We Are Matter

“We are matter, kindred with ocean and tree and sky. We are flesh and blood and bone. To sink into that is relief, a homecoming…”

     “The ancestors of the Protestant world of my childhood had turned worship into a chin-up experience, spine straight on an uncomfortable pew, eyes ahead. And the holy figures who claimed my fascination when I first came back to taking religion seriously in my twenties all seemed, on the surface, to model a sharp boundary between physicality and spirituality. Now I see with different eyes. It’s a contained, safe physicality the mystics reject. They plunge into flesh and blood in the raw.”

    Broadcaster and author Krista Tippett’s childhood experience in a mainline Christian denomination is fairly typical, as is the evolution of her thinking regarding religious matters. Many of us were both taught and modeled a faith that was decidedly rigid, that considered the material/physical world suspect, and that required compliance rather than the freedom to think with an open mind and to worship in a spirit of celebration rather than obligation.

    Again, like Tippett, a number of us have journeyed away from organized religion only to return, but with a different mindset, a more down-to-earth, personal, life giving relationship with the God of our understanding. As she claims, this new take on religion isn’t so new after all; the spirituality of mystics in centuries past was often characterized not by “a contained, safe physicality,” but by one tinged at least with flesh and blood.

     What a relief it can be to embrace as religious/spiritual the life of our body as well as our soul. What a sense of rightness to not have to check our humanity at the door of the church, synagogue, mosque, or mandir (Hindu temple).What a joy to realize that we don’t have to conform to a blueprint of perfection in order to be acceptable to the gods, but that we need only be faithful to an imprint of love already inscribed on our soul.