May’s Conversations :: The body, death, and healing
Here are topics for the next three weeks of meetings, I hope that you can join in!
Are you a body? Or, do you have a body (as something that “you” possess)? Next Tuesday, May 11th, we will gather to talk about bodies. Spirituality is often conceived (disastrously, I think) as a way to get away from, or outside one’s body, to a deeper or higher reality. We rarely stop to think about the bodies that we inhabit, and just how we inhabit them, until something goes wrong and our bodies begin to seem out of control. There are so many fascinating rabbit trails leading away from this subject, and many of them are seldom explored. A favorite professor of mine is teaching an entire course this spring on the theology of food! We could easily spend hours talking about metaphors surrounding eating and being fed. Come and join a conversation that will develop some of the biblical and theological themes surrounding life in the body.
The following week, May 20th, we will gather to talk about death. Death has been conceived in the Christian tradition as the last and greatest enemy of humankind—the insatiable and horrific grave. Yet, at other times, death has been regarded as merely a passage or a veil. In the twelfth century, Saint Francis could even encourage death to praise God, calling it a “dear Sister” in words that inspired this hymn:
And thou, most kind and gentle death,
waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise him, Alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God,
and Christ our Lord the way hath trod
Relative to other cultures around the world, we in North America have very thin and paltry traditions surrounding death. That lack often leaves us isolated in grief and at a loss for how to mourn those who are close to us. It is rare that we spend any time seriously talking or thinking about death until we are confronted with it. Here is an opportunity to deepen your own thinking, and enrich the understanding of others in conversation.
Finally, on the 27th of May [update: this conversation has been moved to June 3rd], we will spend the evening talking about various dimensions of healing. When healing and religion are put in the same sentence, some people think of televangelists praying over broken vacuum cleaners, but we’ll try to avoid that scene altogether. We will look at biblical examples of healing, both miraculous and medical and think through what healing means for us today in physical, mental, and spiritual dimensions of life. We’ll also talk about attitudes and practices necessary to be an agent of healing in the lives of other people.
Come and join us!
