The Religious Importance of Bodies – February 28th, 2010
The summary of today’s service says that the purpose of bodies is to produce intense religious emotion. It is better to say ‘foster religious emotion’ rather than produce, I think. The body, I will suggest, is a community of living things that gives us the world, and when we are given the world, we have the chance to feel religious feelings. But, before we go anywhere else with this I want to clarify that by ‘religious feelings’ I mean wonder and curiosity. When our bodies give us the world, we have the chance to feel all the wonder and curiosity the world evokes. When a child or an adult stops to observe that first spring snowdrop, and wonders at its emergence from the cold soil through the crusty late winter snow, that is a religious experience. If your experience of the world includes God, and God fills you with wonder and curiosity, that too is a religious experience. If your experience of God, on the other hand, makes you frightened, anxious, and bullied, that’s feeling frightened, anxious, and bullied, and is not religious at all. Religious feeling is to feel wonder and curiosity for the world.
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