I went to see Annie Leibovitz's photos at the Corcoran yesterday with Jan. Now I can't stop thinking about bodies.

Annie Leibovitz is famous for her dramatic portraits of celebrities, often staged with props (like a portrait of Leonardo DiCaprio with a swan wrapped gracefully around his neck) or in the midst of some kind of staged setting (like her famous portrait of Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk). But what struck me as soon as I walked into the exhibit at the Corcoran was not the theatricality of her portraits, but their physicality.

Right off, there is a stunning photo of dancer Bill T. Jones leaping, naked, against a stark white backdrop. But the photo also shows what stands behind the white paper--an urban rooftop with girders and bricks, their solidity as powerful a part of the image as Jones' grace. Then, turn the corner and you meet Leibovitz's mother, a sturdy, aging woman, dancing at the beach in a sensible bathing suit, her leg high in the air. A photo of her father and brother, also in swimsuits, grinning with their arms crossed in front of their chests, somehow exudes the same physical energy. A note nearby quotes Leibovitz as saying her whole family shares a kind of "physical vitality".

And then, suddenly, you can see it everywhere. Not just the dancers, and not just the criminally beautiful Demi Moore in her famous pregnant portrait. My favorite photo in the exhibit was a portrait of writer Eudora Welty, taken when must have been in her late 80's, shows her holding her coat closed with one hand and gripping the arm of her chair with the other. The energy in her hands is as clearly portrayed in the photo as the intelligence in her face.

Clearly, Annie Leibovitz knows and honors the vitality of the body. She knows how we live, not just as minds or as spirits, but as bodies. We show up to the world in our bodies, and we age and get sick and die in our bodies. Those photos are in the exhibit too, unflinching in the knowledge that bodies can torture us. They carry pain and trauma as well as exuberant passion.

I want to be a Christian, to be a pastor, with that insight. Ours is an incarnational faith--we dare to proclaim that God has been made known to the world in a body, one that grew and experienced pleasure and suffered and died. And one that rose again--somehow transformed, glorified, but still a body. But so often we think our ways out of the challenge of that story. It's easier to talk about ideas, beliefs, values, easier to relate to each other that way, easier to relate to God that way.

I want to show up to the world like people show up to Annie Leibovitz--alive and present down to my fingertips. I want to show up to God that way, because I know that I have seen God show up to me in my body, in the bodies of others, embodied in the world.

"That I was, I knew was of my body—and what I should be, I knew I should be of my body."
-Walt Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry