The theme this quarter for my Transforming Community experience is “Honoring the Body as a Spiritual Practice.” I mentioned when I went into the retreat in January, that it sounded like a lot of talk about eating less sweets, exercising more, getting more sleep, etc. But, that I knew Ruth Haley Barton well enough to know that was most likely NOT going to be the main point. Which was true. It’s hard to say what the “main point” was – because there were so many facets to it, that it is hard to explain.
It dealt a lot with the tension that Christianity, and humanity in general, has always had with our bodies. The physical and the spiritual union have been a source of confusion from – well, maybe from the Fall. We’ve had the Gnostics who thought that everything material was bad, including our physical bodies. We’ve had the ascetics who abused their bodies, thinking that the temptations and sins that plagued them came from physical impulses and that our bodies needed to be punished and deprived to become more spiritual. We’ve had apartheid, slavery, and Jim Crow that have said the color of our bodies determines our worth and value – even our humanity. We are now living in the era of #MeToo and rampant human sex trafficking that says that the gender and physical shape of our bodies determines how others can use it. We are also now living in the age of extensive gender confusion, where we believe the body we were given was a mistake and wish it was another. (I realize that is oversimplified…) And I work in a milieu where the ability and capacity of your body determine whether you will be accepted by your community or your family – or even by the church – because it will determine whether you can be classified as fully human if a particular part of your body is missing or doesn’t work. And that just scratches the surface of the dissonance with our bodies, failing to mention cutting, the billion dollar fad diet industry (Keto anyone??), the billion dollar plastic surgery industry, and so on.
In contrast, the Scriptures have a lot to say about our bodies – and none of it with the negative nuance that we typically associate with bodies. In fact, when God needed an analogy to give us so that we would understand our relationship to each other once we are in Him, He used the body. When Jesus wanted to leave us with a ceremony that would keep us grounded in our identity as His followers, He told us to eat His body and drink His blood.
It’s been a fascinating exploration, these past couple months, of being more aware of what it means to be “embodied.” Even to contemplate the difference between thinking – “I am a spiritual being who HAS a body,” and “I AM a body.” It has been good to “live in the body” more during this quarter – being more cognitively aware of all of my senses, of sensations in the body – pain, hunger, tension, tiredness – and ask what I need to do for my body with regard to those sensations, to examine thoughts about my body that would normally go unexamined – whether about weight, or aging, or illness. To ponder more deeply on the idea that the body is a gift to us, that our Father formed and fashioned this particular body with love and care and intent in the womb, that our ideas of beauty or “normal” are manmade and not in alignment with God’s thoughts. To engage conversations about race or gender through new eyes and a more open heart, seeking to hear the dissonance others feel with the way they experience their bodies, or the way others experience their bodies.
I will admit that without this Transforming Community experience, I’m not sure I would have ever thought about these things, or at least not in these ways. And I would have indeed been poorer for the lack. Even spending a few minutes dissecting this one verse would be a fruitful exercise.
I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your BODIES as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Why are the “mercies of God” employed in the appeal?
Why present our bodies? Why not our souls?
What does a living sacrifice look like? Aren’t sacrifices usually dead?
Our bodies are holy?
Presenting my body to God is worship?
May your whole spirit, soul, and BODY be kept blameless to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He who called you is faithful. He will surely do it.
Amen.
Here are some resources if you’d like to explore the topic further. I have not read all of these, and they are all on different aspects of our body experience. They are a few from the list of recommended readings from the Transforming Center. The disclaimer in all of our reading lists from TC is to read like Bereans, as not everything in every book is worth keeping, but there are truths to be discovered and mined.
- Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice, Stephanie Paulsell
- Praying With Body and Soul: A Way to Intimacy with God, Jane Vennard
- Jesus and the Disinherited, Howard Thurmon
- Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality, Thomas Ryan
- The Myth of Equality: Uncovering the Roots of Injustice and Privilege, Ken Wystma
- Unwanted: How Sexual Brokenness Reveals Our Way to Healing, Jay Stringer
- When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection, Gabor Mate
- The Gift of Years, Joan Chittister