An old friend of
ours, if you asked him how he was, might quote, “As well as can be expected for
the state I’m in”. He was joking, but a
lot of people are not. How they are
feeling dominates everything... the prison of the body, but also the prison or
tyranny of the mood. The Greek
philosophers had a saying, sōma sēma,[1]
the body is a tomb. So their point was,
by philosophy or however, to escape the prison of the body, or at any rate to
control it, bring it into submission. St
Paul too had his doubts about the body, perhaps in his case with good
reason. Paul starkly contrasts flesh and
spirit[2]…
Flesh and spirit are opposed to each other, he says. And indeed, in meditation we start by making
the body, so far as we can, to be still and silent and less in the way… as
though the body were actually a nuisance. But this is where it gets
confusing. Paul after all still thought
the body was the right metaphor to use for the church, the Body of Christ.[3] I wish he had spelled it out more – the
church resembles the body, not only in the function and interdependence of its
many parts, but equally in its problems, failures, fallibility, and falling
down.
These days we
are frequently told that we must listen to our bodies; they are telling us
stuff we need to know. We had better
listen. Dr Rowan Williams, last year, as
guest speaker for the UK National Christian Meditation Conference, chose as his
theme, “What the Body Knows”. And in
Lecture 1 he plunged right in… in Christian Meditation, he said, the first
Basic Principle is the body, where it is and how it is. Far from telling the body to sit there and
shut up, Dr Williams advocates taking detailed stock… awareness, it is part of
paying attention: the sounds of ourselves, pulse, breathing, digestion...
pressures where we are sitting, tension areas... and then the ambient sounds,
other people’s shifting, breathing, the creaks and noises. His point is not only that this is where we
are, but that this is where we should be.
We inhabit the body – we don’t have a lot of choice about that, it is
where God has put us – it is our locus, where we are. Indeed, the basic human state is just that:
inhabiting and receiving. In prayer,
inhabiting and receiving is reality... anything else we are setting aside for
now. The point of being still and silent
and introducing the mantra, gently and interiorly and rhythmically repeated, is
to help maintain us in this simplest place, present and attentive, listening
rather than speaking… present to God.
In Jewish faith
and understanding it is incomprehensible that we should somehow try to suppress
or minimise the body. We are very much
corporeal, and although the body has its problems, increasingly as the years go
by… it is a welcome presence in prayer.
We are not present in prayer without it.
It is heroic, and even in decrepitude it honours God. Paul could write[4]
(although it is certainly past the narrow borders of my understanding): He
will transform our humiliated body so that it may be like his glorious body, by
the power that enables him to make all things subject to himself.
No comments:
Post a Comment