Embodied Faith

A Reflection by Shelley Regan, Director of Community Engagement 405.341.3544 sregan@fccedmond.org

I I wonder how many of us learned, somewhere along the way, that faith was supposed to happen mostly from the neck up?

We learned the right words. We thought the right thoughts. We studied, believed, confessed, and maybe even understood. But along the way, we also learned to set the body aside. Sometimes directly, and more often through a thousand small silences, we were taught that the body was something to manage, discipline, cover, control, or overcome on the way to something more spiritual.

Scripture has never really been afraid of bodies. God gets hands in the clay. God breathes life into dust. God walks in the garden in the cool of the day. Again and again, the story of faith is earthy and physical.

It’s an embodied story running through scripture: God comes close. God takes on flesh. God meets people in hunger and tears, laughter and meals, wounds and breath. And still, so many of us have inherited a faith that taught us to distrust the very place where God so often chooses to meet us.

I have been thinking about this a lot while reading Cole Arthur Riley’s This Here Flesh. Her writing keeps drawing me back toward a slower, more embodied faith. She gives language to a spirituality that refuses to divide mind, body, and spirit from one another. She writes “contemplative faith is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things, including the flesh we woke up in this morning.”

So for four weeks, June 21 through July 12, we are making space to experience embodied faith practices. Our series, Embodied Faith: Recovering the Sacred in This Here Flesh, begins with the body as God’s good creation. From there, we will name the shame so many of us carry quietly, consider the healing that happens when bodies gather around each other, and pay attention to the ordinary days where God meets us in skin and breath, hunger and tears, wounds and wonder.

If you’ve ever felt that gap, the sense that church wants the tidy version of you while the body gets checked at the door, this series opens a different invitation. If you are drawn to the idea that God welcomes your hunger, fatigue, breath, and aches, the fully sensory, embodied person you are, come experience Embodied Faith with us.

Every body is welcome.