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Living with Your Honest-to-God Self: The Unavoidable Task - Living with Your Body  by Ken Wilson

The path to God begins with honesty. Not moral performance at a
threshold determined by religious authorities. Not opinions conformed to
latest version of orthodoxy. Honesty. We can only get as close to God
as we are willing to be our honest-to-God selves before Him.

This is what Jesus, the way to knowing God as Abba-Father, requires.

For the word of God is living and powerful, and shaper than any two-edged sword,
piercing to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner
of the thoughts and intents of the heart. And there is no creature hidden from His
sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give
account. (Heb. 4: 12-4)

Hebrews understands Jesus as last word from God. He is the word of God living & powerful. This is about intimacy with God thru Jesus, the discerner of thoughts & intents. Before whom no creature is hidden, but all are open, bare, naked. Honest to God.

The only self we can bring into a real engagement with the real God is our honest-to-God self.  But honesty is an acquired taste, the thing we crave and the thing we fear, like we crave and fear God.

We can only get as close to God as we are willing to be our
honest-to-God selves before Him. Series: living with our bodies; past;
conscience; our incomplete but redeemable selves.

Today: Living with Your Body.  Paul teaches: first fruit of our self- imposed exile from God is ingratitude. Take gifts for granted.

How do we feel about being embodied beings? Grateful? 

Earliest heresy stlll with us: our bodies are spiritually incidental, sideshow, distraction, afterthought; soul is peanut, bodies the shells on tavern floor.

Here is a biblical perspective: Hebrew "soul" not separate from body.
You did not exist before your body. You were not an angel or a spirit injected like so much air into a tire. You are a creature, an embodied being, a flesh and blood somebody.

Bible opens with the week that was: story of our being, as much as our beginnings….

Day 1: in beginning God hovering over waters, then Light, day & night.  Day 2: sky with an above & below; Day 3: land separated from water, earth growing grass and fruit bearing trees; Day 4: sun to rule the day, moon-stars hold sway at night; Day 5: ocean swarming with living creatures, air filled with flying birds, blessing to multiply and fill the seas
Day 6: the land filled with creatures--cattle, crawling things, wild beasts, and last but not least, the human creature made to reflect God's image

First instructions to humans are bodily instructions to bodily beings with bodily functions: Reproduce! Struggle to prevail against competition! Then, Humans, eat plants and fruit from the fruit trees, other creatures with the breath of life, shop in the green plant aisle, please.

Camera angle shifts to a new perspective, and we get another story: no shrubs-fields-plants, just dirt-soil-earth. God as gardener fashioning an Adam from the Adamah, a dirt-man from the dirt, a human from the humous, a grounded being, an embodied-physical-material being.  Then God breathes into his nostrils and human becomes a living-breathing being.

How physical, how material, how bodily is that? Very physical, very material, very bodily, and very-verily spiritual because God is present and God is Spirit. Our physicality isn't separated from our spirituality.  Our spirituality is part of our creatureliness, our being somebodies to love.  

Very first words from God to his humans? You are free to eat…!

We spend enormous energy, anger-infused, embattled, argumentative energy over how to interpret this story.  Is it scientific? Is it history as we tell history? Or is history the way God tells history?  Is there a difference between the way we tell history and the way God tells it?

We can argue until the cows come home.  But they eventually come home, and we water, feed and bed 'em down for night, then sit around campfire and listen to God's creation story…shifts our perspective from the ordinary to extraordinary and draws us in: we find ourselves inside not outside the story; we feel his warm breath fill our nostrils and gasp our first God-breath and open our eyes for first time, and we're here in this beautiful world….and we say Thank you!

Then we're asleep and wake up in a garden this time only we're not alone. We hear sound of river running through garden, smell flowers and the fruit of the trees,  see birds & bees, and smile at the other remembering God's first words, "You are free to eat….!"  And we're hungry! And wide eyed with wonder, we say THANK YOU.

Thank you for eyes to see and lungs to breathe and tongue to talk and empty belly to fill, the flesh & blood self here to receive and participate in this gift called life. Because you, baby, are a living being!

That's the story of us that God is telling us.

But….you find yourself listening to other stories don't you?  We listen to a lot of stories, then proceed to write our lives according to the plot lines of those stories.  And some of those stories are not good stories.  Because we got talking snakes in our heads. 

These talking snakes, they turn our heads, don't they? If this is a gift, the giver didn't leave a card with his name on it! This is unclaimed baggage. Just use it!  No gods around here watching over you, tucking you in at night, telling you wrong from right.

You can only trust yourself say the snakes in your head. That need you feel to worship? Worship the trees, sun, moon, yourself! [Or us for that matter]

We play our part according to those themes and get alienated-disaffected.

We get confused, out of whack.
The Hebrew word for this state is hata; Gk, mara; missing the mark. 

St. Paul says hata-mara lives in our bodies, in our members.
Science agrees we've got bad habits embedded in neural pathways….

First indication we're out of whack? "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened." (Ro. 1: 21)

When the lights are almost out, thank you becomes a distant memory. Almost evaporates from our vocabulary.

So God, in dramatic attempt to gain our attention comes in extraordinary way to us: in flesh & blood appearing.  Jesus of Nazareth.

The body of Jesus was not incidental.  His little infant embodied self was dedicated to the Lord in the temple.  He grew in wisdom and stature as only bodies can grow.  He ate food giving thanks to God. He got angry, like we do.  Wept like we do.  Laughed like we do. Enjoyed this awesome world like we do. Suffered like we do.

No, his body was not incidental to his work.  And he paid attention to ours, down to mundane detail of washing feet of his disciples.

Then he offered his body--his flesh & blood body--to redeem ours.

That's why the woman bathed his feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.  To anoint his body for the burial that would bury our sins.

When he came into the world, he said, "Sacrifice and offerings you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me" (Heb. 10:5)
His body would end the whole bloody sacrifice business.

These are the days when God wants to restory us. To give us a new outlook on life, on this embodied life in light of a New Eden….

We live in a world of mixed messages concerning our bodies.  That they are all-important; meaningless. That they are everything; nothing.

We are bombarded as no other generation with graven images of bodies representing unreal-ideal agreed upon by what? the advertising industry?

We fuss or fret over 'em. Distance ourselves from 'em Develop us-them relationship to our bodies; scrutinize our bodies; or ignore them entirely.  

But mostly, isn't it sad? we criticize our bodies.  Oh yes.  

We criticize each other's bodies and then it all makes it's way back to our own head like karma corn stuck in our hair. 

Modern knowledge taught us to think of our bodies as machines. Bodily functions, need a tune up. Diagnose it. Fix it, fix it, fix it. It keeps us running longer, but it's a terrible way to understand ourselves.

God alone beholds us truly: "no creature hidden from His sight, but all are naked and open to the eyes of Him"

Like Adam from Adamah: naked, lying in the dirt, but beheld by the divine as close as our next breath given to us: THANK YOU

 

Five Ways to Cultivate a Divine Perspective on Your Embodied Existence

1. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude regarding your embodied existence.

People of Book had a practice: a blessing for every daily bodily activity. (They wouldn't call it a function not seeing themselves as machines)  A blessing upon lying down to sleep, a blessing upon awaking. A blessing before and after eating.  A blessing for washing the body, even a blessing at the passing of the waters.

The blessings, the expressed God-ward gratitude, mutes the relentless criticism we subject our embodied selves to.

2. Take an extended silent retreat and see what your senses do.

I took one a few years ago--five days of silence. Unexpected result. Over five days, senses heightened. I had a piece of lemon cake and thought I was going to start crying it tasted so good.  Sniffed some holy oil with frankincense-myrrh-cinnamon and thought I'd stepped through the veil.
Listened to classical music thinking, man I should do this more.

I came away from the silence knowing each sense was a window for joy.

3. Understand your body in relation to his body.

We learn about our own bodies in relation to other bodies.  I can never
see my back directly, but I can see yours.  I can never see my face directly, but I can see yours.  We need others to know ourselves.

God assumed bodily existence so we could know ourselves as we are known 

Think of your body in relation to the body of Jesus. This may sound hoakey. Few years ago, noticing how annoyed I was by the necessity of morning routine--shower, shave, etc.  What a waste of time! Hurried thru.
 
Somewhere God got a word in edgewise. Could I learn a lesson from my savior who knelt down to wash the feet of his disciples and dry them with a towel? Was he annoyed-hurried? Was he like let's get this over with!

Slow down, you move to fast, you've got to make the morning last.
"Sacrifice and offerings you do not desire, but a body you have prepared for me." 

I still rush when I'm late, but here's a testimony! I began to take time to floss my teeth daily without resentment.

If you are annoyed with your body, consider: the savior came in an embodied existence which he retains for eternity. He is forever, like you, a somebody. Your body is something you have in common with him.  

4. Take your sacraments seriously.

Let's not get into the tired conversation about what's a sacrament and what isn't and how many. There are these physical-sacred things we do. 

Baptism is a water bath for the body. Spiritual-body washing. [sense re 5 people wanting to be baptized but conflicted over the body being baptized]

Anointing of oil is the physical conveyance of the Spirit upon your body.
Communion is the feeding of your body with his body.

4. Give your embodied existence something to hope for.

Corporations need a BHAG: BigHairyAudaciousGoal.  Give your body one.

Job in the throes of total body breakdown gave his embodied self a BHAG
"I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth.  And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. I myself will see him with my own eyes--I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!"  (Job. 19: 25-27)