Je pense, donc je suis.
Cogito, ergo sum.
I think, therefore I am.
René Descartes
Modern western thought traces its lineage through Descartes and his famous dictum. In essence, he created a mind/body dualism. Our senses may deceive us, so all we can really know for sure is what is inside our minds. Taken to the logical extreme, only the mind matters.
This is a false dichotomy. I will admit that I was once firmly in that camp. As a kid, I was basically the anti-jock. It wasn’t until the last ten years that I acknowledged the importance of physical fitness and health, and its close coupling with the mind. For what is the mind but a manifestation of something happening in the brain? And the brain is clearly physical, and is tied into the rest of the body. In fact, we continue to learn more about how much “thinking” happens outside the brain even.
A while back, I started using a Monk Manual, which is sort of a life planner. Each month, you pick a theme. My theme for May 2020 is “self-care.” These past few months have been very disruptive. It is time to care for my mind, body, and spirit. This pandemic has revealed how fragile our bodies are, and how much our mind and spirit rely on physical contact for renewal. I am fortunate to have my family with me in lockdown, so I don’t need to go without human contact. While I need some alone time each day to recharge, I also need the physical presence of those I love to feed my spirit.
I’ve listened to several audiobooks about wisdom, joy, spirituality, self-improvement, and seeing God in all things. In virtually every book, there is a focus on bringing your awareness into the present, and into your body. Indeed, the first step in meditation is to focus on your breath, the most fundamental autonomic process in your body.
The way I care for my body is to run. Running serves many purposes simultaneously. First, it gets me outside, which is inherently a good thing. Second, it gets my blood pumping so I’m more energized in general. Paradoxically, the less you exercise, the more tired you become over time. Third, running helps me get in shape for elk hunting. The season opens in 153 days, so I need to start getting serious about my fitness!
I am fortunate to be able to run, to have a basically healthy body. Many people, including my wife, are not able to use their bodies in the way they would like. While this obviously takes a toll on their general physical abilities—inactivity leads to other negative health outcomes—it also takes a toll on their mental health. Mind and body cannot be separated. The challenge is to find some way to maintain a connection between mind and body and therefore to feed your spirit.
I am also fortunate to be “straight,” that is, cisgender and heterosexual. In queer theology, there is much discussion about bodies. People who are gay or transgender have a difficulty reconciling what is in their minds—what they know to be true—with how their bodies are built and with the messages told to them by their families and society. Spiritual healing begins when they are able to repair the mind/body split that has been forced upon them.
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … 14 The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.
John 1:1, 14
God cares deeply about our bodies. God cared so much that God became human, so that God might experience just what we experience through the person of Jesus. Sympathy is an outsider emotion; empathy requires becoming like the other. God needed to become human to truly have empathy with us. Somewhere I read recently that Christianity is strangely esoteric and abstract for a religion that is based entirely on a visceral, tactile, intimate experience of a particular man in Judea and Galilee. If you read the Gospels (rather than the epistles), you get a real sense of a man who experienced everything we all do, and yet was able to live a faithful life.
Just as we need to care for our own bodies, we need to care for other people’s bodies. I am grateful that The Mission is open again, serving meals to those who are in need, and providing all of their other services. To an outsider, The Mission appears to only take care of today’s urgent needs, but in reality, it is a place of deep connection. A place where everyone, and most especially the dedicated staff, seek ways to fulfill each person’s physical, social, mental, and spiritual needs. It is not a “ministry,” per se, but as Ashley sometimes says, you can just feel Jesus’s presence in the building. Just as Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, The Mission cares for people’s bodies so that they can also be healed in mind and spirit.
We are gradually, as a nation, opening things up so that people can get back to work. In small part, this is an acknowledgement that life requires connections. As much as we can do online now, there is a real need for in-person interaction. My hope is that we will remember that our bodies are sacred, that our bodies are just as important as our minds, and that our lives are inextricably bound together through our shared physical needs.
Program Notes
First, you may have noticed that I re-named this blog. I’m going just a little more public now, so I wanted a more distinctive name.
Second, I created a Facebook page that is separate from my personal page. That way, people who like to get their news through Facebook and who want to read what I write can choose to do so; others who want to remain my Facebook friend without reading these blogs can do so as well.
Third, I linked my blog to that new Facebook page and to my Twitter account. Since I don’t tweet about anything else, I’m just using my personal account, @KimballJonathan. (All of my other tweets are re-tweets.) You can of course also sign up for email as before.