holistically dualistic

This month my assignment was to read about the idea of “dualism,” or the duality of the mind and the body, and then write a response about how I see these ideas play into my personal Christian spiritual formation.  Just a brief background - the idea of dualism asserts that reality is composed of two independent, often opposing, principles, usually labeled as “mind and matter.”  The philosopher Plato saw the mind as “pure” and matter as “evil,” or at the very least saw matter as being an imperfect and corrupted copy of what the perfect mind could conceive of.  But as children of a God who created us with both mind and body, how do we respond to that?  Are mind and body “opposed” to each other?  Or are they even separate, independent parts?  And of course did the incarnate Christ himself demonstrate a duality, coexisting as both human body and divine mind?  These thoughts in themselves are both intriguing to me but also kind of leave me wondering where to go with it all...

So here is where my rambling thoughts went during the crazy month of May… I really, really like dwelling in the knowledge that I am God’s “ceaseless spiritual being.”  After Ryan’s death two summers ago, I really needed to hear that my spirit/heart/soul require ongoing transformation because they are the “part” of me that carries on into eternity. The reality of that not only brings me hope, but it provides the motivation I often needed to “keep going” and to “do this grief thing” right.  Thoughts of my presence and Ryan's presence in the eternal Kingdom also gave me fresh motivation to trust that there is a way to “do life” correctly on the days I did not “feel” it.  But the idea of bringing my physical body, which is temporary, into this thought process of my own spiritual transformation were met with much less than enthusiasm...  In fact my first thought really was to simply settle into Plato's view of duality - good spirit versus evil matter.  I mean, I can work on my spirit and then kind of “ignore” my body and the physical reality I live in because they will all at some point perish away, right?  But I just do not think that is the way that God wants me to see it all...

So I started with death.  I really could not begin to contemplate and wrestle with these ideas of physical body without thinking about death.  And all this in a month – May - in which a wedding anniversary, Ryan’s birthday, and Memorial day fall within, followed by the anniversary of his death.  May is a heavy month when it comes to realizing and acknowledging Ryan’s death.  So as I prepared to take my children to visit the cemetery last week, our annual visit on his birthday (daddy day), I had to help an eleven-year old and a fifteen-year old acknowledge once again that their daddy’s physical body was put into that ground. Even as I struggle to grasp these “big" and weighty ideas, I also feel the full weight of guiding my children towards an understanding of the body/spirit relationship.  I know in my mind that God made our bodies to honor him and yet I have the blatant reality before me that our bodies do not last.  My children’s daddy is not physically here.  My spirit and soul seem worth “working on” because they are the parts of me that will go into eternity but I know my physical body will one day be put in the ground as well.

In thinking about death, I can easily see my eternal heart/spirit/soul as the center of all importance, simply due to its unceasing nature.  That is THE part that will matter as I pass into eternal life.  “At ‘physical’ death we become conscious and enjoy a richness of experience we have never known before” (Dallas Willard).  And I really needed to focus on how important my eternal soul is at a time when it would have been so easy for me to become entangled in the sorrow of my physical reality or be consumed by my loss of Ryan (him in the “seen” world), all these past 23 months.  I needed to hear that Kingdom life (life in the spirit) is available now and that my spiritual, non-ceasing soul is the focus of that life, even as I was consumed in grief and now as I am busy with the demands of the physical and social reality in which I live.

But God is quickly dismantling any idea of mind and matter being opposed to each other.  Yes, I needed that “eternal” focus for a time.  It served an important purpose.  In a lot of ways it saved me from pain and trauma that could so easily have consumed my person.  But there is also a danger when we focus too much on the spiritual, at the expense of seeing the physical as “corrupt,” evil, or simply unimportant due to the fact that it is by nature perishing and passing away,  “One can immediately see all around us that the human body is a primary barrier to conformity to Christ.  But this certainly was not God’s intent for the body” (Dallas Willard).  I think the point is that both parts – spiritual and physical – are completely essential to each other.  And essentially good.  Essentially good.  Our spirit/heart/soul and our bodies that extend into the physical world, were both created by an intrinsically good God.  That alone is reason to place value on our whole selves. 

And I think to move forward with life I also needed to see the value of my current, physical reality.  My physical body IS important and the care of it is intensely important because it is so intimately tied to the formation of my spirit and my heart.  I could easily get “stuck” focusing on the eternal and miss out on the blessings of the others all around me right now.  My temporary body has value partly because is it where I find and am found by others.  It gives me five senses so that I can speak, write, and read these words before you right now.  It is how I find you.  It is how you find me.  It was how I found and knew Ryan.  Just the fact that my physical body is the means of my interaction with  you and other children of God gives it enormous value.  But also, my body is the created container, the crucible if you will, where spiritual formation takes place.  The habits that I choose to indulge or rid myself of are bodily actions that can bring me closer or further away from my loving God.  I needed to realize how my body plays the active role in placing my spirit in a position to interact with the Kingdom of eternity now.  “The body is not just a physical system, but is inhabited by the real presence of Christ” (Dallas Willard).

So I think if I had to use a philosophic label for all these rambling thoughts, I would say that we are created to be “holistically dualistic.”  “Dualistic” in that the spirit (our heart and soul) and the body (our presence in the physical and social world) are two distinct parts of our person, but “holistic” in that these two parts are so intimately interconnected that neither can be referenced without understanding the other.  Neither can be valued without valuing the other.  In fact neither can function without the other, they are like different types of threads that are woven together to form a whole person.



saw this cool sun halo last week