CHAPTER 1

Believing Bodies

I am running out of shelf space for books in my little apartment and as Ipuzzled recently about which to keep I went into a reverie about the tinycollection of books we had at a home when I was a child. My parents were avidusers of the public library, but owned only a couple of dozen books. I devouredthem all from cover to cover. A self-help manual from the 1940s called Relieffrom Nervous Tension particularly fascinated me, since I felt tense and nervousa lot of the time. So at the age of ten I pored over it, laboring to understandthe concept of neurosis and puzzling over the scenarios the author presented.One particular story made a deep impression. A patient who complained of chronicallergies entered his therapist's office only to be confronted by a huge bouquetof flowers on the desk. Immediately starting to wheeze and choke, the patientrailed at the therapist for recklessly exposing him to such an irritant. Withouta word, the therapist started to tear the flowers up. They were artificial paperflowers and entirely harmless.

Ever since, I have been fascinated by the power of the identities we create forourselves. Who we think we are can dictate how the very cells of our bodies aregoing to react to the environment. The choking patient's body was obedientlyacting out his identity in the "allergic" reaction to what he assumed were realflowers, though in fact they were made of paper. Researchers have discoveredthat in patients suffering from multiple personality disorder, one of thepersonalities can be allergic to something while the other "self" isn't at all.One personality can be short-sighted and the other long-sighted, and the patientneeds glasses with completely different prescriptions as she shifts from oneidentity to another.

Investigation into the ways our ideas get embedded into the very cellularstructure of our bodies should be of paramount interest to thoughtfulChristians. Our commitment to the mystery of Incarnation should make usespecially alert to every source of insight about the way our beliefs affect usphysically. All sorts of avenues should be explored more openly in our Christianpractice as we build a richer understanding of what healing is.

Meditation and prayer are powerful ways of letting go of old identities andexploring new ones in Christ, and our bodies can register this change in ahundred ways, from the expression in our eyes to the ways we let go of stress.And transformation occurs through a flow in the other direction, too. We canallow our bodies to experience change first, and then a new sense of self canfollow.

For example, there are many ways of exposing ourselves to deep healing of heart,mind, and soul through our bodies, through touch and movement. So, for example,it is a fact that our bodies act as the long-term "storage" for painfulmemories. This is not some New Age claptrap, but ageless human knowledge whosefoundation is only now being investigated by science. Skilled body work—myexperience has been with the technique called Rolfing—can release the pain andemotion embedded in particular areas of my body, freeing me to mature. Yoga andother forms of movement can be the royal road to a profound shift in the way weknow and identify ourselves. I have been practicing mudras for some years,praying with a range of ancient gestures and postures for the arms and hands. Ican't explain how these strange and beautiful gestures help shift my energiesfrom petty obsessions, self-doubt, and negativity into a state of openness toGod's presence in the present moment. I just know they do, and that I ambenefiting from millennia of experimentation.

And what about the healing power of sacramental ritual? Our bodies can oftenoffer us ways to grow into radically new identities of faith when our minds seemstuck in skepticism. I remember hearing of a Marxist intellectual in Russia whowanted to believe but could not overcome his agnosticism. He consulted a wisepriest who strangely showed little interest in his visitor's intellectualdifficulties with Christianity. The priest told him to go home and get into thehabit of making the sign of the cross and bowing to the ground a hundred times aday in the privacy of his own room, then come back to see him when he felt likeit. The man returned a month later and asked for baptism. First he practicedbelieving with his body, then his mind could catch up. There are thousands ofmen and women who find it hard to believe intellectually yet regularly take partin services in hospitable churches. Many are simply learning to believe withtheir bodies first. Through the rituals of worship the mental knots of theiragnosticism are gradually being worked loose, and their hearts are being freedlike a compass needle to align with the attraction of God.

CHAPTER 2

Cookham Churchyard

I will always remember a moment years ago, turning a corner in a stairwell ofthe Tate Gallery in London and confronting a painting by Sir Stanley Spencercalled Resurrection in Cookham Churchyard. This huge canvas depicts withglorious earthiness and apparent naiveté the opening of the graves in thepainter's local churchyard on the last day. The different generations buriedthere over the centuries are struggling up as if from long sleep and beginningto take stock of one another. In the middle there is a young man just emerging,looking to one side with a serene and serious expression—the artist's self-portrait.Back then, in the mid-sixties, the painting was regarded as dated andunfashionable and relegated to this relatively obscure place in a stairwell.There I stayed rooted on the stairs for over an hour, a young and troubledadolescent, anxious and struggling with depression I tried to keep secret, beingmoved to the very core of my being by the force of the resurrection gospel.

One of the best ways we can learn spiritually from one another is to sharepersonal stories of the spiritual impact works of art have on us—the buildings,the music, the paintings, the sculptures in whose presence we have experiencedepiphany, even conversion. In our western Protestant world, a culture dominatedby thought and words, conversion experiences are often couched as eventstriggered by speech: a preacher or perhaps an inner voice speaks to us andthings change inside us. But our shared religious experience can tell us thatsymbols contain within themselves inexhaustible reserves of converting power,and we can be surprised by joy—and terror—and become suddenly sensitized to thegrace of God when we open ourselves to them. Anglicans are sometimes mocked fortheir interest in the aesthetic, and we should be able to laugh at ourselves forwhat is often an exaggerated interest in good taste. And yet that laughtershouldn't shake our respect for something we know and love: the power ofsacramental symbol and image to embody and communicate life-changing grace.

When we share our stories of religious experience, one of the most powerfulthemes that comes through is the uncanny way in which our religious experiencesare timely. By coincidence—only it seems it never is mere coincidence—just whenwe need something so deeply, we turn a corner and encounter something that"speaks to our condition," as Quaker spirituality puts it. Somehow, when we areready and not before, we have an encounter: the cathedral we happened to enterwhile traveling because we had an hour to kill before catching the train, thesong that happened to be on the radio when we switched it on at random, thepainting in the art gallery we would have missed if we hadn't obeyed the impulseto turn aside, the sculpture in the garden we wouldn't have had time tocontemplate if our friend hadn't been delayed, the poem that stood out from thepage when we were merely looking at books at random in the store to while away amoment.

Spirituality has a lot to do with gaining a sense that we have our own uniquestory about how God's grace has worked in our lives. These moments when God usessymbols and images to touch us can play as important a role as those grace-filled encounters with living people, the human angels who have come to us justat the right moment throughout our lives. And these grace-filled encounters havea double importance. They are not only milestones on the journey of conversion.They continue to yield new meanings as time goes on. Sometimes epiphany eventsare "a whisper which memory will warehouse as a shout." The original events canbe fleeting, but over time our later experience brings them out in theirfullness, just as the chemical bath in the darkroom develops the dim negativeinto a vivid picture.

The memory of my encounter with Spencer's masterpiece Resurrection in CookhamChurchyard is one I can visit again and again because the force of this strangeand eccentric work of art never diminishes. When I first saw it, it didn't speakto me about the afterlife, but about this life, the life that lay ahead of me. Iwas touched with a sense of hope about my own creativity. And I wasn't surprisedto learn that Spencer had started the painting immediately after his firstsexual experience, because even at first sight, the picture challenged myambivalence about sexuality and my uneasy relationship with my own body. Overthe years, the painting has continued to bring blessings to me, and now inmiddle age, it keeps me company as I meditate on the future that awaits us inGod beyond death. That future will not be the salvaging of a part of me, thesoul, but the embrace of the whole of me, and in some way I will be even morefully an embodied person in eternity than I am now.

CHAPTER 3

Jesus is a Jew

I am often asked how the three years I worked on the staff of the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum have changed me as a priest. I can only answer, "Inmore ways than I yet realize." I am certainly more painfully aware than ever ofthe terrible consequences of the church's historic failure to fully embrace theJewishness of Jesus. So when New Year's Day came round, I found myselfregretting that the first of January is no longer celebrated as the Feast of theCircumcision, as it was in the original Calendar of the Book of Common Prayer.The change to calling it the Feast of the Holy Name must have seemed to make agreat deal of sense in the 1970s when liturgical renewal was in full swing, andnow only senior churchgoers remember the old commemoration. The very idea ofholding up the fact of Jesus' circumcision has been relegated to a kind ofreligious attic where the church stores the obsolete.

Circumcision is that solemn act which marks every Jewish male with an indeliblesign of his membership in the covenant people of God, and Luke faithfullyrecords that Jesus himself was circumcised eight days after he was born. We knownothing about Jesus' personal appearance, but we can be certain about thisphysical sign of his Jewish identity. The old commemoration on New Year's Daywas a reminder of that identity, and however sound the reasoning may have seemedfor dropping it, the loss reminds us of a tragic dimension in Christian history.

"Tragic" seems overstated, but then working at the Holocaust Museum has forcedme to stare day after day at those horrific events for which the groundwork waslaid by the church's historic minimizing—or worse, virtual denial—of Jesus'Jewishness. Generation after generation was brought up to believe that Jesus wascompletely separated from the Jewish people, that Judaism was an alien culturewhose survival was an obstinate hold-out against the new revelation ofChristianity. The Holocaust could not have happened if the church had not beenpropagating for centuries an atrociously distorted theology that severed theconnection between Jesus and his own people.

I used to imagine I was completely innocent of this attitude. After all, even asa boy, I could see through the bias in the depictions of Jesus as a blond Anglo-Saxontype in the stained glass windows. I made an intense study of the"historical Jesus" with scholars who rigorously emphasized Jesus as a prophet ofhis own people to his own people. My preaching was always grounded in theknowledge that Jesus was a Jew. But now I keep on discovering new levels ofdenial within myself. Not long ago the Presbyterian theologian ChristopherLeighton, addressing a gathering at the Museum, jolted me by asserting that itis not enough for Christians to say that Jesus was a Jew; we have to say, Jesusis a Jew.

Leighton's words stung me into awareness. I realized that at some level I hadbeen assuming that Jesus' identification with his own people in the covenant hadsomehow evaporated on the cross and in the grave. It was as though, in beingraised from the dead, Jesus shed his Jewishness like a chrysalis and became aUniversal Being and Presence. Paul's radical message that membership in God'scommunity was open to all—"There is neither Jew or Greek ... for all of you are onein Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28)—has had the unfortunate effect of seeming to makeJesus' inherent Jewishness disappear. I had never said to myself, "Jesus is aJew"—let alone said in my prayers, "Jesus, you are a Jew"

Those who had the uncanny privilege of seeing the risen Christ described a bodystill bearing the wounds of crucifixion: "He showed them his hands and his side"(John 20:20). Just as surely Christ's body bore—we must say bears—the marks ofthe first wound that sealed him irrevocably with the sign of the covenant. Andso perhaps there is a loss that can still be tragic, if we forget Jesus'circumcision.

Many are highly reluctant to meditate in this way. The prudish will recoil fromalluding to Jesus' genitals; they need to keep anything sexual out ofspirituality. Some feminists may have problems with such an overt reminder ofJesus' maleness; it may seem like a regression to an old spirituality thatimplied that males reflected God's image more than females. And for many, theeffort even to imagine a risen Christ as anything other than a metaphor for avague "spiritual presence" is too much. For them the Word might indeed havebecome flesh, but that only lasted for the thirty-three years or so of Jesus'earthly life.

These are neutering tendencies in our religion, and they have a disturbingrelationship with the anti-Semitic biases that have disfigured Christianity.They were much on my mind at times when I walked through the Holocaust Museum onmy own, praying silently to the Christ who, even as the Risen One, suffers untilthe end of time in and with all the suffering. Passing by these countlessphotographs of those who perished in the Holocaust—a mere fraction of the sixmillion—I at least began to grasp that Christ is never more united with humanitythan in his solidarity with his own Jewish sisters and brothers, those who areand always will be his own kin, those who have borne such unbearable things—manyof them at the hands of those who claimed to be Christ's own.

CHAPTER 4

Even After Death

I have been praying for a friend who was diagnosed just a few weeks ago withHodgkin's lymphoma. Today I received news of his death and I find myself so fullof gratitude that I belong to a church that encourages us to pray for the dead.What an amazing blessing it is to know that although we really have to work tolet loved ones go when they die, we can still maintain an intimate connectionwith them through prayer. Through and in Christ, we can still go on expressingour love for the one we have temporarily lost. In the body of Christ, we arestill united and love can go on flowing back and forth, carried along on thecurrents of the Holy Spirit.

Anglicans have not always enjoyed this freedom to pray for the dead. During theReformation in the sixteenth century, the practice was stripped from the worshipand practice of the Church of England. This was partly a reaction against thesuperstitious abuses associated with the medieval doctrine of purgatory.Purgatory was conceived as a place of banishment to which the dead weresupposedly sentenced in order to receive any outstanding punishment for theirsins—a sentence that intercessions for the dead, Masses offered on their behalf,and indulgences applied to their account were thought to reduce. And partly itwas under the influence of rigid notions of predestination, the theory that Godhad decreed in advance our fate in the life to come, a fate that no amount ofprayers could possibly influence.