Christianity has perennially had a problem with the human body. At times in the history of the church, Christians have viewed desires and the body as the enemy. In the past few years, the question seems to have been, “What’s the body got to do with spirituality?” Yet we are finding today a surging interest in what can only be called embodied spirituality. Young Christians express worship with their hands aloft and their eyes closed; more and more find spiritual strength in candles and icons, and some churches are bringing back kneelers. Other churches encourage releasing creative gifts for acting, painting, and art. Fasting, too, is on the rise.
What is this all about? Thomas Howard, an evangelical who first converted to Anglicanism and then to Catholicism, gets it right with these words: “We are all sacramentalists whether our theology admits it or not: we like physical contact with history.” Indeed, there is a rise—let’s call it what it really is, a revival—of the value of embodied spirituality. We worship God and we love God in our bodies and with our bodies and in concrete, physical, tangible, palpable ways. Deep in the yearning of humans is the need to “do spirituality” with the body.
This raises a problem for fasting. Fasting is wholebody stuff. Many of us are much more comfort table with candles and icons and kneelers than we are with throwing our bodies into this business of worship and prayer. When it comes down to it, this revival of embodied spirituality has one major territory to conquer for Westerners. We’ve got a body problem.… Body talk, my expression for what fasting is designed to be, flows out of our body image. Until we have a healthier body image, an image of the body united with the spirit, it is not likely that body talk (fasting) will occur as it should.
To read the rest of this article, you can purchase the entire issue or just this article through our Journal Store.
