful when squeezing my ten-year-old puffs and rolls into Catholic school uniform became a morning chore. I can still feel the pressure of my mother’s hands gently massaging sunscreen into my body one adolescent summer and the sting of realizing she could feel the fists full of my loose, unfit belly skin in her bare hands. I can still hear my dad’s words the summer years after in that same backyard as I said goodbye and he praised my recent fitness, my discipline, my weight loss. 

My smile came by habit at his pride, with eyes opened wide and tight to stop tears that I shed in the car later driving away. This wasn’t health; it was self-flagellation after feeling my belly fuller than it had ever been before. It was penance for the life I cut short inside of me and an attempt to slim down enough to simply disappear. 

Each time my body has carried the added weight of life yet unlived since then, I’ve wondered what it takes to make a broken body heal.

When I fall to my knees in Church on Sunday and feel the weight of my aged, heavied body that has been filled and emptied almost an entire hand full of times pressing into my kneecaps, I wince like a guilty child with worry that I’ll hear one more time my 4th grade Catholic school teacher’s shrill warnings to never rest my backside against a pew while I pray. 

God’s house is for worship, not nap time, she would say. 

My words to God are often whispers of secrets I no longer have the muscle to carry. My genuflection creaks and strains, and it pains me to simply walk the lap up and back at the end of Mass for the Sacrament.

Tight-rope walking was never my balancing act. Mine is leaning quickly from left to right and front to back in bare feet standing naked on the scale in my bedroom, weighting … and praying not to fall.