The body knows

“We’ll smile at one another with our eyes because our mouths are covered. In doing so, we’ll live in our bodies a truth that our rampant individualism would often rather ignore: there is no physical or spiritual way of living merely for ourselves.” Photo: Agustin Paglioriti/Shutterstock

"In an oft-quoted passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, the saint asks this fledgling Christian community whether or not they remember that “your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Cor. 6:19). Paul asks this question of his fellow Christians within a conversation that warns against adultery, fornication, drunkenness and a number of other popular sins (popular in the sense of both how much people like to commit them and how much people like to condemn them). This is why this verse usually gets quoted as a threat. Don’t swear, get tattoos, have the wrong kind of sex or eat too much sugar, because doing so dishonours God. What is missed in this easy read are the radical promises of the gospel. We are promised that in our body we can share in Jesus’s resurrection and be raised as he is. We are promised that in our body we are woven into the life of community, that our body is part of Christ’s Body. We are promised that God honours, blesses, draws near and is revealed, incarnate, in our biological, flesh-and-blood reality."

Read Martha Tatarnic's atricle at anglicanjournal.com