To embody

Embody: the word keeps jumping into my life in my reading and conversations. What does it mean? The dictionary says To represent in bodily form or To represent or express something abstract in tangible form.

We talk about embodying virtue or grace. We also talk about embodied evil.

But in the Christian faith in the West at least, we often regard the body as something faintly embarrassing. Something alien to be held in check. Something that is going to let us down or lead us into sin. Something separate from ‘us’.

Even, for women, a sense that our bodies are somehow inherently evil and will lead men into temptation. Poor things!

There are many examples of saints in the Christian church whose mortification of the body borders on sado-masochistic practice. There’s been a hatred and distrust of the body in Christian teaching, which just shows how perverse we are when we follow the life and teachings of Jesus, whose body is central to our faith.

You can see how it happened: we think almost exclusively of the crucifixion and forget that Christ’s strong body carried him through life working as a carpenter, walking dusty roads, feasting with his gloriously disreputable friends, breaking the Sabbath to heal broken bodies. There’s no suggestion I can think of that Christ viewed the body with disdain. After all, the story is that his first miracle was to turn water into wine at Cana. Nothing tight-lipped about that.

Of course, abuse of the body is not limited to Christianity. In depression and mental illness, we punish the body with neglect, with too much food; we tear at it with alcohol and drugs.

The Velveteen Rabbi talks beautifully about the body in her post Embodied Trust. She writes:

Rabbi Shalom Noah Barzovsky … teaches that there are three kinds of emunah (elemental trust): trusting mind, trusting heart, and trusting body. And the highest of these is emunat ha-evarim, trusting with one’s limbs, where deep trust penetrates every fibre of one’s being.

‘Trusting with one’s limbs’, what an evocative phrase.

Christine writes here about her bathing ritual and its connection with baptism, the sacramental holiness of the element of water.

Abdur Rahman writes of Embodying Patience:

But what does it mean to embody patience? How can we become living examples of embodied patience? … it may well relate to perception. That is, patience is a state of mind, an orientation to life’s passing flow. To be patient is, on some level, to realise that everything will work itself out. It thus relates to faith, in so far as we develop our understanding that God is in control.

The more I read (and Emerging Grace published a post called Embodiment even while I’ve been drafting this) the more I think that while we are in this God-created body, the more we should feel free to simply take joy in our physicality, not distance ourselves from it.

Photographs from IStock

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