Comfort Food
Words by Josh Skaggs
Images by Valeriy Kachaev
It’s the end of a long day, and you need something. You need junk food. You need to jerk off. You need a joint. You need nachos, Netflix, a bottle of whiskey. You need.
You’ve been good for X days, but today you’re about to throw in the towel—again. Maybe it’s a sin issue or maybe it’s a weird Taco Bell thing that no one knows about. Either way, you know it well: That familiar weakness that keeps getting the better of you. You’ve been asking God to give you more self-control, to set you free so that you can finally be the perfect man you’ve envisioned. God doesn’t seem interested. You’ve gotten to the point where this cycle is just a part of your life.
But what if your biggest problem isn’t porn or vaping or your (frankly, alarming) queue of K-pop videos? What if your problem is that you’re a heretic? Specifically, a Gnostic.
Heretics invented Gnosticism in the second century, and modern heretics like us have perfected it. We perform rituals of abstinence and binging, a dogged attempt to become more “spiritual” by overcoming our bodies. We claim maturity, tamping down any need for comfort in a futile act of self-control—or rather, self-annihilation.
We can recite the Gospel, but we have not reckoned with a God who ate and shat and laughed and cried—a God who was ticklish. We affirm that Jesus was crucified and buried, but we can’t wrap our minds around a God who was raised a physical body, a body with skin and scars and an appetite for fish breakfast, a body he still inhabits. This is the body that was broken for us, the body that feeds us.
But lest we get too heady, let’s not forget where we started: It’s the end of a long day, and you need something.
“Most of us hate to think about how needy we are, especially our need for comfort. ”
If you’re like me, you don’t know what you need. Your body is a wise, insensible thing. It knows you’re stressed long before your intellect catches on; it intuits your emotions and pain points with startling accuracy. The problem is, it’s not good at English. Often the message gets lost in translation. You’re anxious, but your body translates this to: “NEED PORN!” You’re sad, but somehow the message is: “CHECK INSTAGRAM AGAIN!”
As a recovering Gnostic, you’ll be tempted to berate yourself and move on. But your body will only let you disassociate for so long. You know that eventually you’re going to have to confront your need. So you receive these feelings as the encrypted messages they are, and you turn to the Father and ask: “What do I need?”
Addressing a father means that you’re the kid in this scenario, which is good news. Kids are resistant to Gnosticism. They inhabit a world—i.e. the real world—in which there is very little distinction between physical and spiritual, thinking and feeling. You can see this in the surprising ways they solve problems. They feel sad, so they go outside to play. They didn’t sleep well, so they cuddle in their mother’s arms.
Good parents are attentive to their kids’ needs and help them find rhythms of comfort and relief. Healthy kids can usually learn these rhythms and implement them for themselves. Unfortunately, most of us are not healthy kids. We are more like the kid who downs a two-liter of Dr. Pepper, throws a tantrum and then keeps his parents up all night.
But there’s hope for even the worst of us. I used to know a kid who expressed his need by grabbing my face and screaming, “I’LL KILL YOU!” He was a kindergartner with autism who was in the foster care system, and for a year I was his elementary school aid. That year, he taught me to pay attention to my embodied self—by paying attention to his.
Every day, he would scream at me, hang from my neck, ram his skull into my stomach. My co-workers and I called these little outbursts “behaviors.” The key to curbing these behaviors wasn’t to try to control them, but to make them more and more rare by instilling better rhythms of comfort.
I became sharply attuned to this kid. I could recognize his facial tics and know when he needed a break. For example, if he was edging toward a catastrophe, I might recommend we go wash our hands in the classroom sink. As cool, refreshing water poured over his hands, he would fall into a trance while his breath evened out. Sometimes we’d stay at the sink for several minutes, letting his body reacclimate. Sometimes, if I noticed him starting to go manic, I would press the flats of my hands against his arms and give a comforting squeeze.
It seems small, but comforts like these enabled him to do math problems without blowing snot balls on me. By the end of the year, this boy transformed from a kid who yelled obscenities in my face to a kid who gave me hugs when I dropped him off at the bus.
To be clear, you’re the foster kid with autism in this extended metaphor (and I’m, uh… God?). I don’t blame you if that feels uncomfortable. Most of us hate to think about how needy we are, especially our need for comfort. But if you’re anything like me, your special needs already surface constantly. We all struggle with “behaviors,” with outbursts of sin or flesh that make us feel out of control.
So at the end of this long day, tune in. Run a diagnostic. Maybe your body is telling you that you feel sad. Maybe your body is telling you that you haven’t been outside in days. Maybe your body is saying “I’LL KILL YOU,” but after some prayer you realize what it really means is, “I’m in pain because of that argument this morning.”
Good. You’re catching on.
Now—what comfort is the Father offering? Try some things out. Go for a hike. Play with your kids. Forgive your boss. Invite a friend over for a home-cooked meal and a good chat. Sing a song of gratefulness. Put yourself in the way of beauty.
It’s going to be a process. All of us experience need in a way that is as unique as a limp. The Father is attentive to our special needs, and he is able and willing to guide us into healthy rhythms. I can’t tell you what those rhythms will look like—I’m still learning for myself. But I know that however the Father addresses you, He’s going to meet your whole self with his whole self. You’ll be so relieved.
Print isn’t dead.
If you enjoyed this article, you’d probably love more like it in the And Sons print issue. If you don’t have one of these on your coffee table right now, you should probably go explore our back issue catalog.
