"The kindness of round things"

What if God has curves? - How body image and river bends teach us about our need for a maternal God

In 2021, I had what I now call a seismic hormonal event.

My boobs ached for two months straight — enough to get me to a doctor who felt something, who sent me to a mammogram which showed a suspicious shape, which an ultrasound eventually determined to be nothing more than several days of immeasurable anxiety and waiting. A month later, I looked down one day and saw a belly that hadn’t been there before. It seemed to have appeared overnight, as though the thighs of thunder that had carried me all my life had finally put up a “no vacancy” sign and decided to send all the fat somewhere else.

Blame it on the stress of the pandemic and the sourdough habit I took up (my starter QuaranTina is still thriving)…or even on reaching the end of five years of nearly back-to-back pregnancies, births, and nursing. Call it sudden-onset perimenopause. But seemingly out of nowhere, my three-year-old daughter was asking me “if I had a baby in there” and I was Tim Allen in The Santa Claus, staring in shock at my jiggling belly in the bathroom mirror.

This, admittedly, did not feel great. And in the years since, I’ve done what women of a certain age do — I tried HIIT workouts and tallied my protein with decimal points, all while fielding innumerable Instagram ads promoting “one weird trick” for losing weight or promising I can get rid of my “meno-belly” in thirty days for the low, low price of $67.99.

Some of these efforts have helped…to a degree. But I still have a belly that hangs over certain pairs of pants, and I tend to favor loose shirts and flowy dresses. Despite the movement towards body positivity on Lizzo’s internet the past decade, I grew up with the skin-and-bones models of the nineties and flirted with anorexic tendencies throughout high school. So I find myself having to claw my way back towards acceptance of my body each and every morning as I’m deciding what to wear.

On a recent vacation, as my family and I were packing up to leave an airbnb before check-out, I stopped to take a picture of the half-wall in the bathroom. It was topped with driftwood, and something about it had captured my attention during our stay — I couldn’t quite determine what — but I snapped the picture quickly as a reminder to myself to find more natural elements to bring into our house once we got back.

A few weeks later, I stumbled across a post on Instagram, which was a short visual essay on “the soft logic of natural forms.” It detailed how our bodies and brains are hard-wired to respond positively to the soft shapes and sounds of nature.¹ The subdued light of the setting sun illuminating a wooden surface, the sounds of moving water, the organic curvature of a river or of a ceramic bowl — all of it exists beyond the realm of poetry and has been scientifically proven to slow us down, calm our nervous systems, and help us emotionally regulate.

I immediately recognized myself in the ideas — anyone who knows me will tell you I have a penchant for natural light and maniacally run around my house turning off overhead lights. I’m a sucker for pottery. I stop short in wonder at every tangible gust of wind and look around for the Spirit of God. I can’t walk my dog by the creek without pausing for a solid two minutes to just listen to the running water and breathe. I take pictures of housebound driftwood.

I nodded in instinctual understanding as the author went on to argue that in this day and age, we are surrounded by so many man-made boxes and sharp angles, which our brains can perceive as suspicious or threatening. Our danger-vigilant amygdalae react subconsciously and negatively to jagged edges. In contrast, we seek out life and safety in softness and curvature - smoothed and worn wood, still full of grainy knots, that was once alive, the gentle movement of a babbling creek, and “curved forms [that] remind us of bodies, of softness, of shelters made by hand or by nature…”

Curves mean shelter.
Curves are safety.
Curves say, You don’t have to brace.

What I didn’t notice when I hurriedly snapped the picture of the driftwood decor is that I can also be seen in the image. Underneath those branches, smoothed and spiraled by time and hardship, my rounded belly is highlighted by the sun streaming in from the picture window to the right. The shaded ripples of my shirt showcase the protrusion of my stomach as it arcs towards the mirror.

When I first realized that I had accidentally created an unflattering self-portrait, I cringed. It’s not as though I was ever going to frame this picture; I had only intended it as a visual note-to-self, but still my immediate response was to wonder why I hadn’t taken the image more carefully to exclude myself. A simple flip of the camera from vertical to horizontal would have done the trick

But in the following days, I found myself revisiting the picture, struck by the physical and metaphorical adjacency of the twisted driftwood to the undulating curves of the corrugated roof, the warm tones of rusted earth, to the relentlessness of life that is ivy finding a way as it curls down the wall, to the hand-painted image of a human, back rippling with both strength and surrender…to me and my belly. I found myself at once drawn to the “soft logic of natural forms” while simultaneously being repulsed by my own.

A few weeks later, my friends and I went out to dinner, and in time, as it often does these days, the conversation turned to perimenopause. After we had spent the mandatory amount of time on protein intake strategies and discussed the merits of various brands of weighted vests, eventually one woman shared about a recent conversation with her daughter, who had just gotten her first period. Her daughter wanted to know why — why do women experience periods and childbirth and all of these bodily hardships when men simply don’t.

The table came alive. Yes, why, we collectively wondered as we bemoaned our brain fog and insomnia, our aches and pains, the clothes that don’t fit anymore, all of the gained weight we can’t get rid of. In time, I brought up the work of Dr. Christy Bauman, whose book Theology of the Womb reminds us that every part of our womanhood is made in the image of God.² It matters that we menstruate. It matters that we can gestate life within nests of stretch marks. It matters that we hold weight differently than men. It matters that we have softer bellies and curved bodies. It matters because it shows us what God is like.

image by Lisa Sorgini from her series Mother

I probably sang “This Is My Father’s World” hundreds, if not thousands, of times when my kids were little. It was my go-to song when I was too tired for anything else; the lyrics would slip off my whispered lips at midnight when my brain was still half asleep but the baby was still fully awake.

It’s somehow easier for us to picture a Father God in the first stanza’s rocks and trees, skies and seas- a God of rough boulders and colossal redwoods, of expansive skies and roiling waves.³ This is the God we find in the thundering Niagara and in the tornadoes that tear through towns on the hottest summer days — a God of unparalleled strength and power that could help…or harm.

From an early age, I had learned that this God had paved a pathway to the promised land with the bodies of those who stood in the way. As I grew into adolescence, this God was glorified by the Jesus Freaks, in the hallways of Columbine as bullets echoed off the lockers; this God left people behind to be beheaded in sensationalized renderings of the Revelation. In college, I fell in with people who liked to talk about how this God saw us as squirming spiders held over a dancing candle flame, our best efforts a pile of stinking rags to this God who watched over our rights and wrongs, which were mostly wrongs. And so I came into adulthood knowing this God of sharp edges and long nails, who somehow loved the sinner but sank his bared fangs into the sin, ripping it to shreds that he eventually tossed as far as east is from west.

This was a God you had to brace for.

I didn’t know then that God was also soft. I didn’t know it until the moment my newborn babies were placed, wet and squishy, against my chest, moments after I delivered them. I didn’t know that God’s love was welcoming as a postpartum belly, round and comforting as achingly full breasts. What I came to learn in that season is that the might God who tames Leviathan also gently clothes the lilies, that the God who shook Lebanon’s towering cedars takes note of every shivering sparrow who falls.

If we as humans are hard-wired to be drawn to and find safety in “the soft logic of natural forms,” if we find calm in the smoothed edges of worn driftwood and comfort in the softness of our mother’s lap, maybe we are looking for those same qualities in God too. Perhaps as we seek to see and understand God through the things that God has made (Rom. 1:20), we need to remember that this too, is our Mother’s World, as the second stanza of the hymn hints at as it sings of morning light and lilies white — a world in which God does not tower over us only at the level of lofty empire or roiling kingdoms but is closer than flower fragrance, subdued as daybreak, soft as caroling songbirds, curved and flowing like rustling grass…a world in which a maternal God can be found in both strength and softness, whose image is even tucked behind every tummy-controlling ruched swimsuit at your neighborhood splashpad.

We live in a world of sharp angles and jagged edges. The headlines are full of them. People are being gunned down while waiting in line for food assistance, and kids are starving to death.⁴ Flash-flooded rivers and violent wars rage on in currents of death. Last week, I sat and cried as I read the news of Alligator Alcatraz. What’s hard and sharp are borders of barbed wire. What’s hard and sharp are ICE and horse hooves pounding through city parks while terrified children hide.⁵ What’s hard and sharp are tanks crunching through neighborhoods.⁶ What’s hard and sharp are five masked men tearing a mother away from her toddlers. What’s hard and sharp are rattling chain-link cages next to stacked bunkbeds. What’s hard and sharp are alligator teeth.

Even more jagged is the serrated cruelty which seems to be the point.⁷

Our amygdalae are blaring sirens, and every day, there seems to be a new reported horror that conscious of it or not, our nervous systems are bracing against. Often it seems as though the thorns of the old song, pointed and sharp, have indeed infested all the ground, far as the curse is found.⁸

Now, more than ever, we are in need of the softness, the shelter, of God. Now more than ever, we need the words of Jesus, gentle and humble in heart, who offers an invitation to come in our weariness and exhaustion (Matt. 11:28-30). Perhaps, we must look through the forests and fields and through our own bathroom mirrors for a God who offers a cushioned lap, sagging triceps and a soft belly, beckoning us to find our safety and shelter there within the folds. Let us follow the lead of what our brains and bodies already know and find rest in the God of the soft logic of natural forms.

Let us find our relief in a curved God…in a God we do not have to brace for

1. Instagram Post - “The Kindness of Round Things” - source of the title quote

2. Theology of the Womb by Christy Bauman

3. “This is My Father’s World”

4. This is still happening.

5. ICE raids CA park

6. This happened 2 miles from my house.

7. See here. And here.

8. “Joy to the World”

*Post thumnail image from Lisa Sorgini’s series Mother