February 22, 2011

Bringing our Bodies to Church

On a December night in 1996, a drunk driver swerved into my mother’s lane and crashed into us head on. I was 14, in the passenger’s seat, and immediately felt a white hot bolt of pain shoot through my lower back. Thanks to God and my mother’s beloved white Cadillac, we emerged from the wreckage largely unscathed. Compared to the person who hit us, who remained in the ICU for weeks after, my own physical therapy sessions seemed a breeze. Very soon my pain quieted to a persistent but low hum.

Fifteen years down the road, however, this hum has become increasingly louder and more insistent. For this reason, two years ago I joined the millions of Americans who now attend yoga classes on a regular basis.

My first classes were a new experience for me in many ways. Not only did I wobble through new poses, but it was also the first time I practiced the connection between meditation and movement, the spirit and the body, prayer and posture. I remember walking back from my first class thinking about how powerful it was for me to finally connect spirit, body, and pain in practice – and how profoundly absent this had been in my experience of Christianity.

Despite the fact that Christianity has its beginnings in extreme physical pain and bodily resurrection, we Episcopalians are inheritors of a profound split between the body and spirit. In so many respects, we are still the “frozen chosen” – a term that both captures and exaggerates our legacy of stiffness.

Thankfully, however, this too is changing. In her 2007 interview with Runner’s World, the Presiding Bishop spoke of running as body prayer. “It’s a meditative experience at its best. It’s a sort of emptying of the mind...” Then there is the dancing that takes place at St. Gregory of Nyssa, the parish prayer walks that the Rev. Janet Waggoner leads in Shelton, Conn., as well as the writings of the Episcopal priest Roger Joslin. There are, in other words, the beginnings of a broader shift. But it will undoubtedly take many more leaders for the Church to recover/create robust physical disciplines within Christian spirituality.

In the meanwhile, however, the need persists, and if the surging popularity of yoga is any indication, it is powerful and widely shared. Who are the leaders in your congregation who model practices that heal the spirit/body disconnect? Can you imagine your church practicing a physical discipline as a component of its spirituality? How can we nourish the remaining physical disciplines that we have – fasting during Lent, walking labyrinths – and build on these for the future?