By Kay Leuschner, C.S.J.

Alan Watts in his book “Nature, Man and Woman: has claimed, “We do not love matter enough.” Our Western, progressive culture is not materialistic, for the true materialist is a poet, an artist, one who loves concrete materials. Ours is a disposable society. Anxious to reach the goal, we ignore the process of getting there or take little enjoyment in the passing. No modern city looks as if it were made by people who love material. Rather, they reflect creators who despise space and time.

Similarly, in a culture that seems glutted with body posture, body pleasures, clothing, anointments, hangings, exposure and pawing, I am ironically concerned that the body is being ignored and despised. It has yet to be taken seriously in experiences of great moments, perhaps precisely because it has been taken too seriously and too suspiciously.

One of the values of the woman’s liberation movement is integration of body and spirit, an appreciation of the sexuality of each of our personhoods.

Human nature has been dichotomized. Christianity, influenced by western philosophical dualism, has stressed belief rather than experience, correct formulation of dogma, doctrine and rite rather than embodied faith. Case in point: we approach religious worship as “heads.” We think of ourselves as living from our neck up when we stand in the moment of religious experience.

To quote Alan watts again: “We should understand that the personality lives but to the degree that it does not withdraw, or shrink from the full implications of being one with the body and with the whole realm of natural experience… The liberated one is free to love with all his might and to suffer with all his heart.”

Too often it has been my observation and experience that worship services merit the description of “boring,” “un-involving,” “anemic,” “cramped” (ask as child, Jesus’ instruction “unless you become…” might prove the source of wisdom in evaluating our Sunday of daily worship.) I claim that the normal fare of our Catholic parish worship suffers from our detachment from body ignorance: rows of people deadened by words and habitual actions, that require no feeling, isolated from each other by claims of private psychological space; enduring a ritual whose inadequacy for feeding the human spirit is well symbolized by the wafer that is used for real bread.

Who would think of religious experience or liturgy as occasions of “Man fully alive!” as times when we are most stretched towards the fullness of our humanity in relationship to the One who creates us incarnate an gives us our possibilities of being and becoming in a gorgeously sensuous world?

If I am to be honest in the exploration of my belief that a person is most alive and is freed to experience fully only if the body is part of this adventure, I need to look at the tradition of sacred signs and wonder what went wrong that these signs—appealing to body capacities and potentialities—lost their meaning and became mechanical. Why do they no longer awaken, enhance, express, involve us in our religious experience?

I think of gestures such as the sign of the cross, standing, kneeling, processing, beating of breasts, genuflecting. I think of sensuous appeals and poetic demonstrations of faith such as incense, candles, stained-glass windows, bells, water, ashes, music—and bread and wine. I think of the singularly exquisite actions as the Easter candle being lowered to penetrate, to impregnate the baptismal waters, out of whose womb will come children of God.

I suggest that in our world of science (dominated by knowledge-mind-word) the poetic world (dominated by imagination-body-feeling) is not appreciated. We’ve lost our sensitivity and something of what makes us most tenderly human. We’ve hidden our body under a bushel because we’ve been ashamed or snobbishly cerebral and spiritual. It is a world we need to re-enter by fresh approaches.

In religious worship we celebrate what we believe, what we have received, how we stand before God. Is that not wholly as human persons, body and mind? Does not the body need to speak its own language, which is more natural expression than the spoken word?

Romano Guardini has written in his book “Sacred Signs,” “The soul does not inhabit the body as man inhabits a house. It lives and works in each member, each fiber and reveals itself in the body’s every line and contour and movement.” This being so, does not freeing the body to respond not also free the spirit?