You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and will all your soul, and with all your strength,
and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.

~ Luke 10:27a

Body and Spirit

Several years ago, Rev. M Jade Kaiser, founder and writer for enfleshed, posed a curious question on social media: “What does God smell like?” The ideas came pouring in. “Flowers,” “petrichor,” “pages of an old book,” “a box of crayons” — each answer was as interesting as the previous one. I wonder what your answer would be?

This made me think about how people sense the holy. I thought of prophetic visions, the sounds of sacred music, bird songs, and babbling brooks, and desserts that taste, “heavenly.” John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, described the moment he received assurance of God’s grace as the feeling of his heart strangely warmed.

In Christian history, we have done too well separating the body from the spirit, a dichotomy claiming that the body must be weak and the spirit must be superior. There are differences between body and soul, yes, and the Apostle Paul enumerated them. Western theology has taken hold of his writing and built upon it a theology of the spirit being willing and the flesh being weak to such an extreme that it disproportionately categorizes the body as bad. But it cannot be as stark as that. After all, both Jesus' divinity and Jesus’ human body are important for us to understand all he is.

When we look at this teaching about loving God from the Gospel of Luke, we understand we are to love God with all we are, including our strength. We each have a both a body and a soul, and we can experience God’s presence in many ways.

In the next month, we will share how God connects to us through the senses. I look forward to an embodied journey with you, where we will celebrate all the different ways God speaks to us.