copyright Bela Johnson, published by The Maine Eagle, October 2002

Remember the story of Icarus, son of Daedalus, who, with wings of wax and against his father's (The Father's?) instruction, flew too close to the sun? Or Harry Potter, Quidditch Seeker, who flew high, fell to the ground and had to have his broken body's bones regrown with Madame Pomfrey's potion? Whether modern or ancient, myths can teach us where potential pitfalls lie in our human existence. The beauty and light of spirit, of Source, is so compelling that we long to linger in its presence, forgetting that we are joined to our flesh in a contract with Life, itself.

Living within the limitations of a physical body is continually challenging for the spiritual Seeker. As we gather knowledge and increase our awareness of the Infinite, our spirit expands and we feel more acutely the restrictions of the flesh as if we are trapped in this dense matter. We want higher mind, higher energy. The world of substance and feeling contained in the body, home of the soul, seems tiresome and heavy. We experience frustration with its slow, plodding give and take. Sometimes we feel good, sometimes not. We want to feel good all the time, like those fleeting numinous moments when we touch God. The more of these moments we experience, whether in meditation, prayer or spiritual community, the more we crave. This frustration causes many to seek oblivion, either through addictive substances and behaviors or through ignoring the body in favor of the spirit.

More than a few of us could cite an example of a very spiritual person we knew who experienced great suffering and finally death at an unfair age. In the Christian model, Jesus was a relatively young man when viciously crucified. And yet even his example seems lost in the current accepted interpretation that he died for our sins. Along with Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden, what are we to believe from what we have been taught, except that our bodies are sinful and inhabiting the body, inherently wrong? Why then did Jesus present his resurrected body in front of witnesses, three days after he was pronounced dead? Why did he demonstrate this by eating fish and honey, if the flesh is evil and undesirable? It seems to me that His act of death and resurrection, when taken symbolically, represents renewal through purifying one's understanding of what it is to be human. Life is suffering, but we do not have to martyr ourselves to experience the act of sacrifice. Instead of piercing the flesh with punishing spears and thorns, we can open the body to the light of spiritual understanding through the breath, through bodywork, walking in nature, and literally coming back to our senses. Jesus demonstrated that we need to sanctify or purify the flesh, not lay down our own lives for it. That was His burden, and one which he took on for humanity to remember for eternity. When we take in sacrament, we symbolically purify flesh and blood. These are the substances of the body. Yet if at the same time we are in effect saying to ourselves, "forgive me God, for my very humanity makes me unworthy," how can we ever purify what we feel to be inherently evil? Is not the sacrament, or sacredness, then lost?

If we embrace the example of Jesus or any enlightened Master, we learn that dedicating ourselves to seeking insight and understanding means we need to undergo sacrifice. This surrendering is painful, no doubt about it. Remember Siddhartha, who surrendered his riches and noble heritage to wander and experience life in the world? He then sat with all of life's unfairness, seeking to know its nature more profoundly and became enlightened, or Buddha. Jesus was likewise a wanderer. Most of us are not called to sacrifice anything as great as these two men, but rather we are challenged to forgive ourselves and others, accept our circumstances in life not as punishment but rather learning of some kind, and surrender our need to figure out the Divine Plan. We then may experience, much as these Masters demonstrated, a sort of rebirth.

Each time we surrender and open to the Divine potential within our human be-ing, we likewise feed our souls. I am fairly certain that this earthly existence in human form is a crucial step in our soul's evolution. If we fail to embrace our human experience, wanting to skip this little Earth journey in favor of something less painful and challenging, we may be doomed to repeat life on Earth until we integrate what we came here to learn. The body houses the soul. We have left the body behind in modern culture, our feelings severed from the prized intellect. This is nowhere depicted more clearly than in such stories as Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN or C.S. Lewis' THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. In FRANKENSTEIN, we observe the hulking monster, dragging itself along, body animated by a superior brain. HIDEOUS STRENGTH is a Hitler-esque tale of men (and one dictatorial woman) who join forces to create a superior society and who take orders from their chief, The Head, an actual severed head fed by tubes and animated by wires.

We can leave our bodies out of the equation, yet the body will continue breaking down, often painfully. Body re-entry for most of us who have spent our lives in our heads is likewise a painful experience. Yet these two kinds of pain are very different. One leads to fearful disintegration and death, a feeling that life has not truly been lived. The other leads to INTEGRATION and everlasting life, a joining of spirit and matter, again depicted by our Jesus figure. And think about it. Living in a world like ours with such incredible sights, smells and textures which offset the challenges of the personal journey into consciousness just might be a life worth living, and living well.