Blood, Phlegm, Bile, and How I'm Not Smarter than the Ancient Greeks

In ancient Greece there was an ongoing argument about what humans were made of. Hippocrates begins the famous Nature of Man (which was actually probably written by Polybus, but details) refusing to participate in the debate of which of the four elements people were made of: fire, air, water, or earth? None of these things, he points out, are “an obvious constituent of a man.” In other words, this is a stupid question.

Hippocrates/Polybus is more interested in the more scientific proposals, specifically “some . . . say that a man is blood, others that he is bile, a few that he is phlegm.”

I read this in a class on the conception of Christian bodies (which, naturally, has to start with non-Christian Greeks, because Western bias), and I couldn’t stop laughing. Someone who walked this earth seriously contemplated that people were formed “in unity” of phlegm.

I imagined a time traveler coming up to me and saying, “Excuse me, are people made of blood, phlegm, or bile?” and I, the humanities major with a high school and nonfiction essay informed idea of the human body, would have to say some version of, “Your assumptions are so wrong, I don’t even know how to answer your question.”

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Hungry Ghosts and Forgiveness

I have many gifts. I am a good writer. I have a completely adequate choir voice. I am very good at comforting people. I’m a natural at milking goats. I can get bathrooms very clean.

I am not very good at forgiving. I forgive small slights easily and I anger slowly, but what my grandma calls “soul bruising,” the hurts my mom talks about passing through the heart—those take me a while.

My patriarchal blessing, the personal prophesy each member of my church receives, says something along the lines of, “Improve your capacity for forgiveness. It will make you more useful.” Every time I read it I grimace a little bit at this part. Oops, I think.

Sometimes I try and try and try to forgive and still come up wanting after years of effort. Sometimes, instead, I refuse to look at the pain. I sweep whatever calls for forgiveness under the rug so that I don’t have to go through the emotional labor of working it through. “Nothing to see here,” I insist, my back to the horse-sized lump in the rug. “Everything is A-OK.”

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Learning about Racism in America

A few years ago, I was becoming very frustrated trying to explain male privilege to some of my guy friends. Most often, I’d start by talking about the difference between a woman walking home in the dark versus a man walking home in the dark. I’d explain why a woman might seem a little uncomfortable walking past them in the dark. A common response was, “But I didn’t do anything!”

“It’s not about you,” I said. “This gets to be about her.”

I found the “I didn’t do it!” reaction frustrating, because to me it was completely beside the point. To me, it feels obvious that this gets to be about the women. It gets to be about the people at risk.

My favorite class in divinity school was “Black Women and Divinity.” In it, we learned about womanism and healing, about forgiveness (pros and cons) and celebration, the earth and our connection to it. I loved the class, and I took it because I did not have even the slightest handle on what it meant to be black in America. As a student of American literature and history as well as a person who lived in America, that seemed like an oversight.

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Last Week in Div School: I Believe in Providence

I was having a hard time holding it together the first few weeks of divinity school. I was overwhelmed by the lack of familiar, by the new city, new school, new apartment, new people. I left everywhere an hour early, scheduling getting-lost-time that I often needed. I had not yet learned that I had finally reached the point of my education in which it was physically impossible for me to read everything I was assigned—so I was reading everything that was assigned, which meant I wasn’t doing anything else.

I also didn’t know how to live my religion at divinity school. It wasn’t hard in the ways Sunday School prepared me for—saying no to friends offering me drinks was fine, and no one was derogatory towards my beliefs or the the Church. I walked out of zero movie nights and a grand total of no one offered me illegal stimulants. It was hard because I didn’t know how to simultaneously represent the complexity and the strength of my faith, I didn’t feel that I was showing how important it was to me, didn’t feel like I was framing it in ways that made sense to the people around me. And because my faith is such a strong part of who I am, I didn’t feel like I knew how to be me in this new space.

None of this is surprising, since I grew up in the Utah part of Hawaii and then moved to Utah. I’d never had to represent my faith to people who didn’t already know what it was. So it wasn’t surprising, but it was a little crushing. I’d always felt good about talking about God, but as soon as I got to divinity school, poof! Away that ability went.

Fortunately, I was taking a class with the only LDS Christian member of the faculty, and I had an appointment with him to discuss the presentation I was giving in his class. After we’d gone over my handout and general plan, I said, “Professor, can you give me some pointers on how to be LDS here? I don’t feel like I’m doing it very well.”

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Emptiness and Wordlessness, In a Good Way

In New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton says, “In order to know and love God as He is, we must have God dwelling in us in a new way… not only in His greatness but in His littleness, by which He empties Himself and comes down to be empty in our emptiness and so fill us in His fullness” (40).

One of the interesting things about mystics like Merton is that they push metaphors until they break down. All metaphors break down, of course, but most of us try to keep our metaphors in tact, to stop before they crumble. Mystics, though, they just plow through. They want to make sure you know that the words they’re using aren’t the reality they’re trying to communicate. “God’s bigger than the words,” they’re saying. “Stop getting hung up on them.” In The Cloud of Unknowing, the unknown author spends whole chapters discussing how when he says “up” towards God, he doesn’t really mean up, and when he says “in” towards ourselves, he doesn’t really mean in. Merton is more concise in his unraveling: God empties Himself to come to us in our emptiness and in His emptiness fills us.

“Fills us with what?” I ask the text. “You said He’s empty?”

“Exactly,” Merton says. “You’re getting it.”

I’m really not getting it.

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I Cried in a Hallway Again: LDS Women Anointing Each Other

This week was a bit rough. I’m not exactly sure why. I was tired, coming off a weekend in which I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not do homework, so maybe that was it.

I don’t think so, though. I think last week I just felt very, very small and afloat. Which is why finding information about pioneer women anointing each other during childbirth in one of my school books made me break down in tears in a school hallway.

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You Have Your Mom's Cells (Hope That's Cool)

Austin says that he gets all the main benefits of div school because I come home and tell him all the best stuff—but I submit as evidence that time we were sitting on his couch and he kept not doing his homework so he could read mine (it was about gender among the ancient Greeks, and it was fascinating). So you should all go to div school, but here are the ideas that are lighting me up this week:

Mothers and Grandmothers

I’m in this class called “Encountering Motherhood: Sacred Histories,” and my professor is intensely motherly. She’s also quite hippy, which I associate that with motherliness, because my mom is also kind of a hippy. My professor wears long green velvet dresses, and the first day of class she assured us it was OK not to come because of family emergencies, and “family includes pets, I want to be clear. If your goldfish dies, and you’re very upset about that, I will absolutely understand.”

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This Week in Div School: Eve and Asherah

Div school is always fun (except when I’m eating oatmeal for the third meal in a row and googling the meaning of words I think I know while wearing pajamas at four o’clock in the afternoon), but this week was extra fun because there was so much scriptural women stuff.

Eve and Eden

The first time I ever really started thinking of doing religious scholarship was in a Milton class where we were reading Paradise Lost, and I noticed that Eve’s interactions with divinity always happened through Adam, which annoyed me. Partially because I really, really think the Eden story matters. For Christians and Westerners, it’s one of the stories we understand ourselves through.

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