I have been intrigued as of late regarding the connection between materiality and spirituality. I find it fascinating that God, who is Spirit, would have the desire, or even the need, to create a material world. Why did He not create a spiritual world and leave it at that? This biblical view of the world, where spirit and material are woven together, has profound implications for the Christian life.
Meredith McGuire maintains, “our material bodies come to be linked with spirituality through social senses and the ritual restructuring of our sense of space and time. Bodies matter, because humans are not disembodied spirits. Individuals’ religions become lived only through involving their bodies, as well as minds, and their emotions, as well as their cognitions. Spirituality is developed by just such embodied practices” [McGuire, Meredith. (Spring 2003). ”Why Bodies Matter: A Sociological Reflection on Spirituality and Materiality.” Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality. 3.1: 1-15]
If McGuire is correct, this may explain why our grandparents knelt in prayer in the assembly. It may explain the kinesthetic movement regarding drama in worship. It may also explain the explosion of material and practictioners pursuing holistic health, where body, mind and emotions, along with the soul and heart are all brought together for the healing process.
Also, I believe this is why Christianity proposes that there is, indeed must be, a redemptive aspect to suffering. Christ suffered in his body. The pain was real. The agony was felt deeply. The misery was palpable.
We are body/spirit linked in fellowship with other bodies/spirits and through that fellowship there is a “ritual restructuring of our sense of space and time.” Just think how the rhythms of the year in the Christian calendar, the rhythms of the week and the first day of the week, Sunday, are experienced in such a way as to reframe our perspective of space and time.
Often we find ourselves thinking about this when we notice other people and other families do not experience fellowship and Sunday the way we do. That is when it dawns on us how powerfully our material world and experience of it is shaped by the church, the activities we bodily engage in, and how we actually live out our faith in a human body.
I am not sure that our traditional view of the body has served us well. The apostle Paul says, “For while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling”(2 Cor. 5:4). Our desire is not to get rid of the body; rather in our bodily existence, we desire to be clothed with a heavenly body. Could this heavenly body include a glorified material body? For instance, like Jesus when he arose from the dead and appeared to the Eleven disciples in the closed room before his ascension?
Our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit and our spirit. May we honor the material as a way of glorifying the God who is Spirit and created the human body in the first place!
In Christian love, Curtis
