Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Contemplative
Our Words, Our Breath, Our Bodies, Our Spirit

Our Words, Our Breath, Our Bodies, Our Spirit

Last updated on: November 26, 2018 at 8:36 am by Carl "Skye" McColman

Our Words, Our Breath, Our Bodies, Our Spirit 2018-11-26T08:36:25-04:00 Carl "Skye" McColman

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Once again, Alison Leigh Lilly wows me with the elegance, beauty and insight of her writing. The fact that her most recent blog post begins with something I tweeted yesterday is not only a delight in itself for me, but her reflections in that post are so rich and relevant to concerns that I am wrestling with in my own current writing that it seems, well, serendipitous.

The piece is called Why I Cannot Tell You About My Gods. And yes, “Gods” is meant to be plural, for Alison is a Pagan, her theology actually a polytheology. If anyone reading this doubts the richness that can come from interfaith conversation, please see Alison’s post to see how a thoughtful Pagan writer can take a simple comment from a Christian and weave a wonderful reflection on the spirit of language and its relationship to the earth and the body. Her post leads off with the following tweet I made yesterday, along with the subsequent response from her husband, Jeff.

Language is tricky. Every word or phrase that reveals God also conceals God. Why? Because God is bigger than the limits of the human mind.

— Carl McColman (@CarlMcColman) September 19, 2013

https://twitter.com/druidjournal/statuses/380695393467510786

From there, Alison muses on the way we talk and think about language itself, leading to the kind of metaphorical assumptions, not only about language but about theology, that underlie my tweet. And that’s where it gets really good, for she considers how language is embodied in our breath, our voice, our web of interrelationships with the earth, the sky, the wind. She sensibly sets the word “God” (or “Gods”) down and picks up the word “chair” instead, using it to weave a richly-textured meditation on how language ignites a symphony of memories and imagination to convey meaning, literally through the air of voice and sound, or through the earth of printed page or flashing screen. While she never overtly denies the Neo-Platonic transcendence that lurks behind most Christian God-talk, she is grounded (pardon the pun) in her recognition and insistence that language itself is a function of the earth and the body.

That’s what got me so excited about her post, for the book proposal I am currently working on (more or less a follow-up to Answering the Contemplative Call, although I’m not calling it a sequel because I intend it to work as a stand-alone book) is all about the relationship between mysticism, the land, and the human body. I don’t want to say too much about that right now, since it is still very much in a working draft. But here are a few tidbits for you to groove on: humility (the queen of the virtues) comes from humus, a word that not only means “soil” but a particularly stable kind of soil, “organic matter that has reached a point of stability, where it will break down no further and might, if conditions do not change, remain as it is for centuries, if not millennia” as Wikipedia puts it. Such stability, of course, calls to mind the richness of the Benedictine tradition, and its understanding of the relationship between humility and stability. While we have a societal idea that humility is about self-abnegation (and yes, that comes straight out of excesses within the Christian tradition), a more holistic way of thinking about humility is to see it as radical earthiness, or embodied spirituality — in clear contrast to the spiritualizing tendencies of Neoplatonic mysticism.

A humble person is someone truly at home in his or her body, which means radically at home on the earth (in the biosphere). Such embodied/earthy spirituality is profoundly necessary in our time, when we are rapidly approaching a potential cascade of environmental disasters that will not destroy the earth (she’s much too big for us to obliterate), but will surely leave homo sapiens (and plenty of other species) extinct. And perhaps this great risk of our species’ extinction, which is really a form of mass suicide (pun intended), is at least exacerbated by, if not very much caused by, our cultural insistence on spirit/matter dualism, which I think goes back to a profound misreading of Plato and Plotinus (in other words, Plato and Plotinus, thank heaven, are not Neo-Platonists!). When we divorce spirit and matter, heaven and earth, God and nature, we are left with a spirituality of abstraction that does little more than serve the interests of those who would use it as a method of social control; meanwhile, we are also left with a way of relating to the earth that is disenchanted, thereby enabling us to exploit nature rather than revere it. To halt this dual-toxicity of enervated spirituality and exploited materiality, we need to re-embody mystical spirituality with an earthiness that I believe is found in Christ and the most holistic of Christ’s followers (not to mention in some pretty amazing wisdom traditions outside of the Christian community).

Okay, I’ll stop there. But this is what I’ve been playing with… and so, you can see (once you read Alison’s post, if you haven’t yet go do so already!) why Why I Cannot Tell You About My Gods excites me so much.

Thank you, Alison. You are such a gifted writer.

Enjoy reading this blog?
Click here to become a patron.

Previous Post

July 31, 2013

Contemplative Commerce

Next Post

September 25, 2013 Embracing Depth and Diversity: a Contemplative Approach to Interspirituality and Religious Commitment

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Activism Announcements Art Books Catholicism Celtic Christianity Christian mysticism Christianity Contemplation Current events Etc. Family humor interfaith dialogue Interfaith Wisdom Interspirituality Lay Cistercians Living the Faith Meditation movies Mysticism Mystics nature Poetry Reviews Scripture silence Spirituality Uncategorized Writing

Select a Month February 2025 January 2025 November 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 March 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 August 2023 June 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 October 2013 September 2013 July 2013 May 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 March 2012 December 2011 September 2011 October 2010 August 2010 March 2010 September 2009 July 2008 January 2008 December 2007 September 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2004

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was Deborah's military commander?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Samson Gideon Barak Jephthah

Support this
Column