If you type the words “body theology” into a web search engine, you’ll most likely come up with a statement made by Pope John Paul II. Certainly most of the results served to you will be related to this statement (or a book by James B. Nelson if you’re lucky), and none of them will seem applicable to you if you’re not Christian or even identify as part of an organized religious organization. For the person who might be generally spiritual, but not religious, let’s be honest, there’s not a lot of information about body theology out there. I hope to change that.
What is Body Theology?
There are not a lot of good definitions out there. In fact, one I found on an academic website spoke so much in circles that even I, a graduate student in Religious Studies, couldn’t decipher it. But simplified as much as possible, body theology could be considered a study of God and who he is as reflected by the teachings given about the body or a theology that helps raise awareness of the theological significance of the body. Both of these definitions prompt me to ask further questions and seem inherently problematic to me.
The biggest problem? Both of these definitions seem to be about the body rather than of the body.
Think of a conversation where you see two people (in this case the Christian God and some theologian) talking about you and your body. They’re not asking your input; they’re not trying to find out anything about your lived experience. They’re telling you what you should think/feel/know about your body and that may or may not match up with your experiences of, you know, actually living inside your body.
Scholars love to separate body theology from embodied theology, which is how theology is carried out in the body. Religious scholars often call it “lived religion” because it’s how religion is actually lived and interpreted by people rather than the clergy or those who are doing the interpreting of the holy books or rituals for people. They are, and can be, two very different things.
Think About Gravity
The story goes that Isaac Newton was sitting beneath a tree when an apple fell down and bonked him on the head. Aha, he thought (after probably rubbing the sore spot on his noggin’), gravity is a natural phoenema that always works in a simple manner. As long as you’re on earth. Bear with the analogy for a moment, even if it’s not scientifically accurate from this point forward. Imagine there’s an apple tree on the moon (I know! I said bear with me.). An apple falls from it. The apple still falls down, but it doesn’t hit as hard. I could talk about how the moon has less gravity than Earth and that’s why the apple (and you) doesn’t weigh as much, so presumably it wouldn’t hurt as much if it hit you on the head. But if that apple tree were say, growing off the side of the International Space Station, then the apples would fall out into space, going towards whatever object had the most pull at the time. Gravity still exists, but it operates differently; therefore, scientists would give it different properties.
Theology is a lot like gravity. Depending on who is doing the interpreting and from what standpoint, the answers could be completely, totally different. Which is why, a body theology that’s wholly separate from embodied (living) theology is problematic.
The Apple Hurts, Or Does It?
Imagine the pain scale that’s so often in doctor offices. Think about the pain scales you may see online, ones that talk about distress levels plus pain levels, or how a chronic pain patient views pain versus someone who doesn’t live in pain every day. Imagine that all these people, Isaac Newton on Earth, on the Moon, and flying randomly outside the space station, could talk to one another. Isaac on earth says, “damn, that apple hurt.” The one on the moon is like “yeah, it bumped me, but no big deal.” The one outside the space station was like “What are you talking about? Apples don’t hit people. They fly right past.” Neither of these individuals are wrong. And yet, if they don’t understand all the nuances of their experiences (different locations, different gravity rules, etc.), they are not going to believe one another and insist that their story about the apple is the right one–the others are wrong.
Sound familiar?
The apples start getting a lot more scattered if you don’t have an organized religious theology to somewhat guide your interpretation of them. Put a hundred pagans or generally spiritual folk in a room, drop mini marshmallows from the ceiling on them (because apples would hurt!) and again, depending on where and when the marshmallow hit them, their pain tolerances, what they’re dealing with, there will probably be two hundred different responses. Some would find it fun and start throwing marshmallows around. Others would eat them. And some would just be pissed that they’re shut in a room with these weirdos throwing marshmallows.
We cannot create one body theology. For Catholics, the Pope can tell you all about how your body reveals God’s wonder, but depending on whether you have bodily autonomy or not, or what kind of relationship you’re in, or even your relationship with yourself, you may not agree with his assessment.
How I think of Body Theology
Now that I’m done talking about apples and marshmallows (I’m kind of hungry now, really.), I want to share with you how I think of body and embodied theology and how I’ll be talking about them. For me there is no difference. As Heike Peckruhn said in her book, Meaning In Our Bodies, “I have pain. I feel pain. I am paining.” when talking about an embodied experience. (This is most likely a paraphrasing of a much more detailed paragraph.) There is no false separation between my body when I am in pain and my experience of that pain. And both of those things are subjective experiences. The fact that I can sit here, type this blog, and list of all the parts of my body that hurt and whether that bothers me or not depends on whether it’s my regular, ordinary pain or something more on top of it. And for most people who don’t live with chronic pain, they don’t believe our (chronic pain patients) experience of pain because that just seems impossible to them. (Just like Isaac outside the space station thinks it’s impossible for apples to hit Isaac on Earth.)
Theology is the study of God, the divine, spirituality, something larger than ourselves. I’m a religious studies scholar, no doubt because I was exposed to many different Christian denominations as a child and knew though the words and the practices may be different, for the most part the ritual wasn’t important, that we were good people who helped others were. I’m also painfully aware that is not everybody’s experience or even my entire experience with Christianity as a whole. And then I discovered other religions, paganism really, and became introduced to yoga philosophy, and again, was struck by how different we all were, and yet in many ways, how much the same. Individuals searching for meaning, trying to make understanding out of the world.
For me body theology is a study of how I embody the divine (the universe), how I exist as that spark of the universe, and how I interpret the world through my body. It is my relationship to the world around me and my relationship to my higher self. Call it my soul, my intuition, my guardian angels, or my better nature. The words don’t matter. It’s how I feel, what I experience, and how I interpret that information.
My job as a body theologian both for myself as well as to help others, is to help myself and you uncover the stories that you internalized that separated you from your true nature and then help you bring that into being by crafting your own body theology. No one gets to tell you who you are. Only you can say who you are. But first, you must know yourself. To me, that is the most sacred work of all.
