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- Title
Recovering Embodied Life.
- Authors
Kearney, Richard
- Abstract
There is no escape from our tactile incarnation in this world. Those who renounce the flesh pay an existential price. The various attempts of dualists, puritans, gnostics, and ascetics to deny carnality invariably met a sad fate. And in spite of efforts by certain Christian Platonists (betraying both Plato and the original message of Christianity) to renounce the ways of the flesh, most major wisdom traditions attest the truth that spirit exists through nature, soul lives through the body. Judaism, for example, teaches us that if we want to know God we need to wrestle corps-à-corps like Jacob with the stranger in the night. Christianity proclaims Christ as Word made flesh. Islam professes the hospitable sharing of food at the Hadj as the highest form of divine-human relation. For their part, most Eastern religions remind us of the healing power of embodied practices like breathing, yoga, ritual, and pilgrimage. Indigenous spiritualities across the globe celebrate the sacredness of all sentient creatures--animals, trees, fish, plants--embraced by the four natural elements of earth, sky, water, and fire. American natives express this state of elemental interbeing in the simple invocation: 'all my relations.' The return to the lived body signals the interconnectedness of all things. As tactile and tangible beings we co-exist with others in a reciprocal circuit of touching and being touched--from the moment we are born to the moment we die. As even astronauts and the birds of the air remind us: what goes up must come down. If you fly from the earth you come back again. We are betrothed to the earth. And our most basic desire is to love and feel beloved on this earth.
- Subjects
GNOSTIC literature; PLATONISTS; CHRISTIANITY
- Publication
Japan Mission Journal, 2021, Vol 75, Issue 4, p219
- ISSN
1344-7297
- Publication type
Article