Catholic Creatives Pillar: Bodies are Beautiful

“We believe that the embodied world is shot through with the Incarnate Christ. Because of the Incarnation, we can find God in the raw, the real, and the tangible. So we don’t run away from the physical world, rather, we seek God in its messiness. Through Christ, every physical experience of beauty is sacramental- the smell of paint, the taste of a crisp apple, the electricity of human love are all windows into the mystery of God. We love the embodied world and accept the call to partner with God as co-creators.“

When I was growing up, ideas were the central way we grew in our faith: Sunday school happened in a classroom with a white board- conversations about apologetics from traveling theologians or professors who would take a respite at our dinner table after speaking and selling books at conferences.

I wouldn’t have been able to tell you at the time, but the truth was, I was ashamed of so much of my body and other people's bodies- they just didn’t seem… holy. My mind would have recoiled from imagining Jesus in a workshop, burning under the hot Judean sun, covered in sweat, flecked with wood chips and sawdust and smelling like a full day's work. For others though who grew up like me, this sort of image is rather shocking- not theologically, but aesthetically.

Somewhere between all the denim jumpers and all the robes that saints wore in holy cards, combined with our (justifiably) horrified reactions to the pornographic stuff that was always presented in media - I got the manichean idea that this world of the flesh was dangerous, bad, and needed to be hidden.

So when I encountered Theology of the Body in my high school youth group, it was revolutionary to me. There it was mainly being taught as apologetic for motivating teens to stop having premarital sex, or nudging them to come down on the right side of culture war issues. But when I heard it, I was fidgeting on my carpet square on a linoleum floor, listening to a talk at a Life Night, and I started coursing with adolescent excitement. It was a third way, between the gross, shallow culture that my community was rejecting, and the shaming, academic, and emotionless Catholicism that I was in the process of rebelling against. Not only was sex good… so were my desires, so was my music, so were my emotions, my clothing, and so was my (very skinny, very emo) body.

Through my work within the Catholic Creatives community I am convinced that when our church culture truly starts to integrate TOB (or at the very least, a love for the bodily world), our events, conferences, parties, and cultures are going to be the most exciting, artful places to be in the world. Unfortunately, we are still working on getting the message of the incarnation down from the realm of ideas and into, well, the world of the body. For instance I once went to a conference whose main topic was Theology of the Body, and while I was there I was struck by how difficult it was to imagine us finishing up a breakout session by stretching, pumping iron, discussing color pallets, or turning down the lights to dance some salsa. Get ready though - someday this kind of cultural sensuality is going to be the mark of Catholic Culture. It is the inevitable result of the incarnation being truly lived out.

“Alright yall, now lets integrate JPII’s philosophy by doing some deadlifts together”
photocred- Istock

Don’t believe me? It’s already happening, like jalapeno seeds slowly ripening in an aging salsa, or yeast working their smelly chemistry on a sourdough loaf, TOB is leavening a new desire for sensory integrity in our generation. You can smell it in our essential oils, see it in our etsy stores, behold it in our favorite influencer’s beautiful clothing selections. Maybe our institutions haven’t caught on yet, but we are into quality photography, clean websites, and beautiful calendars.

JPII’s message was a revelation to the Church that to heal our world, our role as a church is to follow Christ by embracing the bodily world (the true one from our Creator) in all its naked truth. TOB was introduced by prophets of the last generation- but in the coming years, I believe that it’s up to us creatives who can now blow the trumpets, sing the new songs, and bring the church across the river into the promised land of a true and healthy body image.

That’s the good news. The bad news… this mantle is going to be painful to wear. Our church culture’s historical blindness to the body, as evidenced by our poor music, ugly liturgies, unusable websites, and stale buildings, is going to be hard to shake. Creatives work in the realm of matter, of sense and sensuality, and we must recognize that the Catholic creative’s journey is a particularly courageous path to walk in our cultural tradition. We will likely be judged by some very well meaning types as vain, immodest, wasteful, frivolous, and even slightly sacrilegious. But this is the call.

Brace yourselves. No one is gonna like your tattoos or your faux-fur coat.

If we as creatives can learn to play beautiful songs (not just to be Catholic retreat leaders, but simply to worship in the privacy of our homes)-- if we can give ourselves permission to put our hands into mud, just to feel the texture, or to dance down the sidewalk in response to the movement of God in our hearts, we’ll begin the courageous work that David did as a shepherd when he prepared to shamelessly to lead the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, stripped, naked, and unashamed. If we cultivate a personal and shameless love for creation - starting with our own bodies, we’ll be leading the church towards God, and it will be the sort of procession that will crumble Jericho’s calcified and very beige walls.