Reintegrating Faith and Body
(A redacted version of this article was first published in The Furrow, December, 2011 under the title “Reclaiming the Body”))
I have inherited from my parents the story of the Nazarene as my faith story and this is where I go back to time and again – I have questioned it and looked under it and been angry in it and sometimes up and down the years I did not know what I had a faith in yet I never actually felt faithless. I have needed to challenge and to fight the interpretations and the translations that did not value me or see half of the human race as also being created in the image and likeness of the Divine. Yet despite this I’ve also felt I had some kind of resting place, I had a sense of hearing both the beauty of the music and the scratch on the record. My faith keeps me questioning, pondering, accepting, rejecting; it keeps me angry, sad, delighted, heart-sore, loved, humbled. It has kept me digging until I pulled out all the answers that had been given into me before I had even asked the questions, it has kept pushing me not to give up, not to parch myself in a desert of disillusionment… faith supported me to keep digging until I finally began to see what was human-made and what was Divinely created.
It’s important I think to tell stories of how and where we encounter God/Divine for it allows the intimacy of those experiences to feed us and to fill us. Giving voice to my stories; the sounds and the silences of them, the smells, the tastes and the shapes of them encourages me to live in and into my experience. Here’s a story of a simple conversation the consequence of which I continue to live into. Some years ago a man was referred to me for massage therapy. He was referred by his psychotherapist who suggested that massage/body work would greatly support his therapy sessions. He came and received his first full body massage. On leaving the room after the massage I suggested he rest awhile and I would return within a few minutes. Coming back into the room I quietly asked him how he was and how he had experienced the massage. He looked over and said “this probably sounds daft but I feel like I’ve had a spiritual experience….” without any hesitation I heard myself relying “that’s not daft at all – often massage helps us to move out of our heads and into our bodies and sure that’s the most spiritual place you can be ias a human….” as soon as I had said this last part, I immediately felt the truth of it and light heartedly continued – “ Crikey, I better write that down before I forget!” I never wrote it down for it was one of those things that as soon as it was spoken seemed to be something that I knew all my life while simultaneously hearing it for the first time. In that moment those words walked right into my consciousness, and in making a permanent home here, began to reshape everything for me.
Often over the following years I would hear those words in my head – probably the most spiritual place you can be as a human is in your body and always it seemed I landed more solidly into the truth of it. I am embodied. I don’t live a disembodied life. It is in, with and through my body that I find my way in the world. It is in with and though my body that I meet God. My body inserts me into the world. It enables communication, presence and relationship. Its as simple as this: how I get to be in the world as a human is in my body. I can only be present and in relationship in my body.
Bodies are all around us. What we can see, hear, touch, smell, feel through our bodies is the source of what we know. The most rooted and spiritual place we can be as humans has to be in our bodies. Making love, giving birth, dancing, eating delicious food, struggling with depression, laughing till our belly muscles ache, expressing our hopes and dreams, coping with arthritis…these are not only bodily realities, they also shape our experience of ourselves. We learn in the body without limiting ourselves to our anatomy. Awareness of and caring for our own body is how we learn about being aware of and caring for the bodies of others.
The foundations of my faith story clearly affirms this The core of the faith story that was passed down to me is deeply humanistic and solidly holistic. Yet it has got lost in translation and lost in history. As far as the historical Jesus was concerned, mind, body and spirit interpenetrate seamlessly. Jesus reached out and touched physical bodies, knowing he was also reaching out and touching the whole being. It was through his bodily presence he was showing us a way to be fully human – present, embodied and in relationship. The body gives us a rootedness as well as a sacredness and dignity that can never be diminished.
I haven’t known an innate sense of preciousness of body all my life and yet I have grown into the knowing of this…and with such a knowing there is an ability to heal what has been damaged, to reconnect what has been split..to take back to oneself piece by damaged piece the parts that have been shamed, devalued, discredited by church by culture and ultimately self. I know that to deepen my sense of the preciousness of my humanity is the only way I can thrive in the world. To miss this is denying the essence of being human and gives rise to a very twisted notion that in order to honour God we must put ourselves down.
The body is in truth the nexus of a Christian faith, its where our theology, our prayers, and our actions come together. We live our faith in our bodies and we think our faith in our minds/brains. The love that emanated from Jesus needs also to find expression through our bodies; in our tenderness towards self and others, in our actions for justice and equality, in our response to the needs, abuses, joys, terrors and struggles of bodies other than our own. In and through our bodies we live our faith.
Yet the legacy of disembodiment has fragmented and disabled the church, distorting its doctrine and damaging its people. It seems to be that Christianity continues to resist the magnificent and radical nature of its own good news. Body is integral to the faith story and the biggest resource we have through which to experience and to express God’s exuberant love for us. It is impossible to be fully human without the body. We only limit ourselves if we restrict a knowing of ourselves to anything less than whole integrated human beings. Without being really rooted in our bodies and knowing the sacredness of that, we also risk limiting the experience of the Divine merely to what we can think in the mind.
Heres what I have learned – I starve when any part of me is suppressed or denied or diminished. All that I have been born to embody as my contribution in the world gets smaller and tighter. I am however nourished in the experience of the seamlessness of my being, body spirit mind. It feels expansive and open and hopeful and humbling. In noticing this, I’ve realised that what clearly supports me in my wholeness also supports my growing-to-God and vice versa – they are not in opposition – My humanness, body mind spirit and my God are not in competition, they are actually intricately and delicately connected. We are woven as one. This is the gift that whispers me tenderly back into myself.