Embodied Faith

Photo: Andrew Lin

Lindy Hop Meditations Part 5: I was robbed

of an embodied faith when I obsessed over God in the realm of thoughts and ideas, over such a long time of my life. I learned and knew of what to believe, what to say, and how to make what I believe and say consistent to the teachings of the church, of all the little tricks of the mind that convinced myself of my own consistency. I did not live in my body. I wrecked my body on long commutes and sleep deprivation thinking that suffering will make me attain the greatest good. But when I tasted the teachings of Jesus channeled through movement and touch, tension and compression, and saw the thoughts and dispositions of my friends through the conduct of their dance, each of them unique and personal, I realise that I had deprived myself of the awareness of God's love in my own body: I did not know what it felt like in my body when I extended orthodoxy into orthopraxis, because I had not taught myself to feel, but convinced myself that feeling things were sinful.

I thank Jesus for not having stayed an abstract figure, but came to Earth as an embodied being. Humanity has a gnostic instinct that naturally elevated the mind and damned the body to Hell. By living among us he sticks a massive middle finger to our errors. He condensed the 613 Mitzvot of the Torah, implementable through blind faith, into the two axiomatic statements

1. Love God

2. Love your neighbour,

the "what" and the "how" of reciprocating his Love. Whereas the "what" involves the Creator God which is necessarily intangible and ineffable as in all of the other Abrahamic traditions, the "how" concretises it into action that allows the Love to bleed out from worship into our daily lives. Most importantly, as Jesus is incarnate and can represent the object in (1) and (2) simultaneously, these two axioms can even be thought of as a single axiom of the Incarnation.

Because of this, I do not shy away from feeling the sense of touch. I do not see the devil in the gleam in my partner's eye, because when Jesus comes to earth, he baptises our body, our senses and our pleasures. He baptises our blood and guts. He baptises the humble feeding trough where they set him down. He baptises the raggedy shepherds of Bayt Sahur; he baptises the dumb beasts of the manger in Bethlehem. May no one come and tell you that these precious things which he baptised can ever be unclean.