Remember the story of
Icarus, son of Daedalus, who, with wings of wax
and against his father's (The Father's?)
instruction, flew too close to the sun? Or Harry
Potter, quiddich Seeker, who flew high, fell to
the ground and had to have his broken body's
bones regrown with Madame Pomfrey's potion?
Whether modern or ancient, myths can teach us
where potential pitfalls lie in our human
existence. The beauty and light of spirit, of
Source, is so compelling that we long to linger
in its presence, forgetting that we are joined
to our flesh in a contract with Life, itself.
Living within the
limitations of a physical body is continually
challenging for the spiritual Seeker. As we
gather knowledge and increase our awareness of
the Infinite, our spirit expands and we feel
more acutely the restrictions of the flesh as if
we are trapped in this dense matter. We want
higher mind, higher energy. The world of
substance and feeling contained in the body,
home of the soul, seems tiresome and heavy. We
experience frustration with its slow, plodding
give and take. Sometimes we feel good, sometimes
not. We want to feel good all the time, like
those fleeting numinous moments when we touch
God. The more of these moments we experience,
whether in meditation, prayer or spiritual
community, the more we crave. This frustration
causes many to seek oblivion, either through
addictive substances and behaviors or through
ignoring the body in favor of the spirit.
More than a few of us
could cite an example of a very spiritual person
we knew who experienced great suffering and
finally death at an unfair age. In the Christian
model, Jesus was a relatively young man when
viciously crucified. And yet even his example
seems lost in the current accepted
interpretation that he died for our sins. Along
with Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden,
what are we to believe from what we have been
taught, except that our bodies are sinful and
inhabiting the body, inherently wrong? Why then
did Jesus present his resurrected body in front
of witnesses, three days after he was pronounced
dead? Why did he demonstrate this by eating fish
and honey, if the flesh is evil and undesirable?
It seems to me that His act of death and
resurrection, when taken symbolically,
represents renewal through purifying one's
understanding of what it is to be human. Life is
suffering, but we do not have to martyr
ourselves to experience the act of sacrifice.
Instead of piercing the flesh with punishing
spears and thorns, we can open the body to the
light of spiritual understanding through the
breath, through bodywork, walking in nature, and
literally coming back to our senses. Jesus
demonstrated that we need to sanctify or purify
the flesh, not lay down our own lives for it.
That was His burden, and one which he took on
for humanity to remember for eternity. When we
take in sacrament, we symbolically purify flesh
and blood. These are the substances of the body.
Yet if at the same time we are in effect saying
to ourselves, "forgive me God, for my very
humanity makes me unworthy," how can we ever
purify what we feel to be inherently evil? Is
not the sacrament, or sacredness, then lost?
If we embrace the example
of Jesus or any enlightened Master, we learn
that dedicating ourselves to seeking insight and
understanding means we need to undergo
sacrifice. This surrendering is painful, no
doubt about it. Remember Siddhartha, who
surrendered his riches and noble heritage to
wander and experience life in the world? He then
sat with all of life's unfairness, seeking to
know its nature more profoundly and became
enlightened, or Buddha. Jesus was likewise a
wanderer. Most of us are not called to sacrifice
anything as great as these two men, but rather
we are challenged to forgive ourselves and
others, accept our circumstances in life not as
punishment but rather learning of some kind, and
surrender our need to figure out the Divine
Plan. We then may experience, much as these
Masters demonstrated, a sort of rebirth.
Each time we surrender and
open to the Divine potential within our human
be-ing, we likewise feed our souls. I am fairly
certain that this earthly existence in human
form is a crucial step in our soul's evolution.
If we fail to embrace our human experience,
wanting to skip this little Earth journey in
favor of something less painful and challenging,
we may be doomed to repeat life on Earth until
we integrate what we came here to learn. The
body houses the soul. We have left the body
behind in modern culture, our feelings severed
from the prized intellect. This is nowhere
depicted more clearly than in such stories as
Shelley's Frankenstein or C.S. Lewis'
That Hideous Strength. In Frankenstein,
we observe the hulking monster, dragging itself
along, body animated by a superior brain.
Hideous Strength is a Hitler-esque tale of
men (and one dictatorial woman) who join forces
to create a superior society and who take orders
from their chief, The Head, an actual severed
head fed by tubes and animated by wires.
We can leave our bodies
out of the equation, yet the body will continue
breaking down, often painfully. Body re-entry
for most of us who have spent our lives in our
heads is likewise a painful experience. Yet
these two kinds of pain are very different. One
leads to fearful disintegration and death, a
feeling that life has not truly been lived. The
other leads to integration and
everlasting life, a joining of spirit and
matter, again depicted by our Jesus figure. And
think about it. Living in a world like ours with
such incredible sights, smells and textures
which offset the challenges of the personal
journey into consciousness just might be a life
worth living, and living well.
