The Easter season is an awkward time of year for the food, pharmaceutical, diet and cosmetic industries. These industries are largely dedicated to convincing us that there is something wrong with our bodies. Shortly after Easter day we were told that there is an Easter egg mountain because sales were down this year; perhaps it’s because of the cabinet minister who compared the scourge of obesity to the danger posed by climate change or could it have had something to do with that family of jelly babies on television where the little boy unzips his tummy to show accumulations of life threatening fat? The child actor who voices the little boy plays a character in the soap opera Hollyoaks where a teenager of Pakistani origin is currently trying to change her skin colour because of her despair at being accepted as an attractive young woman. It may come as a surprise when we hear President Ahmadinejad of Iran disrupting a UN conference on racism with his views on Israel, to learn that his capital city has 3,000 cosmetic surgeons. Their most sought after intervention is the nose job’ some of them having performed 30,000 such operations during the course of their careers. In Korea something like 50% of its young women are having operations to make their eyelids look more western. In Brazil the government provides for publicly funded breast enhancement as being cheaper than psychotherapy for low self esteem amongst women. This year the world is spending $2.86 billion on anti aging creams. The March 2008 edition of Vogue contained 144 digitally retouched images of men and women to make some aspect of their appearance more acceptable. In 2006 the diet industry in the United States was worth $100 billion as compared with an education budget of $127 billion. Under pressure from the International Obesity Task Force the World Health Organisation redefined the concept of normal’ weight (the Body Mass Index) so that Brad Pitt and Linford Christie became overweight overnight. Of course obesity is a problem but so too are the more hidden cases of anorexia and bulimia which arise from our culture’s obsession with the perfect body.
Most of these examples come from a fascinating recently published book by Susie Orbach simple entitled Bodies’ which ends with the plea that we might rethink the body in such a way that we can both take it for granted and enjoy it. Our struggle is to recorporealise our bodies so that they become a place we can live from rather than an aspiration always to be achieved.’
The Easter stories are all about a particular body that still bears the marks of some terrible wounds, that can be touched but not clung to, that eats breakfast, and supper, climbs mountains, and celebrates with the disciples. We live in an intellectual culture which finds the clause in the creed which refers to belief in the resurrection of the body difficult to make sense of other than in terms of primitive superstition. We are more comfortable with the idea of spiritual survival of death because we have grown used to the idea of the dominance of the thinking part of our being I think therefore I am’. It is as though the mind is a ghost in the machine,’ the body being a purely physical thing controlled by a purely non physical mind. Such a view encourages those scientific aspirations to enhance our cognitive and physical capacities, so that one day we may even find it possible to implant tiny personal computers to transform our minds and bodies in ways which are at present unthinkable. In this way we will it seems no longer have to put up with restrictions, boundaries or frailties in our bodies because of what bioengineering can achieve. Ironically such concerns to improve the body come from an inability to be at home in the body, just as a an inability to believe in the resurrection of the body represents a sense of finally being able to let go of the body as being a hindrance that we cannot ultimately cure.
In such a context belief in the resurrection takes on a new resonance it puts us back in our bodies. There are of course many questions which remain unanswerable. All we can say is that for our creator God material creation is part of his being. If he does not let us go in death then he can recreate for us a transformed bodily existence which transcends but remains connected with what makes us who we are in this life. And who we are now depends on our being at home in our bodies, being at home both with what tires, hurts, decays and stumbles as well as with what is exuberant, joyful, sensuous, comforting and embraceable. Of course such bodily domesticity requires a form of spiritual asceticism or discipline but that must grow not out of hatred for but love of our bodies and their possibilities. Long before the dieting industry was ever invented the desert fathers discovered that holy fasting left them feeling more at home in a world which still had some connection with paradise.
Christian belief is not a set of disembodied principles. What we believe about the future must affect what we do in the present. Belief in the resurrection should reconnect us with our bodies now, clothing, feeding, exercising and embracing them not in order to achieve some image forced on us by advertising and the beauty, food and dieting industries but because our bodies are the focus of God’s creativity at work in us because he loves us and will raise us up on the last day.
With my love and prayers,
Fr Stephen
Vicar’s Notices
THANK YOU to all of you who gave so generously to the crypt appeal and came to see me on the gift day. THANK YOU to all of you who worked so hard on the voluntary rate. THANK YOU to all of you who cleaned and decorated the church so beautifully for Easter. THANK YOU to all of you who made our Spring Fair such a success.
The Vicar writes
Stephen Tucker