January 18, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

The Palace of Our Perceptions

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:1–6, 13–18
1 Corinthians 6:12–20

How shall we come to know one another deeply, compassionately, fulfillingly, unless we learn more of how the mind and senses work? Our several senses, which feel so personal and impromptu and seem at times to divorce us from other people, reach far beyond us. They’re an extension of the genetic chain that connects us to everyone who has ever lived; they bind us to other people and to animals, across time and country and happenstance. They bridge the personal and the impersonal, the one private soul with its many relatives, the individual with the universe, all of life on earth.

Diane Ackerman
A Natural History of the Senses

“All things are lawful for me.” In other words, “I’m free to do whatever I please.” Writing to the Corinthians, Paul drew on this slogan, a slogan that he had probably heard them employ. Here in these verses and again in chapter 10, when Paul addresses a controversy over eating meats sacrificed to idols, he quotes this saying back at them. The popular phrase is found not only in Paul’s letters but also in philosophical writings of Paul’s day. Given that Paul was thought to be the great apostle who stood for freedom from the rules of Jewish law, the Corinthians may have mistakenly thought that Paul would have approved of living by this slogan. Evidently the Corinthians thought that insofar as Paul preached that the sinner was justified by God’s unconditional grace and not by works, he would have approved of persons dismissing old scruples and religious prohibitions. In the case of deciding whether or not to eat meats that had been sacrificed to idols, the wise person would know that since there is no such thing as an idol, eating or not eating the meat would make no moral or salvific difference whatsoever for that person.

In the case of sexual conduct, which Paul addressed in these verses, it seems that Paul had been hearing reports of a similar attitude being used to justify sexual behavior with prostitutes. Many Corinthians seemed to think that since our bodies are part of the physical, material world, the sexual activities in which people engage would make no moral or salvific difference. Since in the end “God will destroy both one and the other”—that is, since ultimately God will destroy all the physical, material elements of the world—it doesn’t really matter how people treat their physical bodies.

This is precisely the point that Paul was trying to refute. Paul refuted the idea that the physical body is spiritually insignificant. “The body is meant for the Lord and the Lord for the body,” he wrote. Paul’s view of the body was no small matter. Paul was challenging an idea that had a strong grip on the way people of the ancient Greco-Roman world thought and lived. Long before Paul was born, a worldview had already been formed in which a clear distinction had been drawn between material, physical things, such as the body, and spiritual things, such as the soul or the mind. In addition to a distinction being made between the two kinds of existences, one was elevated over the other: the spiritual world was esteemed, while the material world was eschewed. The rationale for this was the belief that while physical things pass away, spiritual things last forever. Therefore, physical things have no lasting significance, while spiritual things have eternal significance.

This dualistic worldview, which in the Western world can be traced back to Plato, has frequently manifested itself in one form or another. As much as Paul radically challenged the dualism of his day, it has nevertheless continued throughout history to pervade and plague philosophy, theology, and, without a doubt, our most mundane attitudes. Unfortunately the church has too often played a negative role by instilling in persons disparaging attitudes toward the body. Without necessarily disparaging the body, we Presbyterians tend to neglect the body, at least in worship. We tend to treat true religion as an out-of-body experience, as if relating to God requires mostly our minds. Sometimes it may seem as though our Puritan ancestors are still hovering around.

We don’t have to look very far to see signs of this old and pervasive dualism alive in our culture and in our lives. As Paul gave testimony, however, there is an even more enduring and persistent reality with which we are deeply in touch, and that is that God not only created our bodies, but also, by raising the body of Jesus Christ, has confirmed how much he values them. No one, Paul thought, who understands the good news of the resurrection would suppose that our bodies are insignificant. He wrote to the Corinthians, “And God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” The good news of the resurrection is that we, like Jesus Christ, are to be redeemed body, soul, and spirit.

It is hard to stay attuned to this good news. Instead of remembering that God created our bodies and called creation “good,” we are often quick to find fault with our bodies: the appearance, the fitness, or the functionality of them. In the book Mudhouse Sabbath, author Lauren F. Winner devotes a chapter to the body. Reflecting on her own experiences, she writes, “Though I believe God has something to say about human bodies, I generally tune God out and listen to Cosmopolitan instead. . . . The magazines (and movies, TV shows, and advertising campaigns) speak of bodies that are both too important and not important at all. Scripture speaks of bodies that God created in his image, bodies that are both doing redemptive work and being redeemed” (p. 67).

Paul spoke about our bodies being redeemed, about in Jesus Christ all of creation being renewed. In what ways, though, do our bodies engage in redemptive work? Perhaps part of the answer to this question is simply that our bodies participate in the work of redemption when we do good deeds: by serving others we take part in God’s redemptive work. This past fall, I had the privilege of teaching a Sunday morning class exploring the relationship between theology and our bodies. One of the first books from which we read excerpts was Diane Ackerman’s book A Natural History of the Senses. The book is organized according to the five senses: smell, touch, taste, hearing, and vision. Having gathered both historical and contemporary information from around the world about how the senses have been used, thought of, cultivated, and even ritualized, Ackerman creates for the reader a vivid sense-experience. She shows us how truly “sense-luscious the world is” (p. xv). More than this, however, she awakens us to the fact that we are creatures of sense. Our physical bodies, endowed with amazing sense capacities, sensitivities, and sensibilities, can engage in, interact with, and connect with the world around us in a way that is much deeper than any dualism between the mind and body allows. She writes,

We like to think that we are finely evolved creatures, in suit-and-tie or pantyhose-and-chemise, who live many millennia and mental detours away from the cave, but that’s not something our bodies are convinced of. . . . We still perceive the world, in all its gushing beauty and terror, right on our pulses. There is no other way. To begin to understand the . . . consciousness, we must try to understand the senses—how they evolved, how they can be extended, what their limits are, . . . what they can teach us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit. To understand, we have to “use our heads,” meaning our minds. Most people think of the mind as being located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision. (pp. xviii–xix).

With all our senses at work in astounding ways, it seems inconceivable that our bodies are not meant to put us in touch with God and God’s creation. It seems inconceivable that our bodies have no spiritual significance.

I would venture to say that it is through all the senses with which we have been endowed that we are able to relate to God and God’s creation—not only in those moments of immediate sense perception, but also when certain images and certain words we use to relate to God are meaningful and moving because they have grown out of and still resonate with our embodied experiences.

The language and images we draw on in religion are so important. What could be more abstract and foreign to human beings than God? That is why talking about God quickly requires metaphors, symbols, and stories. The more these metaphors, symbols, and stories are rooted in our bodily experiences and continue to resonate with our senses, the more they will facilitate our sense of connection with God and God’s creation.

We can call this sense of connection “compassion.” What are the conditions that cultivate compassion? In a book entitled Embodied Care, author Maurice Hamington argues that cultivating compassion requires, among other things, a rich imagination—an imagination that can traverse the different particular situations people find themselves in precisely because that imagination is grounded in the experience of being embodied, which people everywhere have in common. Through the complex capacities of our senses, our bodies can connect us to those who experience hunger, though their hunger is different from our own; those whose particular pain we may not know; those whose fullness may be foreign to us; and those whose exhaustion exceeds our experience. Through our own embodied experiences, we can imagine the ferocity of love that other people feel for their families, the protective instincts that propel people to act when their loved ones are at risk, and the survival instincts that kick in when life and livelihood are threatened. Because of our embodied experiences, we can have compassion for and are in solidarity with strangers whose situations we do not know firsthand but can imagine.

Addressing the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?” When I think about how our bodies were created and endowed by God with the amazing ability to engage the world through the senses and how we can cultivate compassion for other people and other peoples through greater engagement of our senses with the world, I begin to think anew of what it means for our bodies to be the place where the Holy Spirit dwells. That the Holy Spirit dwells within our bodies and from that locus proceeds actively and unceasingly to bind together all of God’s world means that God has invested salvific significance in our bodies. Rather than our bodies being irrelevant to the work of redemption, God has created our bodies to be the precious means through which God redeems the world. We can join Paul in saying, “Therefore glorify God in your body.” Amen.