EcoTheology: The Body of God

EcoTheology: The Bod of God

Rev. EJ McGaughy

Day 1 of 5: The Body of God & Attention

“...and indeed, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31)

“What if we are all the somatic experience of the earth? When the Earth is like, I want to feel hot, cold… excited…orgasmic...weeping…we offer that? We are the way this earth home experiences a somatic presence, experiences touch, you know?” –Aesha Rasheed on the How to Survive the End of the World podcast
“Christian theologies as well as works of spirituality have not encouraged meditation on the beauty, preciousness, and vulnerability of the earth and its many creatures. The profound ascetic strain within the tradition that has feared too close association with human bodies has extended this as well to other animals and the body of the earth. But what if we were not only allowed but encouraged to love the earth?” – Dr. Sally McFague The Body of God pg 102

Come here. Linger with this question: What if we were not only allowed but encouraged, to love the Earth?

Sally McFague wants us to love the Earth as a devotional practice. But first, we must acknowledge that for some of us humans (especially those of us inside the Christian tradition), that’s a tall order. Undoing the internalized confusion and harm of colonizer theology is lifelong work.Undoing the long-held belief that humans are somehow separate from, inherently different, and superior to other life forms is a legion task. Yet here we are. We’ve seen the results of hundreds of years of dominion-oriented frameworks. Wreckage. Violence. Ongoing peril for the most vulnerable bodies on/of Earth. Sally is asking us to put that down and try something else. What might the results of an ecological love framework be? Let’s find out, together. Stay with Sally and me.

McFague writes that “the ecological crisis will not begin to turn around until we change at a very basic level how we feel about bodies and about the material creation in all its incredible variety and richness of forms. It is not enough to change our lifestyles; we must change what we value.” (The Body of God, pg. 17)

“Change what we value.” Valuing the Body of God takes practice. Twelve-step communities and behavioral change strategies might be helpful to us here. Acting as if something is true whether or not we have complete buy-in can lead us to discovery. Even if it’s hard for you to believe the material world is God’s Body, what might you discover if you acted “as if”? My guess is, you already know how to do this. How do you act toward what you value, what you love, what you worship already? At the bare minimum, we pay intentional attention to those things and acknowledge them as valuable.

So, just for today, act as if the Body of God is the Earth/Cosmos. Drop any sense of yourself as separate from ecology. Pay intentional attention. Bring the fullness of your presence to the birds of the air, the lilies of the field, the eyes of your newborn, the celestial dome above your head, the curvy waist of your lover, the movement of water, the smell of pine, your own breath. Greet them as the Body of God. “Notice what you notice,” my colleague Robin says, and acknowledges.

I am encouraging you to love the Earth as spiritual praxis, with somatic presence. Allow yourself...

Beloved,

attune us to you;

radically altar/alter our senses

to magnify your presence

inside and all around us

that we might be

living testaments

wondering/wandering about

your precious and precarious Body

Amen.

Day 1 of 5: The Body of God & Attention

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