THE BODY, SPIRITUALITY AND CHRISTIANITY
I had hoped we could simply laugh together over the last post - but then the same thing happened that always happens.
And I have - truth be told - wanted to write this post for a long time. So now you get it, in direct continuation.
There have been repeated reactions over the last few years to pictures of Krisztina and me on warm days, from training or just from everyday life at home, where we are undressed the way one simply is when the sun is shining, one sweats or enjoys life. The reactions usually concern that we do not wrap ourselves up, a mild outrage that we do not walk around with shame about our own bodies, and that we allow ourselves to share it at all.
And then follows the conclusion that always lands sooner or later, that for this reason we cannot be real Christians.
Real Christians….
Just taste that. 😏
Regardless. I will take it seriously anyway, because behind the outrage lies a misunderstanding that runs deep, even among those who mean it sincerely. And those who believe.
So follow me for a few minutes here.
Try going all the way back to the beginning.
Yes. That Beginning.
The first thing Man does, when Shame enters the world, is reach out for something to cover himself with.
Stop. Did you catch that?
Let us take it again.
When Shame enters the world, the first thing Man does - is reach out for something to cover himself with!
The fig leaf is the oldest religious movement we know.
Ok, I assume most are following now.
So let us notice the sequence here.
BEFORE the Fall, Man stood - both of them - naked without the shadow of Shame, and nothing about it was Sin. That was the original state. For Shame did not come BEFORE the breach. It came WITH it. And when God then clothes them, it is not because the nakedness was the Fall, but because they now bore a wound that needed covering.
The clothing he gave them was OF MERCY over a wound.
That they wore it was never a virtue in itself.
Therefore it is worth pausing when someone says that shame about the body is the mark of the "real" Christian.
For it is precisely the reverse.
Shame is not Holiness.
Shame is the Mark after the Fall.
Did you catch that?
Ok. So let us continue.
For a bit later in the same Story comes a fellow walking, in the middle of a world built around purity and impurity, about what one may touch and may not touch, what makes one clean and what contaminates. And he does something so quiet and so revolutionary that we have scarcely grasped it since.
He moved the entire question of 'purity' from the outside to the inside. Nothing that enters a person from outside can make them unclean, he says. It is what comes from within, from the heart, that contaminates.
With that one sentence he empties the entire machinery of external purity, the washing, the covering, the touching and not touching.
In one quiet movement.
I have really thought much about that over the last five-six years. How lovely it was to grow up in a time - and in a culture that lived in the echo he left behind. That the body was fundamentally unproblematic.
Paul carried it forward, and he is not to be mistaken at all.
A faith that consists in severity toward the body - in touch not, taste not, handle not, has 'an appearance of wisdom', he writes, 'but is in reality worth nothing'. And the same Paul calls the body a temple for the Spirit. Not a shed one is ashamed of. A temple. To Freedom has Christ set us free, he says, so stand in it, and do not be yoked under bondage again.
So let me say as purely as I can here, for this is the core.
Neither how much nor how little clothing a person wears - determines whether a person is Christian.
To be Christian is not a question of how much fabric sits on a body - it is a transformation in the heart's direction, a quality in it, a surrender of it to Christ, and that happens in a place where the fabric does not reach at all.
It means that the moment someone makes the fabric the test - too much or too little - and uses it to determine how genuine another's faith is, the question has left the gospel - for then it is no longer about the heart, but about measuring one's neighbour.
One has, in other words, taken the fig leaf and called it the gospel. And not understood that the gospel is the long way back, to the body that no longer needs to hide.
And that leads me directly to the second leg of this text.
When one's body no longer needs to hide, it suddenly becomes clear why it is worth taking care of. For everything we are moves through the body.
The body is not something external we decorate, it is the membrane everything internal must pass through to reach out - and when it is sick, neglected, filled and distorted by pain, then it lays a layer of noise on our entire reality synthesis, on our clarity, on our presence and our judgment.
It is for this reason we take care of it at home - try to listen to what it needs, instead of what it wants.
To do this is a spiritual action, not a vain one.
And this was known long before Paul wrote it down. The Ancients treated the body as something holy, and they meant it literally, for it is the only place the soul has a place to live while we are here. To keep it healthy, clean and strong is not to worship it. It is to respect what it carries.
And it is here the freedom in Christ is most often misunderstood.
People hear freedom and think, then everything is permitted. But it is almost the reverse. That freedom does not remove responsibility for the body, it just exchanges what drives us. Away from fear, shame and duty, away from avoiding punishment and others' gazes, and toward love. One cares for the body, in other words, no longer to escape something. One cares for it, because one has understood what dwells in it.
That we then show it occasionally on social media, I understand well can resemble a need to be seen - and there are plenty of characters out there with that need, we two agree on that.
But the intention is different.
When two people in their early fifties look different as we do, it is not to say "look at me". It is to show that it can be done. And can be done, for two completely ordinary and averagely gifted people like us. For health has an appearance and expression that leaves an imprint in the one looking - and that imprint can invite and inspire just as much as it can offend, depending on what it hits in the one seeing it.
The intention is to lift. Inspire. And say "come now, we only have one life, what better can we use it for, than see how far we can stretch it in all axes that matter for our experience".
And it is only here, up against the culture we actually live in, that it becomes truly strange to be met with shame.
For the current culture has neither the old discipline nor any reverence left. It eats itself slowly but surely sick, buries itself in comfort and excuses, and when the body then fails, it treats the symptoms with masking medicine instead of turning the cause - and simultaneously calls it "getting by".
The modern body goes stuffed and numbed toward the grave and has long ago agreed with itself that "that's just how it is, it's normal after all, the Man on television says so himself!?"
It is not the individual's fault, and it is no judgment on anyone who is sick or tired or heavy - most have simply ended up in the middle of a Machine that profits from them unconsciously continuing to buy the programming.
But as culture it is a surrender, and the surrender has become so common that it is now trying to pretend it is 'the normal'.
It is not.
It is a choice.
About whom one sacrifices to.
And whom one worships.
In addition, Shame and Indifference resemble each other's opposite, but they have forgotten the same thing - what the body carries.
And Christianity is the last place in the world that can afford to forget that.
We began this text in the Garden, but there lies a place even further back, before the Beginning itself. For it stands that in the beginning was the Word, that the Word was with God, and that everything came to be through it. And that Word which already was, before anything else whatsoever existed, then did the most incomprehensible thing.
It became flesh.
Not to lift us out of the body, not as a soul that finally escaped its prison, but by moving into it, taking residence in it, and carrying it fully.
Since that day the body is no longer a prison the soul must flee from.
It is the place the Holy itself chose to dwell.
❤️🔥🪽
And thus I leave you.
With something to think about, before you next time cast around you with judgment about who is "real" - and who is not.
Everyone and anyone should be occupied with their own Heart.
In my opinion.
