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James B. Nelson. (1983). Word becomes flesh. Between two gardens: Reflections on sexuality and religious experience, Ch. 2. Pilgrim Press, 16-38.
Word Becomes Flesh James B. Nelson "Within me even the most metaphysical problem takes on a warm physical body which smells of sea, sod, and human sweat. The Word, in order to touch me, must become warm flesh. Only then do I understand--when I can smell, see, and touch." That, says Nikos Kazantzakis, is our human need.
Christian faith answers with a bold affirmation: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth [John 1:1, 14]." That is a radical claim with which the church and countless Christians have struggled over the centuries. It asserts that flesh is important. It says that matter matters. It declares that a compelling incarnation of God has occurred in a certain human being, one Jesus of Nazareth. And more, it leads to the affirmation that somehow Christian faith at its core is about the embodiment of God in our own daily flesh-and-blood encounters. With each of the above three assertions there are problems. Christians have difficulty believing that human bodies are important and good, and that they and the whole material world are pregnant with the divine presence. Though Archbishop William Temple could say that Christianity is "the most avowedly materialistic of all the great religions," we have been sufficiently affected by spiritualistic dualism to distrust that. The regrettable legacy of Hellenistic Greece--the notion that spirit and body are fundamentally different, with spirit the eternal, good reality and body the temporal, lower, even evil part of us--has woven its way into the fabric of our corporate and personal histories. There is then a two-way problem that arises with our Christology, with our attempts to understand the meanings of God's incarnation. Because we have difficulty accepting the goodness of bodies and matter, we find it difficult to believe that in that compelling instance of God's embrace of humanity--Jesus of Nazareth--God's presence did not in some way eradicate Jesus' genuine humanity. That Jesus should be a laughing, crying, sweating, urinating, defecating, orgasmic, sensuous bundle of flesh just as we are seems incomprehensible. Then the reverse is also true. Because we find it difficult to believe that God genuinely embraced total flesh in Jesus, we have trouble believing that incarnation can And does occur in us too. Lacking the conviction that God not only blesses human flesh from afar but also intimately embraces and permeates the body-selves which we are, expressing divine presence and activity in the world through us, we find it difficult to incorporate our sexuality into our spirituality. But if we do not know the gospel in our bodies, we do not know the gospel. We either experience God's presence in our bodies or not at all. If the gospel is not fundamentally an idea but an action, a deliverance, and if no action can be bodiless in human experience, the gospel must bring good news and liberation to our bodies or it will not liberate anything. Perhaps Norman O. Brown was right. "The last thing to be realized is the incarnation. The last mystery to be unveiled is the union of humanity and divinity in the body." And the last thing to be realized is that the Word, God's dynamic, life-shaping presence, not only became flesh two millennia ago but also becomes flesh now. If it is true for Christians that believing the former is crucial for experiencing the latter, it may, paradoxically, be just as true that without the experience of the latter--God's present embodiment in our sisters, our brothers, and ourselves--beliefs about Jesus as Christ become abstract formulas with little connection to life. But there is another possibility. And to
explore that I turn to body theology. The Body in Christian Theology Fresh concerns about the body are emerging in Christian theology and ethics from a variety of sources. Feminist theology is exposing the pervasive ways in which sexism alienates both women and men from their bodies. Lesbians and gay males are insisting on the significance of their own body experience for Christian theology. Third-world liberationists are asserting that theology's primary task is to change social structures that dehumanize and bodily oppress the poor. Ecological theology is recognizing the intimate connections between our bodies and the earth. Medical ethics is showing new, concern for wholistic health care that attends to the body-spirit unity of persons. While spiritualistic dualism and its companion, patriarchal or sexist dualism, have tragically marred Christian life and thought through the centuries, it is not fair to say that the view of the body in Christian religious tradition has been totally or consistently negative. In addition to the admittedly negative views of the body as foil for the soul and the body as an intrinsic detriment to true spirituality, there were positive perceptions in the early Christian era, as historian Margaret R. Miles has discovered. True, early asceticism frequently fell into the dualistic assumptions of a closed energy system, with the soul gathering energy at the expense of the body. Such asceticism also frequently succumbed to a punitive orientation, wherein the body was punished so that the self as a whole might be spared divine punishment. As Miles points out, however, "Neither discipline nor punishment is the goal of asceticism, but rather freeing of the body from the stranglehold of the [alienated] flesh so that it can come to share in the life and energy of the spirit." Gnosticism was a constant threat to early Christian understanding. The Gnostics believed that incarnation was evil, matter was evil, and the true home of the human spirit lay in the spiritual world released from the snares of body and matter. While gnosticism made some inroads into the early church, most Christians seemed to realize that the affirmations of the goodness of creation, of the incarnation, and of the resurrection of the body required them to reject such teachings. In later centuries there are additional evidences of positive attitudes toward the physical. When interest in speculative theology was lost in the early Middle Ages, there arose a marked interest in the practical expressions of incarnation. Because God had become incarnate in Jesus, the divine power could even now be expected in the material world--in spontaneous, unpredictable eruptions. Thus there was great interest in miracles, in physical healings, in relics and saints, and in the capacity of holy objects, places, and people to express and mediate the divine power. And in the thirteenth century lived Francis of Assisi, "the last and greatest medieval Christian to understand the world within the incarnational framework." To Francis, God was directly and immediately present in the material world. The world of matter and the senses was the form in which God might be known and loved. Such a physical world was not to be seen as a distraction from God but rather as precisely the arena in which the divine presence could be discerned. In spite of these positive moments of
incarnational embrace, in spite of the biblical teaching that the
body is "a temple of the Holy Spirit [1 Cor. 6:19],"
our religious tradition overall has shown marked ambivalence
about the physical. Christian faith has been more commonly
interpreted as the realm of "the spiritual," and the
spiritual has been assumed to be nonmaterial, nonbodily. The
result is that theology's concern with the body is with what it
might say about the body, with the assumption that theology
somehow emerges from a superior, nonphysical vantage point. But
what if the incarnation is pervasively true--that God is met
bodily if God is met at all? Then body experience is not somehow
lower than spiritual experience, nor does theology start
somewhere else and then speak about the body's proper
(disciplined and subordinate) place in the scheme of things.
Rather, incarnational theology itself must be a body theology. The Body as Relation to God It is important to acknowledge that the unity of the body-self is always problematic." Even in good physical health we human beings sense the fragility of our unity. On the one hand, how can we be anything other than bodies? Though our language itself bears signs of alienation (it seems more natural to say "I have a body" than to say "I am a body"), is not the union between my body and me profoundly intimate? Yet I also experience the body's strangeness. Though I can express myself only through my body, I am limited by it at every turn: by its finite location in space (if I am here, I am not there); by the ways my emotions either seem blocked within body prisons or seem to run their bodily course quite apart from my conscious will; by the constant threat of disability, illness, and ultimately death. Thus, I live with a paradox that I cannot escape: my body is me, yet not me. As Richard Zaner says, "Compellingly mine, it is yet radically other: intimately alien, strangely mine. Most of all, my body is the embodiment of that most foreign of all things--death." Yearning to transcend our mortality, we yet recognize the body as bearer of mortality itself. Human beings are, as Ernest Becker has graphically said, "gods with anuses. " Christians face, then, a double problem. Under the impact of spiritualistic dualism in our tradition, we have learned to suspect and fear the body. But, in addition to what we have been taught, our experience itself can make the body-self unity problematic. Does a body theology then make any sense? Indeed, it does. In fact, there is nowhere else to begin. If some theologians seem to attempt to see and speak from God's point of view, other theologians find only impossibility and folly in such attempts. There is no way bodily concreteness and particularity can be transcended in religious reflection. But these limitations are actually an incarnational gift. Body theology is not simply a theological description of the body (as if there were some superior vantage point from which to view it). Nor is such theology simply an attempt to understand the body as housing of the soul. Nor is it a matter of designing rules for bodily life. Rather, it affirms that bodily experience must be the starting point for any theological reflection at all. The concreteness of the world is nourishing in a way that abstractions are not, as Emily Gibbs realizes in the "resurrection" scene in Thornton Wilder's Our Town: "Grover's Comers . . . Mama and Papa . . . clocks ticking . . . and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you."" It is that kind of concreteness with which body theology begins. It is also the concreteness of the genetically deformed infant born to grieving young parents. It is the late-night phone call bearing a suicide threat. It is the Lebanese or Salvadoran child whose sad eyes speak of lost innocence amid violent surroundings. It is the concreteness of hardened concrete in missile silos. Body theology begins with all this experience. But what does body experience mean? Upon reflection we realize that our bodies are not simply objects, for they are our special and only means of knowing what any object in the world is like. We know, for example, that we locate all physical objects in relation to our bodies. Our use of prepositions in speech--in, over, under, between, behind, beyond, beside, within, without--depends on our instinctive sense of our own bodily location in relation to the rest of our experienced world. Indeed, through our bodies we learn that the fundamental reality with which we deal is not simply living beings as such, nor objects as such, but rather it is relationships. Body meaning, however, does not come through relationships as such, but through personal relationships. Without the humanizing process of touch, speech, and gesture from other persons, the infant would not learn personal meaning. The presence of another person (when I recognize the other as person and not simply as object) makes me want to communicate. The presence of the other makes me want to interpret myself--and I quite literally do not know who I am until I try to explain myself. The discovery human beings make very early in life, much earlier than our ability to articulate it, is that genuinely personal presence is life-giving. The relationship with another who is responding to me in ways that take my personhood seriously elicits my sense of well-being, my creativity, my capacity for reciprocity, my desire to care. There is an awesomeness, a mystery about the presence of another in personal relationship. There is something there which neither person has created. The relationship itself has a gift quality about it. The religiously sensitive throughout the ages have identified this experience as encounter with the divine. Thus Martin Buber says that in every true meeting of the I and the thou, there is the Thou. Likewise, H. Richard Niebuhr discerns all interpersonal reality as triadic in nature. The self in relation to the neighbor is: always related because of God, and the self's relation to God (even in physical solitude) is always experienced with the compresence of the neighbor. Thus, we know God not in some kind of divine aseity (Godself alone, unrelated to us or to anything else). We know God only in relationship. Buber put it this way: "In the beginning is the relation." The beginning for us is not one presence, not even God. Insofar as it has any meaning to us at all, the relationship is fundamental. This has important implications for the whole task of theology. Most simply, theology is what the church teaches (or ought to teach) about God. But if God is known only in relationship, then the task of theology is the attempt, in the community of faith, to express the meanings of God in relation to the world. This means that it is not theology's principal task to interpret scripture or to transmit the tradition. Rather, its principal task is to clarify within the community of faith the experience of God in relatedness to us--with the aids of scripture and tradition. Post-Enlightenment, liberal theology may have its problems, but its central insights are of enormous importance. It maintains that the experience of the world is the primary arena of divine activity for us. This runs counter to the tendency to locate God primarily outside the world, outside the body, outside the present; and inside the Bible, inside the church, inside heaven, inside the past or the future." As human beings experience a personal presence
in the world, and as that presence is life-giving, we are moved
to name it God. And we recognize that the experience of personal
presence is always voluntary. There is nothing automatic about
it. I can choose to respond to another human being as a personal
"thou" or as an impersonal "it." So also the
Jewish and Christian traditions speak of the relation between God
and humanity throughout history as a voluntary personal relation.
The covenant between Yahweh and Israel has nothing predetermined
about it. Yahweh speaks, the Israelites respond--or fail to
respond. There is a relational power that the people are free to
claim or reject. Christology as Interpretation of Jesus and Our Bodily Experience The purpose of Christology in Christian doctrine usually has been understood to focus solely on the meeting of the divine and the human in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus a standard theological dictionary says, "Christology is the attempt to clarify the elemental confession of Christian faith, that Jesus is the Christ. . . . The doctrine of the Trinity serves to clarify the christological affirmation of the divinity (or deity) of Christ. . . . Christology shifts the focus to Jesus Christ. It inquires how it is in Jesus Christ that God is present and active with us. The inquiry thus becomes centred on the relation between the divine and the human in this person." I would argue, however, that this is too narrow. By literal insistence or by implication, mainstream theological tradition has confined the Christ to Jesus. In so doing, the practical effect has been to deny the reality of the christic experience and power to everyone else. More adequately, the purpose of Christology is to attempt to understand Jesus as Christ and also to understand and affirm God's incarnate, relational activity in human life in the present and in the future. If the experience of personal presence in the meeting with another is voluntary (nothing automatic, nothing predetermined, nothing foreordained), this gives an important clue to the nature of incarnation. As incarnation applies to Jesus, that reality resulted from voluntary choice. Jesus could have decided otherwise. He was not fated to be our messiah. He could have chosen to resist God's radical claim of love. In fact, he chose to open himself to that claim. He chose to respond with all the fullness of being of which he was capable. The understanding of divine incarnation as a voluntary experience, however, has been a precarious one in the Christian tradition." Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the church lost much of its sense of the free quality of the relationship between the divine and the human. In order to preserve the humanity and divinity of Jesus as Christ, the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) rejected the Antiochene Christology that suggested a personal, moral relation between the human Jesus and the divine God. Instead, the church substituted a hypostatic or essential union of the two natures. The implication of Chalcedon. was that the human and divine natures were so distinctly "other" that there was possible no voluntary cooperation between them. Thus in Jesus it was not a meeting of love between divinity and humanity. Rather, the notion of a personal, moral relation was replaced by a conception of ontological union: the divine and the human were united "without confusion, without change, without separation." Divinity dominated humanity, relegating it to the realm of that which needed to be overcome. A view of Christ emerged that was once-and-for-all. Incarnation was confined to that one individual. Here was a being with whom Christians might have a transactional relationship through faith, but not one who was ours to incorporate in the most intimate, personal, bodily experience. What was substituted was the belief in an unchanging God of perfection, one whose divine love was completely other than human love, whose divine being was completely other than human bodily being. Lost was the compelling experience of the incarnate God as the meaning, the reality, and the power of our relationship to other created beings. Lost was the life-giving experience of knowing God as the inmost presence and power of our own being. When salvation history was centered in the person of Jesus as the Christ, the door was opened to oppressive implications. Subsequent Christian theology lent itself all too frequently to the oppression of the Jews, for if Jesus is the only and true messiah then the Jewish people are spiritually blind in their scriptural exegesis and piety, and their divine reprobation is justified. Such Christology has all too frequently been oppressive to women, inasmuch as it became linked to the maleness of Jesus and the maleness of the Father God. By affirming Jesus as Christ to be "the center of all things," such Christology has "rendered weak, invisible, or ashamed by the church's affirmation" countless persons who are not male, not white, or who are Semitic, or who are born without inheritance, or who are without community, or who feel strongly about their sexuality. For all these persons sense their significant difference from that one person who has been claimed to be the only Christ." Such Christology has paved the way for "triumphalist" theologies and the superior posturing of the Christian church in relation to any and all who are "outside the covenant." It has contributed to a theological defense of reactionary and oppressive politics.' And in all this, human bodily experience seems distant from God. Orthodox Christology, however, was attempting to grapple with an affirmation of enormous importance: the source of salvation is in God. If the two great christological councils of the church, Nicaea and Chalcedon, insisted on the divinity of Jesus, it was because these early Christians were convinced that the power to make alive, to reconcile, to redeem was God's power. The regrettable fact was that the orthodox formulations led to a view of humanity that emphasized passivity and powerlessness. The formulas have led countless Christians to believe that there is really only one God-bearing person to be encountered in human history, and that is Jesus. All others are excluded from the christic nature. What if Christians believe that the desire of God is that all human beings--not just one--be Christ-bearers? What if we believe that the Love that (as Dante said) "moves the sun and the other stars" deeply yearns for intimate union with every person, desiring that each one participate in the redemption of the world? Then we who stake our claims with the Christian community and its tradition find in Jesus of Nazareth the crucial paradigm of the Christ. But this paradigmatic figure does not monopolize the Christ. Indeed, his purpose is precisely the, opposite: to free and to release the christic reality that it might be embodied in the fleshly relationships of all. Norman Pittenger puts it well: "If Jesus released the divine love into human life in an unprecedented manner and degree, he did this because in all respects he shared the [humanity] which is ours; and if we, in our turn, can appropriate that love released in his accomplishment, it is because it was disclosed and made effective in those very human terms which are also ours." Incarnation--personal presence--is a voluntary process. Jesus was free to reject the intimate union with God, as are we. But he chose to respond to that presence, and in the process both he and God were changed. Something new was revealed about both God's presence and human presence. In Carter Heyward's words, "And the something new--the revelation--is that when God and humanity act together in the world, human action and divine action are the same action, the same love, the same justice, the same power, the same peace. Incarnation is always a paradox of grace. Indeed, the experience of grace, God's love in action, is always paradoxical in human experience. We recognize that the best we are and do ultimately has its source beyond us in God. At the same time our lives and our actions are never more truly personal, responsible, and free than when their divine source is affirmed. Paul expresses the paradox in saying, "I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me [1 Cor. 15:10]." Thus we cannot draw any sharp boundary line between God's work and our own, between God's action and our action. Both sides of the paradox are true and need to be affirmed. It is false to say that the more of God's grace there is in an action, the less it is my own action. More truly, it is the other way around. The deepest paradox, of the Christian religion is the incarnational one. Incarnation is a miracle. Yet the essence of the miraculous is not the interference in the natural world by the supernatural, but the authentic discovery of who we are. As H.A. Williams puts it,
Such discoveries are never once and for all. They are luminous moments in an ongoing process, moments that shed light upon the meaning of all else. The Word became flesh. And the Word continues
to become flesh. Both meanings of incarnation are important. If
we affirm only the first, we drastically diminish the religious
value of all the rest of human history. Moreover, we are led to
think of incarnation as possession more than as relationship. And
we deny the reality of the present embodiment of God, the
indwelling of Christ. But if we affirm only present incarnation
and neglect the reality of the Christ in Jesus, we lose the power
of that particularly luminous moment in our communal history. We
lose the transformative power of that paradigmatic one to nourish
and shape the embodied God in us. Both meanings are important. Resurrection of the Body: Incarnation and Our Sexuality If the Word continues to become flesh, if bodily experience is crucial to the experience of divine presence, the connections with human sexuality may be obvious. Yet in life the obvious is often the most difficult to grasp in our experience. This seems particularly true with our sexuality, marred as it is by the dualisms of the centuries and the continuing legacy of ignorance, fear, and guilt. To explore various facets of our incarnational-sexual experience is the purpose of the essays in this book. But, by way of further groundwork--and in light of the previous affirmations about body life, relatedness, and God--consider these possibilities:
God's hunger. When the author of the Fourth Gospel spoke of the Word becoming flesh, that writer was utilizing the Greek concept of the Logos as "Word." The term Logos was introduced into Greek philosophy by Heraclitus of Ephesus in the fifth century B.C. Prior to Heraclitus the nature of reality was believed to be static and mathematical, but in this philosopher's vision the cosmos was in ceaseless change; one could never step into the same river twice. The cosmos was a state of becoming. But, if that becoming were not to result in chaos there must be an intelligent, eternal power that guided change into order and meaning. John B. Cobb Jr. describes it this way: "The Logos is the cosmic principle of order, the ground of meaning, and the source of purpose, . . . the lure for feeling, the eternal urge of desire, the divine Eros." Cobb's description conveys the religious insight that the Logos is not fundamentally abstract, rational power, but is more truly that dynamic, ordering will which is marked by passion and desire indeed, by hunger. This is the nature of that Word which becomes flesh: a hunger for wholeness. Classical theology, which dominated the church's thought for centuries, finds this all quite foreign. In that tradition, God is totally complete, forever fulfilled, and has no intrinsic need of human beings or anything else in creation. There is no hunger. "At best," as Bernard Lee has observed, "God takes dessert to be polite." In recent decades, however, a more biblical perception of the God who changes, who yearns, who is incomplete without the embrace of creaturely life has been rediscovered, particularly through process theology. No longer is it adequate to embrace those ancient philosophical categories which assumed that God was immutable and changeless, that God could only give but not receive, that God could only cause effects but could riot be affected. God is marked by eros as well as agape. And what is eros? It is "the life instinct, the large sense of the passionate drive for life and growth, and the power of those passionate instincts that derives from their satisfaction." It may well be, then, that the human experience of eros is a crucial arena for meeting God. It may be that our genuine human hungers are experiences of the divine hunger. We know these experiences bodily--with our sexual bodies. Surely one of the central meanings of sexuality is the yearning for reunion, the appetite for wholeness that can be satisfied only in intimacy with others. The Word sexuality itself comes from the Latin verb secare, meaning to cut or divide. The word suggests the primitive human sense that we experience separation and long for reunion with the entirety of our body-selves. Observations of people in public places, the reading of gossip magazines, overhearing ordinary conversations all reveal the ways in which people, are excited by and energized by other people. "This," as Richard Rohr accurately comments, "is sexuality. It is our energy for life and for communication. Without it, we would settle for a cold metallic kind of life.... The power of bonding, linkage, and compassion would be gone from the earth." While sexual arousal and genital desire are only one part of a much richer human sexuality, these experiences can be bodily experiences of God's hunger. To be sure, our sexual arousal and desires can find destructive expressions. But, as Henry Nelson Wieman has suggested, at best they seem intended to break through our confining egoisms, to make us profoundly responsive not only to the other but to all the other's interests and relations. Sexual arousal, in Wieman's view, can be sacramental precisely because it is the experience of greatly heightened human responsiveness and the intense desire to relate. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Molly's "Yes" is this experience: ". . . and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes . . . and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes." We human beings know in our own sexual experience something of Molly's Yes. But Molly is not only us. Molly is also the hungering, passionate God who meets us bodily. God's language. Logos is translated as Word. That is significant. Humans experience the eternal will to order and meaning, the divine eros, the infinite desire, as Word, language, communication. We are creatures of language. We would not be human without it. But language is not only vocal or written speech, it is also body language. The parallels between speech and body language are striking, as are those between speech and our sexual meanings. Consider these:
It is useful, then, to understand human sexuality as a form of language. Sexual behavior is one basic way people have of saying what they mean--or of misleading themselves and others. Andre Guindon in The Sexual Language observes that sexual behavior as language conveys our most intimate understandings of bodily existence, In such speaking, sexual meanings take on a certain originality, a newness. If, however, our sexual language (our bodily words) are nothing but the patterned repetition of someone else's words, our language gradually becomes meaningless. It is a dead tongue. Such disintegration, Guindon notes, can occur through either side of the body-spirit sexual dualism. Spiritualism would rather that the word not become flesh, while corporealism wants the flesh without word. In either case, sexuality loses its human meaning and ceases to be a fundamental medium of truthful communication. God's language remains abstract, unreal, and ineffectual to us until it becomes embodied. But when the divine Word is embodied it communicates with life-giving power. Speech then becomes quite literally "being in touch." This was what the early church experienced in Jesus as Christ. They experienced him as both body and language. In him they found true language (the universal Word of God) and true bodiliness converging in a single life. To be sure, human language is always ambiguous. It is false as well as true. It is dangerous as well as life-giving. Our verbal speech creates a world of products that outrun our control and manipulate us. "All the great dangers threatening humanity with extinction," comments Konrad Lorenz, "are direct consequences of conceptual thought and verbal speech." But language is also the basis for transformation of the world. "From the same mouth come blessing and cursing [James 3:10]." The Word, however, is true. The Word is life-giving. The Word is transforming. And when that Word becomes flesh in human beings, our bodies speak God's language. For the fundamental purpose of language is communication. The fundamental purpose of communication is communion. And communion is the essential meaning, of our sexuality. God's interrelatedness with all. God's bodily speech intends communion--shalom, interconnectedness, interdependence, mutuality of relationship. On the one hand, bodies are means to such relationships. Humans need bodily apparatus complete with vocal cords in order to speak; we need hands to write. With our bodies we enter the relationships that sustain and give meaning to our lives. But they are not only rneans to relationships. Our bodies themselves are divine revelations of the interrelatedness of all with all. Though our minds are still saturated with the dualism conveyed by Greek Hellenism, Newtonian science, and Cartesian philosophy--the fundamental split between mind and matter--there is a different vision: that our bodies themselves are revelations of the inclusive community. Each of us is made up of more than a trillion individual cells, all attempting to work together and maintain one another. Our bodies are communities with their own ventilation systems, sewage systems, communication systems, heating units, and a billion miles of interconnecting streets and alleys. Our bodies are not only communities in themselves but, even more, communities in relationship with the earth. Our bodily fluids carry the same chemicals as the primeval seas. Quite literally, we carry those seas within ourselves. Our bones contain the same carbon as that which forms the rock of the oldest mountains. Our blood contains the sugar that once flowed in the sap of now-fossilized trees. The nitrogen which binds our bones together is the same as that which binds nitrates to the soil. Our bodies tell us that we are one with the whole earth. Our bodies are revelations of God's new heaven and new earth. And, when cancer eats at our vitals, when bones become brittle and break, when genetic diseases deform innocent infants, there is still revelation in the midst of tragedy. There is still revelation because we know that it was not meant to be this way. The tragic is tragic precisely because it takes its meaning from a vision of harmony and interconnectedness. Such is the body's testimony to the shalom of the New Age where the wolf and lamb shall lie down together.
God's pleasure. In spite of the pain of the alienated dimensions of human sexuality, our bodies furnish us with considerable pleasure. But the suspicion of pleasure, is still strong among Christians. One strand of this, undoubtedly, is the parental fear that if children discover sexual pleasure there will be no stopping them short of promiscuity and pregnancy. Beyond this there is simply a strong, antipleasure bias in parts of our religious tradition From whence did this cloud of churchly suspicion descend on us? Probably from a variety of sources in the long history of the church. The Stoics, who influenced much early Christianity, sought a life devoid of passion. Indeed, some early Stoical Christians wished that the act of intercourse necessary for procreating the race were as devoid of passion as was urination. Medieval theologians were suspicious of orgasm, for at the peak of sexual pleasure people seem to lose their rationality, and to the medievalist rationality was absolutely essential. The Calvinists were convinced that everything must be done decently and in good order, and decency and good order did not seem to leave much room for exuberant sexual pleasure. The Victorians simply assumed that sexual pleasure: was animalistic. Even now those Christians who pronounce sex to be holy and, good still leave the subject of pleasure largely unexplored and unaffirmed, with the persistent fear that the bold affirmation of sexual pleasure will invite self-indulgence and destroy true spirituality and communion. But what is sexual pleasure? It is more than just good feelings. It is the union of bodily, emotional, mental, and spiritual feelings in ways that we humans experience markedly positive sensations about the self. In sexual pleasure--be it lovemaking's orgasmic climax or in the deeply sensuous experience of breast-feeding one's infant--the body-self feels profoundly unified, taken out of itself into another, yet intensely itself. There comes a self-abandonment. The ego surrenders some of its control. Pleasure seems to elude us when we most directly try to produce it. It is denied to the egotist. To have pleasure one must let go, a paradox reflected in Jesus' words about losing life and finding life. Bodily pleasure has the capacity to contribute significantly to human wholeness, and consistent deprivation of genuine bodily pleasure is predictably an invitation to violence. If genuine bodily pleasure is important to wholeness and communion, why do those syndromes persist that announce, "If it feels good it must be wrong," or "If it hurts, it must be God's will"? One reason, surely, is that much Christian theology and piety has lost touch with the pleasure-giving, pleasure-receiving God. But the Old Testament is full of the One who exults in the sensuous glory of creation and who wills shalom, that rich harmony of peace, justice, joy, and pleasure. And the portrait of Jesus in the New Testament is far removed from that of the stern, body-denying ascetic. Later Christianity, however, in taking the cross as its central symbol, frequently misinterpreted it in ways that exalted pain, suffering, and death when the purpose of Jesus' crucifixion was really to put an end to all crucifixion and to usher in a new age of shalom. Christians might do well to recapture some of the old language of the prayer books: "It was God's pleasure to take on our human flesh." And it continues to be God's pleasure to do so, for in embodying the divine presence God expresses the eternal eros, the eternal desire to communicate, the cosmic yearning for the wholeness and interrelatedness of all with all. That is why faith perceives that the Word not only became but also becomes flesh. And that is why W.H. Auden ended his Christmas oratorio, For the Time Being, with these words, "Love God in the World of the Flesh; And at your marriage all its occasions shall dance for joy." |