My Review of "This Is My Body"

Ragan Sutterfield's This is My Body:  From Obesity to Ironman, My Journey into the True Meaning of Flesh, Spirit, and Deeper Faith is a memoir of his own experience in moving toward a Christian faith in which our bodies matter.  Having wrestled with being overweight since his childhood, Sutterfield eventually finds himself in adulthood, with a failing marriage and at his heaviest weight.  He is faced with the incongruity that he is an environmentalist and farmer, doing grueling work to care for the land and creation, and yet taking poor care of his own body.  After the collapse of his first marriage, Sutterfield surrenders himself to the disciplines needed to care better for his body, specifically controlling his diet and becoming serious about exercise.  From this conversion point onward, Sutterfield begins to learn and experience an incarnational faith in which our bodies cannot be taken for granted.

In what is the most moving passage of the book, Sutterfield recounts:

What if God himself became flesh and remains enfleshed?  What if God not only has a heart that longs for our love but also a heart that pounds with blood?  What if God has skin that drips with sweat?  What if the God who offered his body as a sign of love also wants us to experience our bodies as a gift of his love?  Christians must worship a God who is all of these things because we worship a God who was made manifest to us in the human, embodied life of Jesus.  The denial of the body, of the flesh, is not a denial of the dangerous locus of sin, as so many of us have been taught.  It is a denial of the Word made flesh.  Those of us who follow Jesus Christ -- God in human skin and muscle and mind -- cannot deny the goodness of the body.  To do so is to reject the reality in which Christ now lives as the risen and ascended Lord. 

This Is My Body is an amazing book about the implications of the Christian incarnational faith for our daily lives.  Though it alternates between Sutterfield's larger conversion story with ones that focus on the particular story of preparing for the Ironman race, the book as a whole is a theological reminder that there's joy in living thoughtfully and faithfully by caring for our bodies as disciples of Jesus.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.