Bring Your Body Home

An excerpt from Henri Nouwen's Inner Voice of Love

'You never felt completely safe in your body. But God wants to love you in all that you are, spirit and body. Increasingly, you have come to see your body as an enemy that has to be conquered. But God wants you to befriend your body so that it can be made ready for the Resurrection. When you do not fully own your body, you cannot claim it for an everlasting life.

How then do you bring your body home? By letting it participate in your deepest desire to receive and offer love. Your body needs to be held and to hold, to be touched and to touch. None of these needs is to be despised, denied, or repressed. But you have to keep searching for your body's deeper need, the need for genuine love. Every time you are able to go beyond the body's superficial desires for love, you are bringing your body home and moving toward integration and unity.

In Jesus, God took on human flesh. The Spirit of God overshadowed Mary, and in her all enmity between spirit and body was overcome. Thus God's Spirit was united with the human spirit, and the human body became the temple destined to be lifted up into the intimacy of God through the Resurrection. Every human body has been given a new hope, of belonging eternally to the God who created it. Thanks to the Incarnation, you can bring your body home.'

I've been reading out of this volume in the mornings and found this reading compelling in that it explores how we understand the redemption of our bodies now, before the final resurrection. We participate now in Christ's new humanity by being united to him and are able to anticipate in this life as ourselves the life to come as ourselves made new in every way through the Holy Spirit in us. The fact of the incarnation has ramifications for how we live as humans made of flesh and blood.