Week 3: Body
I notice it most when I run. Somewhere around mile three or four, the thinking quiets down and something else takes over. The feet find their rhythm. The breath steadies. And for a little while, I'm not in my head anymore. I'm just here, in the body I've been given.
For many of us, the body has been the enemy. Or at best, the thing we're stuck in until we get to heaven. We've been taught that spirit is good and flesh is suspect. That the goal is to transcend the body, not inhabit it.
But the incarnation says something different. God took on flesh. A body that got hungry, that wept openly at the tomb of his friend, that trembled in the garden the night before he died, that cried out from the cross. Jesus did not rise above his body. He moved through it. If God chose to dwell in a body, then bodies are not obstacles to the sacred. They are where the sacred lives.
One of the earliest Christian writers, the apostle Paul, asked a strange question: "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you?"
I've been sitting with that. The body as temple. Not the building where we go to meet God, but the place God has already moved into. The breath in my lungs is prayer. The heartbeat is holy. Which is a strange thing to say about a body that also gets sore from running, or indigestion from a spicy meal. But maybe that's exactly the point.
This changes how I understand presence. Presence isn't an idea. It isn't somewhere else. Presence has a location. It's here, in the flesh I've been given.
I've found that the body knows things before the mind catches up. It knows when something is true. It knows when something is wrong. It holds what we've been unwilling to face. The desert mothers and fathers, early contemplatives who went into the wilderness to pray, understood this. They weren't trying to escape the body. They were learning to inhabit it fully, to descend from the spinning mind into the quieter wisdom of bone and breath. For them, embodied practice wasn't preparation for prayer. It was prayer. The breath, the attention, the simple act of being present in the flesh. That was the meeting place.
This week, we practice arriving. Not going somewhere else to find God. Discovering that God is already here, in the body we've been given.
Where do you live? Where do you actually dwell?
Lectio Divina
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
—Teresa of Avila
