This Beautiful Embodied Life Part 2
Why Elevating the Spiritual Over the Physical is Misguided and Perilous
I love watching children play because they speak and spell joy through their faces, limbs, and bodies. My four-year-old granddaughter and I make sand-castle cupcakes with saltwater and seaweed frosting. She bites into the gritty cupcake and laughs. My younger granddaughter chases seagulls on the soft sand, a perennial human empowerment game. The lounging birds predictably stand up and run as she approaches, but to a toddler this delight evokes a rising squeal. Similarly, my sweet grandmother who suffered from Alzheimer’s was like a child toward the end of her life. We gave her nature and animal picture magazines, which delighted her with every turning page, even if she had seen the pictures dozens of times before. She exulted saying, “Wie drolling!” (“How funny (and cute)!”) because each view was a happy surprise. Why do repetition and familiarity erode wonder as we grow into adulthood?
Many adults think that novelty is needed to experience wonder. They seek out extreme and exotic experiences, which up the ante. There are others who seek metaphysical experiences as a way to recover wonder, but they end up with a dualism that places the spiritual over the physical realm. My previous post zeroed in on C.S. Lewis’s claim that it’s no good being more spiritual than God. This post looks a little deeper at why people shy away from celebrating embodied life.
Some world views support the idea that the spiritual world is better than the physical world. In Buddhism the Four Noble Truths set the goal of life as attaining the end of suffering. The Second Truth identifies one cause of suffering as desire, the desires of pleasure, material goods, and immortality. Desiring these things brings suffering because they cannot be attained.
Gnostic thought, dating to the late first century Greek world, elevates the spiritual over the physical world more decisively than Buddhism. Gnostic thought, as well as Platonic, creeps into the early Christian movement, leading to the view that the afterlife is a disembodied state and other similar body-minimizing beliefs.
In her cancer memoir, The Middle Place, Kelly Corrigan tells a story of traveling alone to Nepal at age 29 where she meets a sunny German woman, Sabine, traveling with her three-year-old son, Peter. They fall into a conversation about Buddhism’s Third Truth, that suffering ends when you eliminate desires and attachments. Sabine, a Buddhist, clarifies that it’s not just material attachments, but attachments “to ideas, to goals, to jobs, to people” (125). Hearing this, Kelly reflects:
“I was proud of my attachments to people…I mean, sure, don’t attach to marble countertops or the Burberry fall line. But people? I say attach, wrap around, braid yourself into. What’s the point of a life without attachments? We are our attachments.”
Corrigan concludes that Sabine “was lying if she thought she wasn’t attached to that boy of hers, who made her eyes flicker every time he leaned into her” and that if attachment turns the wheel of suffering “[t]hen I choose suffering.” Corrigan chooses an embodied life with all of its risks and dangers.
Why do people shy away from the embodied life? There’s the obvious danger of materialism, a legitimate worry in our consumerist culture, a danger too easily ignored in many communities, including the church. We have to guard ourselves against the false promise that consuming will satisfy our wants, much like The Second Truth. Sharing our resources with others is important. There’s also the danger of striving to fulfill our desires at a cost to ourselves and others. Reactionary, reflexive, and unconscious spending impulses invite us to slow down and ask ourselves how our spending conforms to our priorities, how it adds value to our lives.
The perils of elevating the spiritual above the physical, however, strike me as more profound. Denying human frailty in favor of an ethereal—perhaps idealized— version of humanity and thwarting legitimate pleasure lead to a more threatening danger. We cut ourselves off from flourishing as human beings. We cannot see, as Hopkins proposes in “The Kingfisher,” that
“Christ plays in ten thousand places
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.”
He plays through our limbs, eyes, and faces; he plays through our uniqueness as individuals—our very features. It’s lovely.
Is it possible that we fear expressing our unique selves? Do we cut ourselves off from our best desires and dreams? Lewis suggests this in this noteworthy quote from The Weight of Glory:
“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
Perhaps the greatest cost of elevating the spiritual over the physical is imposing a crude, mud-pie imitation of life. What if we felt our desires but put them a good place, not as must-haves? What if we affirmed our humanity as God does? What if we feasted more on this beautiful, wild, matter-and-spirit-entwined life?
Source Cited:
Corrigan, Kelly. The Middle Place, Hachette Books, 2009, New York.
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