I was taught to be afraid of my body. Bodies were dangerous, potential vehicles for the devil, because bodies might lead to sex. All expressions of sexuality were morally wrong unless you were married and heterosexual. But the messages were confusing, because my parents, youth pastors, and school teachers also taught me that my body was a temple of the Holy Spirit, that God had created it and called it “good.”
My undergraduate alma mater is a small, evangelical Christian liberal arts college tucked away on the North Shore of Boston. I loved my time there and made some of the best friends of my life, and yet it was there that I struck upon further fear of bodies, my own and others. Each student signed a “Life and Conduct Statement” committing to refrain from sexual activity before marriage. It’s a pretty standard, if unrealistic, evangelical college practice. But the statement singled out LGBTQ+ people, requiring such students to sign and pledge that they will not participate in “homosexual practice.” Those who are afraid of LGBTQ+ bodies perpetuate fear upon those very bodies. It must be disorienting and terrifying to be queer in an institution that says you are divinely disordered.
My denomination today, the United Church of Christ, ordained its first gay minister in 1972, long before most other denominations had identified LGBTQ+ equality as an issue over which to battle. And yet, as seemingly affirming of bodies as my mainline church, and friends and colleagues appear to be, I have a nagging feeling that we are usually terrified of bodies, too. We mostly ignore sexuality as a topic to be discussed, relegating it to a de facto realm outside of faith. But this is to leave one of the most critical aspects of our lives separate from our spirituality. God and sexuality are inextricably linked—whether we are comfortable with it or not. Many of us are starving for a spirituality of the body that is more than “Don’t do that.”
Christians across the ideological spectrum are afraid of bodies. Christian fear of embodiment, and specifically sexuality, goes right back to the earliest Christians themselves. They picked up a strand of Plato’s philosophy that said our access to the spiritual truths of the soul is contaminated by the body. The way to God, they said, is away from the body, towards heaven “up there,” not through the body and towards heaven “right here.”
Early theologians revealed a profound ambivalence about bodies. Origen of Alexandria is one of the most forward-thinking intellectuals of the early church, teaching a breathtaking and universal scope to God’s love. But even he was plagued by Plato’s dualism and hatred for the body. Origen thought that dwelling in bodies was like military bootcamp for the soul. Eventually, with diligence and discipline, the soul could leave the body far behind, but only after having struggled against the mighty floodwaters of sexual temptation. Mystics could take the higher roads of celibacy and prayer and taste union with God, but those lesser spiritual beings who succumbed to marriage and child-rearing would have to wait until the afterlife to experience God’s full delights.
The apostle Paul is also a favored writer for those who prioritize spiritual flights of fancy over embodied reality. “Live by the Spirit,” Paul says, “do not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). On first glance, Paul’s binary categories of flesh and Spirit seem to fit right into a dualistic Platonic glove, locked in their all-too-familiar wrestling match. But the Jewish renegade Paul is up to more than simple denigration of bodies, and it all hinges around what he means by the term “flesh.” “Flesh” or the Greek sarx in Paul’s writings is not the same as body. They’re two different words. Flesh is sarx; body is soma. Paul speaks very highly of soma-body in other places, arguing for a resurrection from the dead that is not physically disembodied (1 Corinthians 15). Somehow, Paul believes, that when God restores creation through resurrection it will be the healing restoration of material reality, bodies, injustice, and the whole universe. Paul opposes the flesh to the Spirit, but Paul does not oppose the body to the spirit. Flesh or sarx in the letter to the Galatians means the desires we have that are opposed to God.
In all of us there is an existential struggle between spirit and flesh, a struggle between desire for God and desire for reality apart from God. Some of our desires lead to spiritual fruits such as love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness (Galatians 5:22–23). Some lead to destructive ways of living: jealousy, quarrels, factions, envy, anger (Galatians 5:19–21). Sarx is life alienated from God. Walter Wink describes sarx in Paul as “the self externalized and subjugated to the opinions of others.” When we are too nice and try to make everyone like us, or when we posture in public a different self than the one in private, or when we take our cues about what to think from the latest social media influencer, when we lock our suffering inside and pretend that everything is ok when it’s not, we are living life according to the flesh.
Sarx is not the body, it is the part of ourselves that is not free. One way for Christians to overcome their fear of the body is to reread Scripture and rediscover the Jewish, this-worldly, life-affirming heartbeat of the Bible. But we also need to engage in practices of prayer that honor rather than devalue or ignore our bodies. Protestants like myself are far too heady, which itself is a way of dishonoring the body. The poet Edwin Muir wrote about Scottish Presbyterians that “the word made flesh here is made word again,” and that pretty much sums up most Protestant worship services since the Reformation. And for those Christians who are unafraid to dance, raise their hands and pray for the sick, all too often they still combine their swaying songs with an anti-body theology.
One practice I’ve been doing lately that is shamelessly earnest and organically vulnerable is to hug trees. Yes, I’m a tree hugger. And I don’t hug the tree for five seconds, I do it for three to five minutes. The tree’s bark sometimes feels prickly and awkward. Occasionally, I feel bug legs crawling on my arms. It often takes me a minute to overcome my initial self-consciousness. But when I’ve done this in my backyard or on a hike with my dog, I linger with the tree, the tree lingers with me, and I eventually feel my body connected to the ground, to the tree, and to life.
Photo by Trent Haaland on Unsplash
Buddhists and yogis have much to teach Christians about the positive value of the body—as well as its inevitable impermanence. Buddhist-inspired mindfulness practices teach us to draw our attention to this moment, this breath, and this bodily sensation right now. I became a dedicated yoga practitioner because breathing and moving together intuitively felt like praying in my body. I didn’t have the language or theology to articulate it at the time, but my body knew what I was doing was sacred. Christians have work to do in order to knit prayer lives back together with bodies. Regardless of what form it takes, whether weeding the garden, walking mindfully, practicing yoga, or having conscious sex, praying through our bodies reminds us that Spirit reveals itself through our bodies and not in spite of them. And really, how else could we pray other than through and with our bodies? Embodied prayer is an invitation to a transformed, Spirit-soaked rhythm of life.
This is an adapted excerpt from my book The Holy Ordinary. You can purchase it at all the places (with special recommendations for local libraries, Bookshop, and Hearts and Minds Bookstore.
My Catholic school experiences along with my children’s parochial school teachings 30 plus years later did not allow for seeing our bodies through the eyes of a loving God. What a shame, what a lost frame of mind that could have shaped us differently. May we all eventually be brought to this type of message after learning or seeking a more loving way that resonates deeply true in our bodies! Thank you Mark
I've been thinking about how to do this better in worship. Getting more of our senses and body movement into church is as challenging as getting a new hymnal. It is hard to part with the familiar squares of bread, the pews, and head-oriented service. I think I may need to try sermon series on worship with all our body. A mindful beginning, something more interesting to taste and end with dancing.