I never really understood deconstruction. As a confession, it often seemed bewildering. Or prepackaged, copy and paste. Or spoken about after the fact, all tidy-like. But now I see the ways of the heart are complex.1
And maybe it can feel—among other things—like a perpetual bashing into a boulder.
They’re always talked about in theory, those stumbling blocks. They’re tight and safe in those scripture passages. Maybe talked about regarding alcohol—the classic go-to. That’s about it. But there are other real ones, looming ones. Perhaps we need to expand the imagination a bit.
“Bodies aren’t simply biological, flesh and blood. Bodies are theological, revelations of the soul and the expression of the Love from which we find our source.
This flew in the face of the materialism, the spiritualism, the dualism that I saw in the world around me and that I saw far too often in the church—with just a sprinkling of Jesus on top.”2
With what else do we have to fully worship, enjoy creation, learn virtue, practice trust, even suffer with our Lord?
Our limitations are for our good, we say. Our Maker crafted us good, we say. And then we supersede and disregard. No matter. It’s the thought—or perhaps the outcome—that counts. We’re living in modernity, baby.
But that’s the thing.
We littered the way with raw spiritualism, materialism, pragmatic rationalism, and they turned into lead bricks. Bricks over which others stumble. And we wonder why they seek pastures elsewhere. Perhaps they desire embodiment to mean something, speak something, cost something. Perhaps we can see why some are hindered from seeing how our orthodoxy even matters. It all gets to stay on the paper and in our heads.
How else are we formed? With what else do we speak in the world, but with our whole selves? How else are we set apart?
Faith can be on a razor’s edge, like pulling the last thread. Distorted orthopraxy turns into someone else’s stumbling block.
The soul needs beauty, and the body needs limits by which to be tutored. We need them for good things, difficult things, soul-stretching things to run wild. Are we enslaved to the practical, the choices that need not be spiritual? We are mere flesh and blood after all. Nothing more. Ends justify the means, all that.
Saved for… what? Set apart… in what way?
Mock those who want faith to have meat on it. For the physical to hold spiritual weight. Snicker over sacramental worldviews and embodiment, but people want those to mean something, to speak something. Mock those turning to other traditions, but painstaking orthodoxy on paper only goes so far. It needs flesh and bones.
Orthopraxy requires our whole selves, or nothing at all. With what else do we have to worship? What else is theology for? What else is faith for?
Embodiment becomes a floating buzzword in the absence of a lived anchor. The body reveals the soul and reflects the source of our life, all that true stuff. But when push comes to shove, it often doesn’t have teeth. Not on the bits we have a grip on. Give us the safe embodiment. The parts about exercising and eating, viewing sunsets and home liturgies, of comforting and serving our neighbor. Not the ones held most dear, the ones that feel like carrying a cross, the ones of ontological consequence.
This becomes the bashed-into boulder, the taste of straw and the hollow ring.
Tune us, refine us, mold us. Toward a better witness in the world, and to each other. Amidst the spirit of the age, perhaps a tumultuous soul’s wellbeing depends on it.3
