Spirituality: embodiment

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31/07/2009

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The spiritual realm may be invisible, transcendent, mysterious - but people are not. (Though they can certainly be a mystery.) People are flesh and bone, they are mind and history, music and passion.

In order to make any sense of the spiritual we have to translate it into terms we can grasp - into words, into symbols, into the way in which we live our lives, into rules and regulations, into art, into buildings, even into what we do with our money. We put flesh on the spiritual bones - we pour what is invisible into a bodily form in order to be able to see it. We do so individually and we do so in dialogue with the groups and communities we belong to - both Christian and secular.

Icon of The Black Madonna of Czestochowa

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa

We consciously embody our faith when

a) We try to reflect what we know and believe about God in the daily course of our lives. We put faith into practice.

b) We use symbols - material things or words - which point beyond themselves to what is spiritual. Our worship - the words we use, the movements we make, and the objects we use (bread and wine, for example) symbolise our response to God, and also try to evoke that relationship.

(The most common trap for religious people is to forget that these things are not important in themselves - symbols and objects are no more than expressions of a relationship with God, or helps to apprehend God; they themselves are not God. When they are no longer helpful they should be discarded as hindrances. This is particularly true for objects or practices that once were really helpful. Having once found that help it is so much harder to let it go.)

Embodied in ideas

A further aspect of embodiment concerns our shared ideas of what spirituality is (and could be), and the appropriate, adequate, and best ways in which we we respond to God.

Our 'worldview' is a constellation of ideas - about who we are, about the way the world works (and how it ought to work), about morality and suffering - and whole packages of other notions some important, some trivial. A 'worldview' is the way we order or pattern all our knowledge and experience. It is built up through our life and, critically, it develops in engagement with others. As we talk and work together we share our ideas and understanding with other people - we test our ideas on them and they affirm, denigrate, challenge or dismiss them. To take another person seriously is to be open to the possibility of being changed by them as we integrate their responses into our own understanding of the world. (I don't mean we have to agree with them: it's often the way that we have to sort out what we think more sharply when someone challenges us than we do if they just accept what we say.)

This process happens with communities too. The Christian community (in all its wonderful diversity) is the community of people who share a faith, draw on a common tradition, and hold certain values in common - they share a 'worldview'.

Praying near Allahabad at the Maha Kumbh Mela

Self-evidently this shared 'worldview' is understood in widely divergent ways. Each congregation is a coalition of people with a range of views. The differing strands that make up each denomination stretches that range considerably wider. Take a look across history and across the world and the differences in the ways people understand and articulate their faith seem immense. It raises the question of whether or how we can really call this plurality of views shared at all.

The task of the community of Christians is to inherit the faith - belief and trust in God. Each generation must make the faith their own: faith is not a possession we hold or a treasure to be guarded, it is who we are. We make the faith our own in continual dialogue with one another, with Christian history, and with the challenges of the world in which we live.

This whole process is embodied in people's lives. To be a Christian is to embody in our self our idea of what a Christian is. Because these ideas vary there will always be disagreement between faithful Christians as to what are proper ways, what is inadequate, what is most important, and what is quite wrong, as we embody our faith in our daily lives.

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