WHY THE BODY MATTERS SO MUCH

 

There have been huge changes to the way the human body is viewed in the west in the last hundred years and it has been driven by several factors. Here are some of them.

 

1. 1. The experience of the British army during World War One. The staggering abuse of vast numbers of soldiers in pursuit of a pointless war marked a turning point in how ordinary civilians expected to be treated by those in authority. Huge waves of bereavement and the terrible injuries soldiers brought back altered perspectives. And although shell shock continued shamefully to be treated as an absence of moral fibre, documentation of cases of what is now diagnosed as PTSD began a movement that resulted in final recognition of the psychological effects of war. We are now in a very different place. Peacetime society and sophisticated weaponry mean we tolerate very few losses in war. Disability is better catered for and less shunned; increasingly, it is celebrated through sport. And emotional traumas are recognised more readily. The state can no longer abuse the body the way it used to – in the west at least. Sadly the state continues to abuse human bodies in many parts of the world.

2. 2. The creation of the UK National Health Service and the welfare state after the second world war marked a new social contract between the state and the human body. The war was centrally organised and the belief that life could be made better by central planning was popular in ways people find harder to understand today. The Attlee government made this possible. Each person was to be treated as equally valuable. When anyone went through a tough time, the assumption was the state would support that person until they were in a stronger position to look after themselves again. Attitudes to welfare have altered out of all recognition, but commitment to the NHS grew for decades, being what Nigel Lawson described as ‘the closest thing the English have to a religion’. The NHS is now less trusted than ever, but the body remains central to how we organise our politics.

3. 3. The social liberalism of the 1960s. Decades can be too easily caricatured, but it’s fair to say that social liberalism came of age in the 1960s in the nation’s sexual relations and reproductive choices. The slogan My body, my life took hold. Freedom of choice and expression became central to how we understood life. Behind this is the philosophical belief that no-one else has a right to impose on others and, crucially, that personal decisions could be made without being obliged to think of their impact on others.

4. 4. The economic liberalism of the 1980s. If we’re going to caricature one decade, let’s carry on! This was the era of deregulation – of labour laws and capital restrictions in particular. Re-locating for jobs as old industries failed was expected of people. It was down to people to make what they could of their lives. No-one else could be blamed. People were encouraged to look after their own interests and to believe that in doing so, they would maximise outcomes for everyone else. Or, to put it in Gordon Gekko’s cruder language: greed is good. If the 1960s said it’s my body, the 1980s said it’s your body, and don’t expect me to look after it.

5. 5. The tech revolution, which we are really only just beginning, is producing some interesting and at times worrying attitudes to our bodies. Cameras used to be employed to take photos of scenery, of other people. Now they are used to take selfies, where the photographer is made the centre of all that happens. Image – always significant – has become more important in how we understand one another. We curate the best shots of ourselves. We photoshop relentlessly. And, by example, we are telling each new generation that you will be celebrated if you look perfect. It may mark a rolling back of the earlier gains we spoke about, where everyone’s body was supposed to be treated equally. Now we have to earn our physical status. The body has been commodified and judged in unprecedented ways. And it’s women who are more targeted than men. Greater awareness of mental health may be a triumph over earlier generations’ inability to understand it, but the fact we are talking about it more is also because there is more mental illness around. There is something unhealthy in our culture.

To sum up, there is greater care and respect for the human body. There is greater equality for each person (and therefore each body) in law. There is freedom from abuse and oppression. But we are individualistic in how we live. We don’t expect the state to look after us as much. I must look after myself. Market values permeate more and more of life, where things cannot be priced. There are winners and losers. And losers are not as protected by the state anymore. Communities and charities do this work. But as people become more atomised, more sealed off from others, there are fewer people to do this work of love and fewer who believe in it in the first place. There is a lot of inequality, self-judgment, loneliness and mental illness.

 

So, what is our story as the Church? How do we embody healing? We must be realistic to begin with. There is a huge amount of inter-penetration between the Church and the surrounding world. As much as we wish to share the Gospel with others, we bring in to church many of the attitudes and beliefs that surround us. Some of these are good, some are not. We live outside of church in ways that both bless and hurt the community. We are far from perfect. But we are called to embody something deeply of God. We may fall short of this, but this lack is no excuse for not aiming for it in the first place. God has called us to be holy, as he is holy.

 

Like a human body, the body of Christ has certain frailties. A special risk, like with an ageing body, is that we do not realise the body is letting us down, so slow and steady has been the decline – rather like when our hearing goes but we don’t realise it at first. If the church is to be a place of healing and growth we should think about how we share our gifts. Just as when human hearing declines, so the ability of a church to listen to itself can be reduced to a place where only the loudest voices get heard in a room. The loss of eyesight leads to the narrowing of our horizons; the weakness of a hand to a failure to get basic things done; slowness of movement to indifference to God; the loss of smell to an acceptance of wrong; confusion to a lack of clarity in leadership. And our healing as the people of God is not simply individual, it is corporate.

 

It may be worth any church conducting a mapping exercise like this. We tend to do more conventional audits of who we are. But how about drawing a body and doing a health check? It may help us to understand where our strengths and weaknesses are, how others perceive this body, and what this body is capable of doing by way of blessing others.

 

Here are some values a church might want to think about, as it looks at this body and how it wants to use it in service of the Gospel.

 

1. 1. There should be no winners and losers in Christ. In the letter to the Romans it says we are more than conquerors in Christ, it does not say we must always win at everything in life. There is a pernicious ideology in our wider culture. It separates people into winners and losers. It tells the winners they deserved to win, allowing these winners to ignore any advantages they may have had in the race, like natural gifting, good schooling and family contacts. When you hear the sentence: she wanted it more than the rest, stop and think that through. It allows us to write off those who didn’t win as losers who deserve all they have coming to them. And if they deserve it, why should we bail them out? So, who is losing out in our community, and what might we do about it?
   

2. 2. We should be good listeners. Listening is becoming less common, even looked down on, as people fight to get their stories across. The saying, I’m all ears, may be the best a church could ever aspire to. We should resist the temptation to turn a conversation round at the first opportunity, to make it about us. And true listening asks us to hear out people we disagree with. That is truly counter-cultural. Right now, we defriend people we don’t see eye to eye with. It’s so much more comfortable. The tech thinker Eli Pariser has called it the filter bubble, where we create communities online, where everyone thinks the same. And as a result, communities become more polarised. So, what is your church’s commitment to the healing of this fracture in the local community?
   

3. 3. We should accept weakness and cherish it. St Paul spoke very clearly about this in his essay on the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12. He said: God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honour to the inferior member, that there may be no dissention within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another (verses 24-25). But in our other ear, we hear talk from the culture about how standing on our own two feet is the most important thing, and that we should be embarrassed to depend on others – especially if this is on a regular basis. My question would be: where is the weakness in your church? What do you value in it? How can it be used for God. After all, God’s strength is made perfect in human weakness. And what is weak in the surrounding neighbourhood that could be supported? Who gets picked on because they are weak?
   

4. 4. We should re-define perfection. Our faith calls us to be holy, as God is holy. The surrounding culture tells us to ‘be perfect, as your photoshopped neighbour is perfect’. And there are a range of perfections to meet. We must be fit, slim, beautiful and gregarious. We must pull our own weight. We must own the right labels and have lots of friends. We must have more digital friends, likes and shares on social media, post the best photos of ourselves and the places we have visited that others haven’t. If adults pursue these goals – and some clearly do – there can be no surprise that younger generations think it is the route to making it in life. And when it turns out less than perfect, they blame themselves rather than the rotten culture they are growing up in. There is a battle for the human soul today, and it’s all around what it means to be perfect. Confronting it should be part of our mission. So, how might your church help people to see themselves differently?