"The necessary bond between spirit and matter" - Ivone Gebara and Sacred Bodywork

There are just so many ways of talking about and experiencing the bond between spirit and matter. And yet we still need to make the connections - the Cartesian split between mind and body, and the common spiritual teachings (not only in the Abrahamic traditions) that divide spirit and matter in such a way that they seem to have minimal (if any) interaction, continues to wreck havoc on our understandings of ourselves and our environment and our bodies. This is not to say that there is a spiritual world separate from the physical world - I think that may well be true - but in a moment of climate change, let us be sure to not loose our focus on the places where they connect. Despite generations of traditions of imminence (God is within) from within Christianity, we still struggle to integrate mind and body, spirit and matter.

One of my favorite eco-feminist theologians is Ivone Gebara: I will be referring to her work often in this blog. Gebara is a pre-emminent Brazilian theologian and a member in the order of the Augustinian Congregation, Sisters of Our Lady, an who self-identifies as a feminist eco-theologian. She has traveled widely within the diverse contexts of Latin America, and listens deeply to poor women and to their experiences of evil. Feminism, as she uses the term, is against patriarchy, not against men.

Gebara strongly emphasizes the importance of experience in our knowing (epistemology), especially our knowing of the Divine. "What we say we know is a pale reflection of what we experience;" words only go so far in enabling us to express ourselves. As we come to know our multiple ways of knowing, including through our bodies, we come to recover human experiences and to

"place ourselves within the tradition of our ancestors, of those whose bodies vibrated as ourselves do when they experienced the attractions and repulsions we ourselves undergo as we relate to so many different situations in our everyday lives." (Gebara, page 50).

For Gebara, and for many others, eco-feminist theologies enable us to dissolve the separations so that we can live into the "oneness of the matter and energy that are our very makeup without knowing what that oneness really is." Indeed, we don't have to know: oneness flows through us. With this oneness, we can welcome our own morality.

I am particularly drawn to her use of the phrase "necessary bond". It is not just that it is. It is also necessary. Our spirit is deep into our body; our body is within our spirit.; we are all part of a Sacred Body. This is not to say that our differences and our uniqueness is not important. It does not mean that as a bodyworker I know everything about the body I am engaging in. But it helps explain some of how energy flows and of how I can get intuitive understandings about the person with whom I work. As a necessary bond, it means that we can and even must go between spirit and heart, between the ephemeral and the fascia and the muscle and the story and the bone. Interwoven in all of this we find ourselves and God, between the in breath and the out breath, the rise and fall of the softness of our bellies.

Gebara, like many eco-theologians, does not hesitate on the importance of practice. I see Sacred Bodywork as part of the practice of eco-feminist theology. I believe that there are many hands-on healers who work with mind, body and spirit even if they are not explicit about it. Integrating these dimensions might, even, be one of the most ancient forms of healing.