Welcoming Back the Body

A homecoming for the body for the glorification of God

Let me start off with something really tangential:

I have come to loathe the radio. When I was a teen and in my early 20s, I enjoyed listening to secular radio (now’s the time to pick up your stones) because I did like most of the music being played. My parents always had Christian radio playing in the car (most of it was Focus on the Family, so it’s not like it was music, anyway), and I tried in my mid-20s to get back into Christian radio.

But I couldn’t. Because the number of times ONE song being replayed does to my soul what a tilt-a-whirl does to my stomach. And most Christian radio doesn’t even have the self-respect secular radio has to at least play current songs ad nauseum.

Now that there are AUX cords and Bluetooth functions in cars, this becomes less of a problem because I can just put on my playlist or podcast and not worry about what is happening on the radio.

However, I am married to someone who has once again tuned into Christian radio. So, when I don’t feel like gearing up the Spotify account on shorter car trips, I’m stuck listening to whatever is on. It’s usually about one of 5 songs, all of which have become so annoying (I don’t want to hear “Good Day” by Forrest Frank EVER AGAIN).

One that has been highly rage-inducing to me is Leanna Crawford’s “Still Waters”. Thank the blessed Lord that I only get to the first chorus, and I’m usually done with the song when I arrive at my location.

It’s taken me a while to figure out why I loathe this song so much (I’m sorry if I’m killing your joy, and this is your jam — please, by all means, continue to enjoy it, and you’re welcome to excuse yourself from my rant). I feel especially bad because the entire chorus is based on Psalm 23.

Only recently, after having a small epiphany after reading Room for Good Things to Run Wild by Josh Nadeau, did I realize why I hate this song so much.

It’s because it continues this horrid concept that we’ve started in the American Protestant church that there is nothing we need in the body, that all of the things we experience and feel are just things we need to master in the mind.

And yet, as I walk through therapy and learn how to reconnect with this corporal form I’ve been given to steward and trained to hate, I can see now where Crawford, like the Church, has been steering modern-day saints in so many wrong directions.

Repetition in the Mind Does Not Mean Acceptance in the Body

Perhaps because I’ve struggled with mental illness, particularly depression and now increasingly anxiety, and I’ve had to be medicated for and receive counseling to treat the conditions, it makes me more sensitive to off-base theology. And Crawford, for me, begins way off base.

Great Aunt Maurine said at a hundred and three
Write scripture on your heart for when you need it
'Cause anxiety hates Psalm 23
So just say it to yourself 'til you believe it

- “Still Waters”, Leanna Crawford

Let me start off with this — Aunt Maurine is correct. We do need to write Scripture on our hearts for when we need it. Sometimes it’s giving us the words to comfort someone, push back the enemy, or walk forward in confidence. Sometimes, it is fighting back against the identity being told to us by forces wanting to discount us in this fight against darkness.

But, dear Crawford and my readers — there may be times that the words of Psalm 23 alone do not defeat your anxiety. And just saying it to yourself will not make you believe or feel it anymore.

Stick with me; I’m not saying God’s Word isn’t powerful. But there are times when repeating something to yourself will not break that mind/heart barrier. It just isn’t. There’s a large part of me that sees this response and thinks back to all the times I was told to “just pray more” or that “clearly I wasn’t praying the right way” because my anxiety was not alleviated, the dark depression I was walking through did not blow away.

For some people, repeating Psalm 23 until you feel it will work. But my goodness, what a modern way of trying to understand Scripture. What a way to love God and feed our heart and soul at the neglecting of our bodies — when I am convinced that the part of this verse focuses most on David and his body.

You know— that thing we completely destroy in modern-day church. Whether that’s talking about the desires of the flesh and equating it with the drives and needs the body has naturally (because hunger, tiredness, weakness, and sex are neutral until we give them to one camp or the other). We gorge ourselves on our pizzas and our pies at potlucks and once a week at church meetings, and then we talk about how our bodies are just failing us as we do nothing outside of this to steward the gift that God has given us. We don’t even realize how much we’ve allowed secular ideas to invade the teachings of our church, until it’s become part and parcel, finding it’s way into the songs we play for ourselves or the literature we read.

You probably don’t even realize that the way you view the way you have been designed is more Greek in concept than biblical.

Platonic Beliefs

Think about what your belief is about the body.

While I am sure you did not have a sermon outright telling you what the body is in correspondence with Scripture, I can guarantee the attitude toward the body is the same way you are thinking about your body currently.

I would venture to guess that you view the body as merely a carrier for the soul — a place for this spirit God has created to be housed in until you can get to heaven and be freed from this sack of cells that limits you from all there is in the spiritual realm.

What if I told you, friend, that this view comes from Plato’s theory of the soul and is not, in fact, Scriptural? It was Socrates and Plato, those two great Greek thinkers (whose ways of rationalizing and finding answers in ethical arguments can lead back to God, as most ways of discovering Truth do) who founded and spread the idea that your body is just a house (or maybe “temple”) for the soul, trapping it and keeping it from everything it could be on this great mortal coil.

Nowhere in the Bible does it seem to suggest that our soul and our body are two distinct things, meant to be separated like a bird fleeing a cage. Look at the first few pages of Scripture:

…then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

Genesis 2:7, ESV

At any point in this verse, do you notice where God first creates the soul (the breath of life, we may say) and then inserts it into this body that He formed?

I see God created both the body and the soul in one fell swoop, forming man and breathing life simultaneously, almost like we would need both body and soul to experience God.

Even looking back at the ancient Hebrew, חַיִּ֑ים (ḥay-yîm) is used to describe the breathing in of life, not נֶפֶשׁ (nephesh). חַיִּ֑ים refers to the presence of life in regards to being alive or being dead. God gave Adam life. When God formed Adam, we must then take into consideration that his נֶפֶשׁ, or his soul, was formed at the same time as his body.

Similarly, when studying the later commands on how we are meant to love God — body, soul, strength — it seems these parts are intended to work together. We are not meant to beat our body into submission to best obey God. We are called to use our body to experience and to explore what we know about Him.

While Jesus had to give up some of his omnipotence in order to walk in a fallen body (while He Himself did not sin, it does not mean that there were not aspects of Him that were affected by sin — for point in case, please look at the violent and brutal way in which He was sacrificed), it does not mean it was the body itself that was the horrible cage He had to lug around to better understand us.

He not only had to discipline and care for a body that grew hungry, tired, and weak, but He also had to care for a Spirit that would know sadness, pity, and anger. Yet we only focus on the fleshly aspects Christ partook in, and not the entire experience of being human.

In the miserably concise and non-descriptive English we use to understand the Bible, we see that Paul tells us we wrestle against the desires of the flesh. Yet when we read these passages, we tend to only focus on all the ways we fall short in our bodies. We make the physical manifestation the root of all of our sinfulness instead of a way we can glorify God on earth. It would be better for us to see what Paul is really saying — if we do not discipline the body, soul/heart, and strength to run a race bringing honor to the Kingdom of God, any part of these bodies can lead to sin and death.

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Galatians 5:19-21, ESV

We focus on the sexual immorality, the sensuality (which I believe some people seem to mistake with the use of the senses), the drunkenness, orgies, and what we do with our bodies in anger. We look at this list, ignoring the mental games of rivalries, dissensions, division, and the heart postures of idolatry, enmity, and strife, and we conclude that it is because of our body we struggle with all of these sins. If we can be honest about the failings of our language, culture, and Scriptural understanding, it’s not our bodies but our heart postures that need discipline and taming.

More of us need to calm our bodies' internal and external structures to be better in tune with what is truly in the heart (which is best understood through the Jewish lens). Our internal worlds may be in chaos because of how our hearts were treated, raised, cultivated, or exposed to; we might need to do more than say a few words to ourselves and avoid sugar for 30 days. In modern-day therapy, this is work called “grounding,” or simply putting our bodies in tune with the feelings, sensations, and rhythms of the world around us. For King David, or even Aunt Maurine at 103, grounding was just a part of every day before modern-day life, and all the distractions of the industrial revolution and technology took over.

Grounding in Peace

I know I am being hard on Crawford, who just wanted to put together a song Christians would download to seek comfort. While music can be a way of relaxing the nervous system and finding some internal rest in a physical way, it isn’t going to provide serenity the way experiencing Psalm 23 in the world might do.

Crawford’s Aunt Maurine might have done better to encourage her offspring to embody the Scripture as much as memorize it. This is where we learn to go from the milk of babes, regurgitating words, to the meat of adulthood, experiencing God and all He has done for us. And a large part of what He has done for us, even before He formed us, was to create this great, big, beautiful world around us that can incite wonder, calm a harried soul, or provide peace amid chaos. A walk in the woods listening to only the bird song and the breeze in the leaves rarely adds to the stresses of everyday life.

It is no different with Scripture. When David was writing about being led beside still waters, he wasn’t just trying to convince himself he had nothing to fear. He had been there. As a shepherd out in the fields, guiding the flocks of sheep, he was able to use the ambiguity of poetry (and not the preciseness of prose) to explore the feeling he would get when sitting beside still water. The peaceful gurgling of the water over the rocks, the sighs of the sheep as they find a place of rest and safety. Tasting the coolness of the water on a hot day, the feeling of the gentle pools on tired feet. The rest that comes with finding oneself in a small alcove with clean water after a long trek. The unwinding of tension and, at last, relief. One cannot simply understand this by repeating over and over, “He leads me beside still waters” (Psalm 23:2). It is best understood by going to the calm waters.

It’s no different eating at a table of enemies — David would have experienced this as he sat at tables with King Saul. If we merely try to hide in the halls of our church and never engage with those around us, we will never be seated at enemies’ tables because we will be so well distanced from people seeking to misunderstand us. This doesn’t mean we wander into trouble, but we engage people with love and humility when we go out into our communities. Non-Christian workplaces, the gym, the park…our own neighborhoods. We will find that there will be those who oppose us and become our enemies in the strictest sense as they combat us. But it is only at those tables that we can see God preparing the table of blessing for us before them. That we can understand the peace and love of God following us to these places or through the darkest of valleys.

We cannot simply repeat the words of Scripture to ourselves. They need to become something to us, and that is going to take some effort on our part. Maybe it’s booking a weekend away in the woods where you can see the goodness of God in the quiet of the copse of trees. Or perhaps it’s simply getting out of the Christian bubble and engaging people where they are at, not where we want them to be. We need to ground our souls in the world around us (this does not mean we are growing the fruit of the world, we are simply growing where we are planted and remaining in the vine that trellises us in Truth as we do).

When Strivings Cease (Because They Should)

There is so much in neuroscience to support the ideas of grounding, of being in the world God created and seeing its profound impact on the body.

Perhaps, instead of shying away from this, it would give us a better understanding of the world that was commonplace for the writers of the Bible, increasing our biblical literacy. We are so far removed from the culture, the language, and the world these people wrote in. Trying to understand this language with modernity will lead to what modernity offers— anxiety, perfectionism, striving.

And, ultimately. Aunt Maurine’s prescription is striving. You cannot always repeat words ad nauseam until it just one day makes anxiety go away. There is more nuance to the way that God created us. You may need to connect with calm waters and green valleys, you may need a diet change or medication to begin to break conditioning and generational curses, you may need to pray that the enemy keeps back his demons from assaulting you (they may not be able to inhabit you, but that does not keep them at bay from attack), or it may be a thorn in the side you have to wrestle with the rest of your life as you learn to daily put your trust in God. If this is a thorn, it’s doubtful Psalm 23 is going to make it go away.

The only way to know what prescription is going to work for this particular wounding (among a host of others) is prayer, engaging God, and trying varying remedies as you step out, wanting to experience and trust God in a real way, in the real world.

I hate to have more superficial answers for hurting people in the church that aren’t going to make a lick of difference; as a millennial who is seeing so many people ‘deconstruct’ in part because they were given such horrid ways of coping or working through issues, I don’t want to see this continued.

I am sure there will be people reading this who will think that I am being too picky or sentimental. That’s okay. I am willing to bet a lot that they’ve never struggled with life-altering anxiety and depression (the kind where leaving the house or getting out of bed is a huge task and is avoided for as long as possible). As someone who has continuously struggled with many of these mental health issues due to myriad reasons — physically, psychologically, and spiritually — I’d like to see us have a holistic revolution of the human condition and how to invite God in.

And that begins by letting the body back in with the mind, strength, and soul.