Praying with Our Bodies

During Lent I’ve been listening, on the Hallow app, to the story of Takashi Nagai, who lived in Nagasaki Japan during WWII. Although he grew up practicing the Shinto religion, he had become an atheist during his medical training, dismissing all religions as empty mythology. But the experience at his mother’s death bed impressed upon him that there was something lacking in his worldview, that his atheism didn’t explain what he knew to be true as a human being. He began to feel drawn to Christianity, but then found himself floundering. He was strongly attracted to the idea of faith but didn’t know what to do about it.

How do we learn to believe? How do we develop faith? For most of my life I’ve understood this to be an intellectual thing, that one develops faith by reading books, weighing the evidence, knowing more about the truth. If one is persuaded inwardly, this is then followed by some outward changes, maybe going to church, seeking out other believers, becoming part of a small group Bible study. The process begins with the inner life and only later does this begin to show itself in actions.

But the advice Nagai found in Blaise Pascal moved in the opposite direction. He read in the Pensees, “You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you…. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believe, taking the holy water, having masses said, &c. Even this will naturally make you believe….” Start acting as if you believe, doing things that believers do, (for Pascal these things had a distinctly Catholic form) and you will find your faith growing. It’s not that information and logic are unimportant, but they are only part of the story. We are not souls inhabiting a body but human persons consisting of both body and soul in union each having a profound impact on the other. And the impact can go in either direction.

I recently read a book by David Easterly, a wood carver, writing about his experience studying the style of the great carver Grinling Gibbons. “One day it occurred to me that you couldn’t fully understand how Gibbons developed his style unless you understood something about his tools and his medium. I made a note to try to find an art historical study on woodcarving techniques. In the meanwhile, just to divert myself, I thought I might as well get some chisels and wood and see what carving felt like. Just to divert myself.  No sooner do I write that phrase than I know it’s false. I was being borne toward carving by a tide stronger than I could control, a tide made up of all that I’d thought and read and experienced in the years before. Writing a book wasn’t going to answer to it. More than the mind needed to be deployed. And this was the turning point for me: not the epiphany in the church, but the decision to try the tools of the trade” (The Lost Carving, pp. 52-53).

Easterly started out as an academic, examining the technique of a great carver, but the physical act of carving, handling chisels and wood, turned him into a wood carver. And the same thing is often true in our spiritual lives. Acting in faith, using our bodies in prayer and worship, even just making the sign of the cross, can have a deep impact on our spirits. “We ought to take advantage of this union of body and soul and benefit from it during prayer…. repeating the metanoia [repentance] gesture, even when it is performed only with the body, is just as effective as tears in breaking the spell of that interior ‘wildness’ and insensitivity that seems to kill all spiritual life within us. In a mysterious way the body, which in its posture is actually the ‘icon’ of the soul’s interior disposition (Origin), ultimately draws the reluctant soul along with it” (Gabriel Bunge, Earthen Vessels, pp. 178-79). 

Years ago, a friend of mine shared that he was at work, feeling oppressed and weighed down and he impulsively shouted out loud, “praise the Lord!” And suddenly the weight on his spirit disappeared. He understood it at the time as a victory over demonic oppression, and this may be accurate. But his help came through something he did with his body, not just thinking or praying silently but shouting out loud in praise of God. If we’re stuck spiritually, we may be helped by a new book or a sermon, but we also may find help by walking into a church, dipping our fingers in holy water, making the sign of the cross, and kneeling in the Lord’s presence. Or, at other times, going for a walk in the woods, praising God out loud for the beauty He has created. Responding to God with our bodies can breathe new life into our spirits.