Radical Embodiment

Thoughts on how we inhabit our traditions in our bodies

This week I’ve been re-reading a book that really jumpstarted my interest in embodiment, Radical Embodiment by David Nikkel. His work is a reminder that we connect to the Sacred through our bodies. We listen and watch for the presence of God in the created world—in birdsong and the dawn light reflected through the trees. We touch the love of God when we receive an embrace from a loved one or hold hands with a young child. We connect with God through our emotions, both joy and sorrow.

It can sometimes feel hard to connect with our embodied experience though. In modern Western culture we are taught to value hard work and the acquisition of stuff—nice clothes, a big house, a fancy car, and all other manner of consumer goods. It can sometimes seem like these are the only things that matter, which leaves us with a sense of rootlessness and disembodiment. We feel a lack of meaning and belonging, and seek places of connection and a feeling of being at home in the world. Nikkel calls this desire to feel rooted to a particular place, tradition, or community radical embodiment. Radical embodiment is radical in the sense of our being rooted in creation. Nikkel writes, “We are rooted in a meaningful world through our human bodies—and the bodies of our traditions” (46).

Religion is one of the traditions that provides us with a place of meaning and belonging, lived out in ritual and community. Nikkel argues that “We dwell in traditions, extending our bodies through them, incorporating them within our bodies; tradition then functions as a body through which we engage the world and becomes part of our bodies” (74). This is a profound notion. Our faith tradition becomes an extension of our bodies. We are formed by it and it shapes how we perceive and engage with the world. Western Protestants tend to think of religion as a set of beliefs that a person assents to, but faith is so much more than our intellectual understanding. It includes all of who we are, how we love and care for one another in the world, and the priorities we place on practicing our faith in particular ways.

Our bodies are spaces where our faith is lived out. For example, we often move our bodies in specific ways when we pray. Children are taught to put their palms together and bow their head when addressing God. Other people kneel next to their bed, or even sit in a prayer closet. Muslims pray by using a prayer rug and bowing at certain times, while Jews don a special shawl during times of prayer. All of these varied postures help us to get into the right mental space to connect with God. Though God hears us in all times and places, moving our bodies in particular ways can help calm our frenzied minds and ground us in the current moment and help us recognize that we are in the presence of God.

The people who lived at the time when the Bible was being written also understood that our bodies are places where we encounter God and that reflect the sacredness of God. Nikkel argues that the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam provide us with a tradition that “regards the human person as a psychosomatic unity” (90). This holistic understanding of embodied selves is also beginning to be recognized by the scientific community, a refutation of “the Greek-influenced mind-body dualism that has reigned for most of Western theological and philosophical history” (90). When we read the Bible, we encounter a faith tradition that was meant to be embodied, to incorporate all of who we are and what we do in the world.

The biblical writers did not separate their existence into dualistic categories of mind and body, or body and soul. They saw each person as a unified whole. Similarly, Nikkel writes, “For radical embodiment, body is not split from mind, nor is it reductively physical, but rather exists as correlative with consciousness. A person persists as a mindbody continuum. ‘Mind,’ as awareness of and attempting to make sense of things, and ‘body,’ as that with which we have and relate to a world come radically interrelated and correlative, never simply distinguishable, and both come into play at some level in all our acts” (122).

We are whole and holy, fully embodied beings. Through our physical presence in the world, we can be the hands and feet of God, offering love and care to our neighbors and working to repair our broken social structures and a hurting earth. The Bible provides a foundation to appreciate the miracle of our own embodiment and to work to protect all other embodied beings. And our church communities ought to be safe places to live out our embodiment and to provide sanctuary for all kinds of bodies—young and old, small and large, able and disabled.

David H Nikkel, Radical Embodiment, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 125 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010).