“If you touch my junk…”  The watercooler story of the week is about how John Tyner revolted against a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport screener who informed him that even Mr. Tyner’s groin was subject to a pat-down search. Here’s the AP story, in case you hadn’t heard yet, and here is the CNN coverage of the YouTube Video that Mr. Tyner posted.  Mr. Tyner, like all airport travelers these days is being treated like a machine to be examined, a thing to be inspected.

We are living in an increasingly dead, mechanistic world.  Or, at least, that is the sad perception more and more people have of all that is non-human.  Our vague sense that nothing is valuable apart from its value to human beings turns everything in our environment into a mere object to be used for human pleasure and convenience. We are seeing our throwaway planet being transformed into trash, into junk. But not only the things around us are diminished. Even parts of our body are ambiguously known as “junk.”

Words matter. I think that this slang, “junk,” for a man’s genitals is really sad.  Are his genitals not sacred and valuable parts of his person– though perhaps not ‘more’ sacred or valuable than any other parts? But, certainly, they are not garbage, refuse, trash; they are not junk.

While there is certainly a Christian history of applying a heaping helping of shame to human genitals, no religious tradition views the human body, nor any of its parts, as  junk. So, is there a better word?

Where would a better word come from?  It must emerge from  a transformed attitude about what it means to be embodied.  A process-relational outlook on the world can help.  In process-relational theology, we acknowledge the truth of our radical interconnectedness, of the relatedness of every entity with every other entity as a way to begin the process of re-envisioning embodied life as an unimaginable gift.  But this relationality is not merely a present phenomenon.  It is an interrelatedness that traces in every direction, and all the way back to the dawning of our cosmic epoch. What if we can live in a way that is mindful of the truth that every single creature, from human being to the faintest wisp of actuality in the farthest reach of space is the crowning achievement of the vast wave of causation, the vast wave of interrelationship.

When we imagine even for a moment the basically incalculable impossibility that this moment, this body, has come to be as it is and not in some other fashion, how can we afford to surrender our wonder and awe into a malaise of boredom?  How can we afford not to imagine for even a moment that every body is an epiphany of the cosmos? How dare we disregard our own self and the selves of fellow creatures as boring, as ordinary– much less as junk?

We must be able to look, each of us, at our own body and see that it bears the imprint of divinity, because it bears the imprint of creation and creativity in unbroken solidarity with every other creature through the 15 billion year adventure of cosmogenesis!  How dare we imagine for even a moment that the cosmos would create anything other than a truly unique cosmic epiphany with each creature?

Our language, which is itself the epiphany of the cosmos, the epiphany of God, bears the burden of the universe’s own self-reflexion, and so we fail sometimes to do justice to the gifts we have been given.  The irony of the terminology as used by Mr. Tyner (and I know he did not coin this term– I hear it often) is that it is obvious that he knows that his genitals are not junk.  Otherwise he would not have protested.

As creative beings who are the grateful recipients of lavish cosmic generosity, lavish divine generosity, I think we can do better than calling our bodies junk.  I call for suggestions about what language will reflect the awesome gift of our body.

Let’s become a new creation together.