Incarnation
The solution to such ill-health I believe can be found in the focus of the second part of this paper: incarnation and in remembering the discomfort of hypostatic union. In the incarnation we believe that God became flesh, not just that God became human but that God became body – arms, legs, hands, feet. God partakes in a carnival of flesh, and we call it incarnation. God’s birthing and being and becoming in human flesh. This matters greatly because if we understand incarnation as a meeting point of flesh and divinity, the shared experience of spiritual or intellectual and corporeal entities, then we can see the role of embodiment within a wider context than just self or other. Carter Heyward’s work asserts that an individual’s body is not a shell or vessel in which God does or does not dwell, rather it is a member of God’s body in the world. The human body is utterly coherent and interdependent with God. Heyward writes ‘Knowing that God is in our body and that our cosmic communal and personal bodies are in God (in mutually coinherent relation) sparks our passion for life, for God, for one another, and for the world.’[8]
The concept of shared experience, bodily and intellectually or spiritually lies at the heart of incarnation; dismissive of dualistic heresies and holistic in approaching humanity. In any organisation, the Church included, were people to be seen as embodied and incarnational the genuine value experienced by people in that approach would be reproduced into the organisation itself. Bell and King reflect that: ‘The body is thus the medium through which socialisation into a culture is achieved through a pedagogic process of teaching and learning.[9] I believe that in an incarnational approach to embodiment this is a reversible process, that the experience of the body can achieve organisational culture shift by embodied socialisation of the organisation.
In praxis this approach to embodiment and incarnation in the Church would have a number of outworkings; the first and foremost I believe would be culture shifting as it would lead to a renewed habitus which would then go on to inform ministry practices and Church organisation and structures. Such habitus would also be concentrated on the well-being of bodies and the corporate body.