Giving a Body Back to Spirituality

In the previous blog, I mentioned about Thomas Merton's criticism of certain aspects of contemporary spirituality in some circles by excluding or ignoring or otherwise minimising or even denigrating the human body. But the body should be interpreted more widely as including not just our physical body. It may be extended to all that the body needs. In other words, it may be extended to our physical needs for food and clothing and not just food and clothing for our mind and our heart. This aspect of Christianity is emphasized by a theological movement originating mainly in Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s of the 20th Century. It is called liberation theology

According to the Wikipedia, liberation theology is a "movement in Christian theology which interprets the teachings of Jesus Christ in terms of liberation from unjust economic, political or social conditions" or "an interpretation of the Christian fatih through the poor's suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and the Catholic faith and Christianity through the eyes of the poor".  The term "liberation theology" was invented by a Peruvian priest called Gustavo Gutiérrez in his book A Theology of Liberation (1971). The movement's other leaders are Leonardo Boff of Brazil, Jon Sobrino and José Porfirio Miranda of El Salvador and Juan Luis Segundo of Uruguay.

To me, man has an insatiable desire for freedom and for liberation. This desire expresses itself in his yearnings for transcendence. Man longs to transcend the limitations imposed not only by his physical body but also by the social, economic and political conditions which restrict his freedom. Yet at the same time, he has an equally insatiable need to connect to someone, something, some ideal larger than himself. Thus he seeks union with a member(s) of the opposite sex, with other people, with his community,with his race, with his nation, with Nature and for some, with the spirit of the Universe. Hence, whenever any of such needs are not satisfied, he feels incomplete. When any of such needs are denied, he feels frustrated or even angry. And if his needs are denied satisfaction for prolonged periods of his life, he becomes sick, either physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. Thus any religion which fails to address these issues or which fails to give proper weight to each of such needs for liberation and for connection is bound to be perceived as unsatisfactory. Likewise, any spirituality which fails to take into account or fails to meet man's apparently contradictory needs for freedom on the one hand and for connection on the other, are bound to be found unsatisfactory too. Such contradictory human needs have been vividly portrayed by D. H. Lawrence in his novel Sons and Lovers.

Spirituality has traditionally been considered as belonging to a higher sphere, above man's mere animal nature, as something which is a mix of the rational, the intellectual and the emotional and in the worst cases reduced to some abstract "intellectualization" of certain otherwise intense almost "visceral"  "religious" emotions, as a form of "decorporeality" of the mystical emotions if sense of union felt in moments of deep meditation or sense of awe people vis a vis displays of the power or the magnificence of Nature in the form of high mountains, the huge waves pounding upon rocky shores, the thunder and lightning during storms and tornados etc. or even the delicate beauty of Nature.  Yet while man needs to transcend his animality, his spirituality can never be entirely divorced from his animality either. After all, we must never forget, as I am fond of saying, that we have got feet of clay! We should not oppose our body to our spirituality. Rather we should incorporate our body into our spirituality. That's why we should pay as much attention to our bodily or physical needs as our spiritual or religious needs.

If we take into account our physical needs, then it becomes inevitable that our religion should concern itself not only with our souls, but also our body and the associated economic, social and political conditions under which we lead our lives. Hence all religions, whether Christian, Muslim, Buddhist should not refrain under appropriate conditions to lend its support to various movements for the advancement of the ideals of political and economic equality and of social justice. For this reason, it is not right thinking to dissociate our spiritual life in the form of our prayers, our contemplation, meditation, our retreats, our worship from our work and our material needs and the conditions for their satisfaction, including on suitable occasions, throwing our weight behind the relevant social and political movements. For this reason, liberation theologians have reinterpreted the Christian experience as the experience of God incarnating himself into human form, suffering with man concretely in history, dying for us on the cross to bring home to us the message of love and forgiveness. God has become man. He is no longer seen as someone abstract, remote, perfect, up there in the sky. God intervenes in human history to liberate man from sin. God acts with us, here and now. The church's role is to help God to liberate man from his sins, of man's inhumanity to man, not the least of which is the way the rich exploits the poor, the way rich nations and multinationals exploit 3rd world countries and its people. The Church should no longer be segregated from the world: it must actively help Jesus achieve the liberation of man, help its faithfuls to struggle for justice, for a fairer share of the fruits of economic production and for human rights, here on earth  Theology should no longer reamin a matter of purely cold dry analysis, clarification and sytematization of abstract theological insights and doctrines about a static and remote God. It should a dynamic and on-going practice or praxis fitting theology to its historical contexts and the active personal struggle of the theologian sharing in the people's (especially the poor people, the marginized people like women, black, homosexuals) battles for liberation. Loving God should no longer be distinguished from loving our neighbors. 

Quite apart from making theology relevant to people's social, economic and political life, it is also about time that theology should recall to the mind of its faithfuls the "spiritual" dimension of activities not "normally" considered spiritual e.g. our work, our day to day contact and social interaction with members of our family, our fellow workers at the factory, office, shops, our customers, our clients, and others whom we meet in the myriad social interaction with others in our ordinary day to day living. That spiritual dimension may consist in the first place in our being "aware" and being "mindful" at all times of the ultimate interconnectedness of each of us with all the others, with the world, the entire universe, and of our folly in erecting and then "pretecting" and "defending" the "false" boundary between our "self" and "others" and between ourselves with that supreme being or entity we call God, as if we could ever exist independently of each other. If this awareness is present, then we will more likely treat the others less as "enemies", "competitors" or complete "strangers" having nothing but antagonistic relationships with us and more as partners in the joint enterprise of  realizing our common aim of freedom in union. We would then find it much easier to treat our daily work and our daily relations with fellow human beings as a form of "prayer" or an "offering" to that mystery we call either Life, Universe, God, the Tao, the One, the Absolute etc. We should then as Thomas Moore says, "re-enchant" our daily life with elements of "ritual" and of "myths" and thereby to restore to it a little of the magic which ought to be attached to this most mysterious and awe inspiring process called "Life". Our life will then have restored to it its original sacredness and holiness.

In my opinion, religion should no more be exclusively "spiritual" than that secular life should be completely devoid of "spirituality". It is as wrong to consider religion as merely "spiritual" as to consider our daily life as merely "secular". There should always be a spiritual dimenion to our life but in addition to a "private" spirituality, there should also be a social dimension to our spirituality. In the end, we can never achieve spirituality alone, although that is sometimes necessary because of the need for silence and for temporary withdrawal from the world.  In short, we need a more holistic spirituality. Is that not why Merton alternated his life between silent meditation and work within the Trappist monastery and  speaking out in public and writing about social issues?  Is that not the reason why the great Buddha after having achieved enlightenment himself continued to teach others the wisdom which he had won after countless personal struggles for more than 40 years until his death?