So let’s start by being clear about where this is heading. The first thing is that I am talking in a literal sense about bodies – the reality of embodiment; of flesh incarnate and I will draw parallels between the nature of embodiment in the Church and in secular organisations. The second thing is that I’m talking about incarnation as embodied praxis. So how would understanding embodiment as holiness in all contexts (Church and ‘Other’) make for what I have conceived of as organisation as carnival of incarnation, what would the practical implications be? Lastly, throughout the paper if not already, it will become clear that I am coming from a Christological and radical feminist perspective.
Embodiment
So we begin by exploring embodiment in both contexts of Church and management. Susanna Wesley sums up the nature of unhelpful dualism surrounding the body, which was very much of her time and which has shaped societal approaches to the body, she says: ‘Whatever increases the authority of the body over the mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may seem in itself.’
How uncomfortable in every way is this notion of a competing body/soul dualism and yet how deeply programmed? This idea of the rational self or the intellectual self separated from the body suggests that the body is somehow in the process of being overcome so as to understand self as in perfect state when separate from the body, the desires or functions of the body. The Church has lived with this notion of disembodiment. Working out the separation of the body and the self or the integral nature of both in pursuit of the Divine relates directly to Plato’s birth as descent, a becoming embodied which means falling further away from divinity only returning to the divine state and death and Descartes’ portrayal of the body as unthinking extension to the mind. Both further reinforce the body as distinguishable and secondary to the mind, soul or self.