So this is a big topic for me, HUGE really, and I'm not going to fully delve into tonight. But I've started re-reading a book I hold dear, Reclaiming the Body in Christian Spirituality by Thomas Ryan. Essential it talks about the role of the body in Christian spiritual life and what it means to be an embodied being. When I first read this book it was a total paradigm shift and also a total breath of fresh air. I want to share a passage from the introduction, which is actually a quote from another book, Honouring the Body by Stephanie Paulsell:
What is this body we wish to honor? There seem to be as many descriptions of the body as there are people to describe it. The body is a friend or a traitor. A gift or a task. Something precious knit together by God's own hands or the prison house of the soul, which, according to Plato, is trapped in the body like an oyster in a shell. Most descriptions of the body tend to fall into one or two camps: some suggest that the essence of who we are is merely encased, temporarily, in a body. In other words, a body is something we have. Others suggest that what is essential about human being cannot be separated from bodies. In other words, we are our bodies in a very fundamental way......Such is the mystery of the body. Sometimes we know that we are our bodies, that our capacity for life and death makes us who we are. At other times we feel that we simply inhabit a vessel that is inadequate to contain all that we are.
So what is it? Am I a body? Or trapped in a body? In either case, what does it mean if I ignore my body's needs, abuse it, starve it, try to whip it into shape? What am I really doing? Or what am I attempting to control?
I love this book too because it really delves into the idea that GOD MADE US TO BE EMBODIED. In fact, the thing that distinguishes Christianity from other religions is the idea that God became EMBODIED and came down to earth and dwelt among us. Our entire faith is built upon the bodily life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Whoa. So what does that tell me about the importance of bodies to God? And more specifically, what does it imply for the way I should be treating and caring for MY body?
Right now I mainly just have a lot of questions, and not a lot of answers. But I'm asking new things. And I'm certainly re-examining the way that I think about, live in, and treat MY body.
