Spiritual Exercises
A couple of Fridays ago, we finally got a break from the rain. After I finished what I had to do for work, I went for a bike ride. I took one of my favorite routes that has just enough in the way of hills to be a workout but that only takes about 90 minutes. It was a great ride and I felt very “pumped” as I pulled back into my driveway.
It occurred to me along the way that it might be an odd way to spend a Friday afternoon during Lent. It doesn’t seem very penitential, does it?
It’s easy to think that Lent is about self-denial. But I don’t think that’s quite it. In the same way that trimming back the excess branches of a tree reveals its true shape and beauty, the disciplines of Lent help peel away the layers of our false self.
For a good part of my life, I never gave much thought to my body. I was naturally slender, which meant I didn’t have to worry about what I ate. I didn’t think twice about working late or heading out to a bar after that. Like many people, I began to notice my body more as I aged. It was after my waist size had gone up two inches in two years that I took up cycling.
I think this sense of disconnection from our bodies has gotten worse in our culture. Our kids spend more time playing video games than playing outside. Many of us work in jobs that don’t require much more exertion than it takes to walk down the hall to the laser printer. The development of new technologies like web conferencing, social networking, virtual world, MMORPGs and the like means that we live more and more of our lives in a quasi-disembodied state.
For me, cycling is a way of reconnecting with my body. It is a joy to train and see that my body can pedal faster and longer. But my body also has limits. It tires, it gets injured, and it requires rest and care. To climb a long steep hill on a bike—to say nothing of the subsequent descent!—is to be reminded with every labored breath that you have a body and that you do not have life apart from it.
Christians do not believe in the “immortality of the soul.” We believe in the “resurrection of the dead,” persons who are body and soul and who are saved by God from death for no other reason than that He loves them. A prudential care for our bodies is a form of stewardship over the part of God’s creation that we know most intimately.
So perhaps it’s not a bad idea to add a little exercise to our Lenten observance!
“I think this sense of disconnection from our bodies has gotten worse in our culture. ” — that’s undeniable, but at the same time, the sense I get from the farmer side of my family is that one’s body is primarily an instrument for work, whose major problems require prompt repair, but whose minor ailments are dismissed or ignored, with indifference. It’s only the object of care in a utilitarian perspective. Paying too much attention to it is frowned upon as bad taste.
At the end of his life, St. Francis asked pardon of “Brother Ass” (his body) for not having treated it better. I think that disassociation from the body has plagued Christians for a long time; we want to free the soul from the body when, as Peter notes, we purport to believe in the resurrection of the whole package.
We were not meant to be pure spirit, like the angels, but to be creatures of flesh and blood and bone.
Not only does it take strength to do the work God hands us (taking care of a child, an elderly parent), but finding time to care of the body provides balance–it pulls away from the screens and chairs. Exercise refreshes and renews. And now I go to practice what I preach.
Of course, on the other hand, that “somatic” body becomes a “pneumatic” body. Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom and all that, so, hey, maybe it’s okay to wreck it just a bit!
Pardon me: psychic body, not somatic body. Not even the Apostle is that redundant.
Abe –
Why can’t the body inherit the world eventually? The lion will lie down with the lamb, all will be reconciled, and the world will be more beautiful than ever. Just what the world will be like then (and our bodies within it) is a great mystery. But surely it will be better, better than Eden for having the Lord in it.
Ann, I was just riffing on 1 Corinthians 15. Paul seems to think that at the resurrection, the body will be transformed and will consist of spiritual “stuff” and not fleshy “stuff.”
Abe –
Looks to me like Paul has a problem with bodies, and the only way he can solve it is to think that in the end body will turn into some sort of pseudo spirit. I wonder how much Plato, if any, he knew and also the early Gnostics.