Worship With Your Body

In a zeal for correct doctrine, evangelical spirituality tends to restrict interaction with the Divine to intellectual engagement. But, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, “God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature… he likes mater. He created it.”

The scriptures invite us to worship and encounter God with our whole being. The Shema, the rudimentary Jewish prayer and doctrinal statement found in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, emphasizes the need for total engagement in worship. In verse five the community of faith is specifically instructed to love Yahweh with all our hearts (the seat of the will in Old Testament Hebrew), all our souls (our personalities and all the intangible elements of who we are), and all our beings (our physical bodies and the five senses).

Participation in symbolic actions as a means to communicate with God lies at the very heart of biblical revelation. The prophets performed various, and at time bazar, actions to illustrate God’s judgment (see Jeremiah 19), and the High priest laid hands on the scapegoat each year on the Day of Atonement to symbolically transfer the guilt of the people to the animal before releasing it to the desert (Leviticus 16:20-22). The entire population of Israel even engages the divine through symbolic action when they offer sacrifices, grain offerings and peace offerings to Yahweh.

But symbolic action isn’t the only way to engage our bodies in worship. Movement in general can do that too. Combining the practices of silence/solitude and movement has had a profound effect on my own faith, and for that of my husband and many of our friends. When I go walking or running on the trail near my home, I’m afforded the time to think, to pray, and to appreciate the blessings of my own body and the beautiful natural world around me. When I engage practices like yoga or walking a labyrinth, my mind feels free to explore thoughts and feelings I’ve been ignoring or that I didn’t even realize were present. In short, movement and engaging my body – as well as my mind and my heart  -allows for a deeper, or at least a different, kind of worship and participation with the divine.