S29 Ep 1 | Becoming Human: With God in Our Bodies

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership Podcast. I'm your host Ruth Haley Barton and we are back in your feed with a season that's been percolating within us for a long time and that is a season on being human and how that connects with our spirituality and our leadership. There's a quote from the French Jesuit priest, Pierre Tillier Deschardins, who was also a scientist, he was a paleontologist, he was a philosopher, and there's a quote from him that I've been pondering probably for at least 20 years. He says, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." And as I've pondered that, it kind of comes out of my mouth in a slightly different way, but that we are not human beings trying to become spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to become human. Now we might wonder where would we find an idea like that in Scripture? So I'd like to mention two places in Scripture that I think undergird the conversation that we're getting ready to have over the next few weeks. The first is Psalm 139, where the psalmist affirms that God knew his unformed substance. In other words, he is saying, "God knew me as a spiritual being, as a spiritual essence, before he brought me forth in physical form," which implies then that we existed before our bodies existed, and then there's a journey that God gives us to take, and that is the journey into being human and to learning what it means to be human and certainly to glorify God in our humanity, because God is our creator. And then I would also draw our attention to the incarnation itself that John 1 speaks of the fact that Jesus existed as the word or the logos or the organizing principle of the universe before he became flesh and lived among us. And there was a physical expression of his spiritual essence, but he existed before there was that physical expression. And so the incarnational journey, if you want to look at it that way, is that the incarnational journey is the journey from being spirit, being an unformed substance in God's presence, a person that God knows before we have a physical body, but then there's this journey to becoming human. And John 1 affirms that Jesus has gone before us in that journey, and that in some ways we are on the same journey that Jesus was on, and that is moving from just being a spiritual essence that God knows to being a physical being that can now glorify God and actually experience God in our bodies. So I know this might sound a little bit mystical, but I do think that it's biblically very accurate and that it says something really significant about the integration between our spiritual selves and our physical selves. Now if you are like me, you may have spent a good portion of your life or maybe an early portion of your life living in the illusion that life in our bodies is fundamentally separate from life in our souls and life in the spirit. And of course that is a false dichotomy and there's reasons why that happened and I'll mention that in a bit. But if you're like me, maybe you spent some of your early years really having your spirituality and your life in your body very disconnected. Now if you're not like me and you evolved way earlier than I did, maybe you never lived in that false dichotomy and how wonderful is that? And I thank God that any of us have had that experience. But Dorothy Bass talks about the fact that most of us, if not all of us, have inherited an ambiguous legacy as it has to do with the body. And that ambiguous legacy comes from at least two different directions. One is from the religious traditions where the body was seen as less than the life of the spirit or the life of the soul. And then there's the secular culture on the other hand that actually objectifies the body and actually glorifies the body in ways that are pretty sick actually because it glorifies the perfect body, the sexualized body, but not the body in all the forms that it exists and all the forms and expressions and experiences that we have in our body. So both the religious tendency to denigrate the body, the Pauline idea of beating my body or mortifying the flesh, that Paul was not talking about mortifying the physical body. He was talking about mortifying the part of us that works against God and God's purposes in our lives. And that is not our physical bodies. It's the willful part of us that's not willing to move with God, however it is that God's moving in our lives. So I think that's one of the places where the religious tradition has not helped us to understand why the body has been denigrated so much in religious traditions. Not all of them though, but particularly the Protestant tradition and the Catholic tradition have a lot in them that denigrates the body in all sorts of different ways, including the Catholic tradition where the highest expression of spirituality is for someone to be celibate. There's a very subtle message in that, that this experience of being married and having a sexual relationship with another person in a committed relationship that those are not part of our spiritual experience and that if you're really spiritual, you wouldn't marry and you would be sexually celibate. So there's all sorts of ways in which we have been caught in this ambiguous legacy. And I would even say, and I was very aware of the secular culture when I was a young girl because there are all sorts of specific messages that the secular culture has to speak to girls in particular and that is to value your body only according to your sexuality or for men to honor their bodies only according to their physical strength. But that objectifies the bodies and glorifies the body itself rather than the biblical alternative which is to glorify God in our bodies. That is the third way, that is the third way that threads the needle and helps us to find our way through these false dichotomies. In scripture it says that it is possible to glorify God in our bodies and to experience life in these temples as a place of encounter with God, a place of divine revelation about who God is. And so in this season, overall, we are going to be trying to do at least three things. One is to confront this dualism, to seek to shatter it, if you will, and to integrate life in our bodies with our spirituality. That's the first thing we're going to try to do. Secondly, we're going to explore some of the experiences that we all have in our bodies and we're going to have conversations about what it's like to seek God in these very specific experiences that we have as human beings. The great writer David Banner, who's a psychiatrist as well as a spiritual director, he says in his book, "Softal spirituality that authentic spirituality must ground us in the God ordained reality of our lives, including life in our bodies, with all that goes along with that, with our sexuality, with our gender, with our race, with our places where we're maybe physically challenged or not as able as we would like to be. All of those things are the God ordained reality of our lives in our bodies." David Banner says that our authentic or a healthy spirituality grounds us in the God ordained reality of our lives. Now, we're not going to be able to touch on every single experience that we have in our bodies, but we're going to try to cover enough of them that we start to get a sense of how do we seek God in our bodies in this particular experience of our human reality? So that's the second thing we're going to do. We're going to have some very specific conversations with guests about how we can seek God and find God in the different experiences that we have in our bodies. And we're going to structure those like spiritual conversations. They are not going to be interviews or anything like that. But we're going to set up a spiritual conversation where I and whoever it is that speaking with me is willing to be given over to the Holy Spirit. We're willing to be led by the Spirit. And to field questions that are coming out of the moment versus those that have been prepared for us ahead of time. I think it's going to be very exciting to be out on that edge with each other. And then number three, we want to explore how coming to a better integration of life in our bodies and in our life with God can produce healthier leadership. And to do that, I'm going to start with an article. I'm just going to name the article now and the question that comes out of it for me. But we'll look a little bit more into it later on in this episode. And that is how can so many pastors and leaders be godly and dysfunctional at the same time? And my answer to that question, and also the writer of this, it's a book, this article is based on a book called Tending Soul Mind and Body, the Art and Science of Spiritual Formation. The author Todd Wilson would also say that this is the point of his book is that the reason we are so dysfunctional as pastors and leaders is that we are out of touch with our humanity. Who is that ever? That's a deep thought. And we can see that functioning in our culture right now, as I'm recording today, two of our United States congressmen have resigned because of sexual infidelity. And to me, that speaks about how our inability to integrate our sexuality and our spirituality or our life in the body and our spirituality can actually deform our leadership and actually disqualify us for leadership. So these are really important matters that we're going to be looking into. So those are our three goals in the season to confront the dualism between life and the body and life in the spirit, life in our soul, to shatter it as much as we can, to seek God in our experiences, in our bodies, to experience our bodies as temples, places of encounter where no matter what we're going through in our bodies, we can experience our bodies as a place of encounter with God. Now that's an amazing thought. and we're gonna get after it. And then number three, to explore the connection between the integration of life in our bodies and our spiritual lives with our leadership and look at how this integration, this integrative work can actually make us better leaders and healthier leaders. So that's a pretty big assignment for this season, but that is what we are doing. And we're so glad if you are willing to come along for the ride with us. (gentle music) So let's work on those three purposes and points as we work through this first initial episode so that then when I have my guests with me we'll just dive right on in to the particular experience that they're bringing. So first of all, I want to start with Scripture because we do need to shatter this false dichotomy and the Scriptures do that for us if we're really paying attention. Because the truth is that all the great themes of Scripture affirm the goodness of life in our bodies. And if you were to do a reading of Scripture just looking for references to the body and ways in which the Scriptures uplift life in the body as being an important spiritual experience, you would see this very clearly. But let me just give you a few of those categories, those places in Scripture that we could land in. And we can put in our show notes, a more complete listing of the themes and the Scriptures that we can look at as we walk into this topic. But let me just touch very high level on a few of them. As we do this, just know that I am offering to you a particular hermeneutical approach to Scripture. Hermeneutics just means biblical interpretation, principles of biblical interpretation. And this is a principle that really matters as we talk about the body. Because in a hermeneutical approach to Scripture that I'm trying to offer to you here, the idea that is that we identify the major themes of Scripture and then we look at the lesser themes of Scripture within the light of the major themes. And there is no doubt that honoring the body is a central discipline and theme of the Christian faith. At creation, it's clear that God created human beings in bodies and declared those bodies to be very good. That was the only thing that God called very good at the end of the creation story. Not sort of good, not just good, but very good. Your body and my body in whatever state we're in today is very good. Now God could have created us as disembodied spirits. Or left us as disembodied spirits. But he did not. He invited us into and sent us into this experience of creating bodies in God's image, male and female. He created them. And then giving us this experience of being human. So let's keep moving. Deuteronomy 30 talks about an aspect of discernment that has to do with being able to tell what is life for us and what is death to us so that we can choose life. And God is really clear that that experience is in the body. It's in your mouth. It is in your heart for you to observe. You don't have to go far to get it. It's right there in your bodies. Our bodies were created as instruments of discernment. You check out the scriptures and see if you agree. So he says, I've set before you life and death, now choose life so that your descendants might live. I've not put it in the heavens or across the ocean for you to go get it. No, it is in your heart and in your mouth for you to observe. I like to think about the body as actually a tuning fork for the divine that we are wired to pay attention to the divine. The Psalmist in Psalm 63 talks about his desire for God as something that he experiences in his flesh. My flesh faints for you. My flesh thirsts for you as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. And so he talks about his desire for God, which is a spiritual desire, as something that he is experiencing literally like physical hunger and physical thirst. Then he goes on in Psalm 139 to say, I am fearfully and wonderfully made that I know very well. All of us have heard that verse, but wow, in this context, we need to sink into subtle into that. And to say, I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Do I know it very well? I'm asking you that today. Do you know it very well about your body as it exists today in this moment? It's something to ponder spiritually. I wonder when was the last time you looked at your body and you celebrated it? It does get harder as the years go by. The years go by, you want to keep it covered up as much as you can. But there has to be a way in which we can look at our bodies as they exist right now in this moment, maybe very differently than when they were young. And you say to God, thank you for all the things I can do in my body. Thank you for the running and the dancing and the exercising and the sleeping and the showers and the hot baths and the love making and the eating and the drinking of really good wine. Thank you for life in my body. Thank you that I am upright today, if I am. If I am laying in a bed unable to move, thank God for the breath that God gives you and let that experience trust yourself to God more deeply. But to somehow say to God with truth, I am fearfully and wonderfully made. And then we've talked about the incarnation, the word made flesh, that supremely spiritual being, Jesus himself, who existed far beyond the physical material world as we know it, he came into flesh. And so no wonder our Jesuit priest, Dishardan, says that we are not human beings trying to become spiritual or spiritual beings trying to become human. That's the journey Jesus was on. It's the journey that we're on. It's what we're talking about in this season. Then when Jesus was getting ready to leave his followers, he did not leave them with a Bible study guide or a commentary or anything like that or a teaching. He actually instituted and embodied experience of footwashing. And he gave them specific ways of remembering him that were very embodied. There was the footwashing, but there was also the wine and the bread. And of course now in our worship now, the wine and the bread is what we lift up in our worship services. And we say the gifts of God for the people of God. And what are the gifts? The gifts are flesh and blood. That's what the gifts are. The gifts of God for the people of God. The highest most sacramental moment in our life and worship is flesh and blood held high. Jesus is saying, "When you forget about me, when you forget about the journey that we were on together, when you forget what I taught you, use these embodied actions to remember who I am, what I taught you, and how I wanted you to be together." I think that's, I mean, I can feel my own chills, even as I speak of that, that that was Jesus' gift to us, was flesh and blood and the elevation of flesh and blood as our bodies are affirmed in that way. And of course now that Jesus is no longer physically present with us, our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. And I know that I heard that verse, you know, as a young person in these teachings about sexual abstinence. But I don't think that's all that the Apostle Paul is saying here, because a temple is by definition a place where we encounter God. It's a place for prayer. So what would it mean for us to see our bodies and experience our bodies as a place of prayer, as a place of encounter with God? What would it be like to meet God where we are right now in our bodies? And that's what the season's about. That's what I'm going to be asking the people who are willing to be our guests is to say, what's it like for you to see God in your body at this stage of your life, of your body's life? What's the experience there? What's the encounter? How is God making God self-known to you? And I would also go on to say that our bodies know how to pray because they were created as a temple. They actually know how to pray. So when you pay attention to your body, you can notice that your body knows what to do. It may want to dance. It may want to sway. It may want to kneel down. It may want to lay flat on the floor. But your body knows how to pray because that's what it was created for. I could go on and on. But let me just sort of bring this part of our episode to a close, just this part on scripture. I'll draw your attention to 2 Corinthians 4, where Paul talks about the fact that whatever ministry we've been given, including the ministry of the gospel, is carried in our bodies. And that once our bodies go away, your ministry cannot go on as it is right now. There'll be other things that God has for us, I believe, that with all my heart. But this moment in our bodies is a unique moment. When we get to be on this planet in a physical body, carrying the ministry that God has given to us in this body. And also because our bodies are fragile and vulnerable, Paul is really clear about saying that God's power is seen in and through the fragility and the vulnerability of the body. I mean, that's a pretty amazing thought as well, especially in the moments when we feel our fragility, when we feel our vulnerability, when our bodies betray us by not doing the things we wish they would do. Paul is saying to us, those are the moments when the power of God can be seen. And then there's this major biblical teaching about the body of Christ. And it emerges out of this metaphor that Christ's presence here on the earth today is the main way that Jesus is still active. The spirit of Jesus is still active in and through the body of Christ as the Holy Spirit animates it for ministry. And so no matter how we feel about the "church" capital C on any given day, no matter what conflicts are taking place among us, no matter how weak or a wreck or a mess our churches are, this is just how God has chosen to be present here. So we can't really reject it ultimately because it is the way that Jesus has chosen to be present in and through what he calls his body. And we know that Teresa of Avallah stated that so beautifully when she said that Christ has nobody now on earth but yours. No hands but yours, no feet but yours. Your eyes are the eyes through which compassion is to look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which Christ is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which Christ is. is to bless all people. So if you're not driving, I would suggest that you take a minute right now and look at your hands. Just look at your hands and bless your own hands or hear me blessing your hands. That your hands are the hands with which Christ is to bless all people. What does that mean to you that your body is to be a blessing? I mean, these are very important considerations for us as Christians on a spiritual journey. And we consider the resurrection of the body. See how I'm doing this? The themes all the way from Genesis, all the way to the end of Scripture. There are these themes that elevate the importance of the body and the goodness of the body. So the resurrection of the body, which is promised to us in the New Testament, tells us that we will not spend eternity as disembodied spirits, but the Scriptures tell us that we will spend eternity as glorious embodied beings. Now we don't know much about what that looks like, but the Scriptures are clear that God will resurrect our bodies on the last day. And so until then, every day and this very day, we have the opportunity to offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices, which means to offer ourselves to God in our bodies wholly and acceptable, which is our spiritual worship. And so that's Course Romans 12 and 1, that we can offer ourselves in our bodies to God as living sacrifices. And I know that's a bit of harsh language, but what I'd like to say is that I think that metaphor that Paul is using there is a metaphor for surrender. And that we find ways to surrender literally physically in our bodies as well as deep in our souls. And so these are beautiful, inspiring truths from Scripture beginning to end that begin to shatter the dualism between life in our bodies and life in our souls and life in our spirits. Okay, so that whole litany is meant to just help us to shatter the dualisms that are in each and every one of us pretty much because of the world that we've been raised in. But now let's move to that second point and that is seeking how we can experience and encounter God in our bodies. And when you think about the fact that our spirituality is all about how we reach for the more, how we commune with the divine, how we open to the divine work within us, to the mystery of it all, that's our spirituality. And then our bodies give us a space and a way in which to do all of that if we can bring it all together. And so I'll remind us again of that big idea that David Banner gave to us that an authentic spirituality must ground us in the God or dain't realities of our lives. So this is the second movement we want to make in the season and that is to talk about how we can seek God in everything that we're going through in our bodies. And there are practices that can ground us in the God or dain't realities of our life and that can help us to open up to this great reality of life in our bodies as a gift from God. So that's another point that helps us to connect is to realize that our bodies are gifts. They are gifts from God. And so how do we honor a gift that someone gives us? Like if somebody gives us the gift of a piece of clothing or a piece of jewelry, you honor that person by wearing it, by wearing this sweater or by wearing the piece of jewelry. And the person who gave the gift is watching every time that you show up to see if you are wearing and enjoying the gift or reading a book that you gave. They can't wait to hear that you're reading the book and that you're really loving the book. So I think we need to look at our bodies differently and say, "If this is a gift from God, how can I receive it as a gift?" And I think that's the first movement in our discussion about how to seek God in our bodies. First of all, to acknowledge our bodies as a gift and to deeply receive our bodies as a place of real gifting from God. And so you can start by just simply paying attention and noticing how things feel in your body. You can notice how warm bath feels and you can thank God for it. I'm a bath taker every single day and every single time I take a bath, I thank God that baths are possible in this body because it just feels so good. You can notice the joy that comes from being active in your body, playing basketball or going for a long run or dancing and what it feels like and how you get those good endorphins. And instead of just receiving that, thank God for it. Actually, orient yourself to God around that great gift of life in the body and see your life in your body as a gift that God wants to see you enjoying. I just think that's just such a profound idea to say to God, "You've given me this gift." And I'm using it and I'm enjoying it and there's nothing that gives me more joy than being in this body that you've given to me. And if you think about yourself as a parent, if you are a parent and you've given birth to a little body, you've welcomed a little body into the world. There is nothing that you love more than seeing that body develop and grow and enjoy being in the body that came through your body or that came through your union. Pay attention to your breathing. It's one of the simplest ways that we can acknowledge God's gifts to us in our bodies because our breathing actually is a signal that God wants us to be alive. I find breathing can be, if you can take a minute to pay attention to it, it can be a powerful affirmation of the fact that God is giving us our breath in each and every moment and in doing so is affirming our life that God is saying, "I want you to be alive in my presence on the earth right now." It's one of the simplest ways of getting in touch with your existence as a body and also with the gift of life in a body. Martin Laird has written a wonderful book called "Into the Silent Land" and one of the things that he says that has really struck me and helps me to pay attention to my breathing or my not breathing because there are times when I have forgotten to breathe where my body gets so uptight and tense that I literally find myself not breathing. And he says, "It's so wonderful." He says that when we notice that we're breathing shallowly or with short breaths, it's often an indication of resistance to deep, ungrasping stillness. Now this is a place where your body and your soul can be very connected. The people who refuse to enter into the stillness where we don't grasp and cling are often the people who breathe shallowly because they are resisting any sort of ungrasping. They are resisting an open and receptive posture before the Lord. That is powerful. Notice when you're breathing but also notice when you're not breathing and seeing if there's any way you're holding yourself tight and resisting the work of the Spirit in your life. Breathing can also help us to sit quietly and openly and receptively before God. And so breathing is a powerful way in which we connect our bodies with our lives in the Spirit. Another way is to really pay attention to some of the God-ordained realities in your life versus ignoring them and pretending that they don't matter. Continuing to develop David Banner's thought, and he develops this wonderfully in his book, "Softal Spirituality," that we can ground ourselves in the God-ordained realities of our lives and find ourselves there and stand tall there and stay grounded there. So this includes whatever experience we're having with gender, sexuality. It's a very hard place of integration. We're going to have a whole session on that, a whole episode on that. The appreciation of life in our bodies includes embracing maleness and female-ness or anything in the continuum in between. I know that these days we're not talking about maleness and female-ness as binary, but there are physical characteristics. And so even if we experience gender to be more fluid or to be on a continuum, there's still a way of interacting with that as being a God-ordained reality of our lives. Sexuality, of course, when we're young, oftentimes we feel like our sexuality is a problem, especially if we've been taught we're not supposed to express it. And so how do I, in this stage, experience the sexuality in whatever stage it's in? How do I receive that as a gift from God and open that up to God for God's love and God's care and God's perspective? So those are some of the ways. And then if we live in a body that's differently abled, maybe it's a body that was differently abled from birth or maybe it's a body that had some sort of an accident or an experience that caused our body to be abled differently, or maybe it's chronic illness, an experience of chronic illness, or even a terminal illness, that these are also the God-ordained realities of our lives. In the sense that we're blaming God for them, I'm not saying that, but I'm saying it is where we are, it is where God has us. And to not open up to God in that place is going to cut us off from spiritual meaning. It's going to cut us off from finding God and God's meaning for our lives and also God's healing touch and God's strength, the inner resources that we need to live our lives on the earth in the body that we're in. And then also because our spirituality is all about union and communion with God, then our sexuality is all about union and communion with other people. And in that way, our sexuality and spirituality is tightly aligned. And if we move away from a dualistic approach, then we can start to see these things become integrated in our lives. So those are some of the practices. I think I could also add to that caring for our bodies and whatever state they're in. I think that when we get to talking about our bodies and leadership, one of the ways that leaders stumble is to get so caught up in their life and leadership that they stop caring for their bodies. And so they get into debilitating levels of exhaustion, levels of exhaustion that compromise them physically where there might be heart attacks, strokes, and so on. all sorts of things that are highly stress-related at many times is not all that those things are related to, but oftentimes there is a relationship between certain illnesses and experiences and the stress that we allow ourselves to live in. So caring for the body might be some sort of a response to Jesus' question in John 5 to the paralytic. Do you want to be made well as I listen to life in my body and I living with the debilitating sort of exhaustion? Am I letting myself live in so much stress that I have physical symptoms of that stress? And how can I glorify God by just caring for the good gift that God has given me? By drinking enough water, by exercising, by eating well, by getting my regular physicals and medical appointments, things like that? Can I glorify God by caring for my body as a spiritual practice? Not to look a certain way in the world, but to see it as a spiritual practice. We can live sensually. That's another way of receiving life as a gift in our bodies. And what I mean by that is paying attention to all of our senses. So, sight, smell, touch, hearing, all of that taste. If we can really stop and slow down and savor those moments, how good things feel in our bodies, that's a way of receiving the gift. And then listening in the body that has to do with discernment, I've mentioned that learning how to listen to our bodies as tuning works for the divine as the place where God is speaking to us about what gives us life and what gives us death and is inviting us to choose more of life. And then praying in our bodies and we've mentioned that the body is actually created for prayer. And so maybe we can even incorporate into our spiritual devotion and to our spiritual practices. Practices associated with praying in our bodies. So that's the second point of the season, having to do with seeking God in our bodies and experiencing God in our personal spirituality. And now is the third thing that we're hoping to do in this season. And you know, you can see this is a lot we're going to be doing, but we're going to function on all three of these levels as we go. Is that we want to look at how being disconnected with our humanity actually can be destructive in our leadership. And how being connected to our bodies can actually deepen our effectiveness as leaders. So I'm going to take us back to this article by Todd Wilson, who is a pastor himself. How can so many pastors and I would add leaders be godly and dysfunctional at the same time. And this is what he says and it's it's it's it's a very striking and powerful example that he even gives from his own life. He says pastors can be godly and dysfunctional at the same time. They can be holy and not whole. They can be biblically faithful and psychologically broken. They can be prayer warriors and control freaks. Spiritually mature and emotionally repressed. They can sincerely love Jesus yet be addicted to food or porn or pain meds. I know this to be true from experience. So let me just you know kind of let that settle in there for a minute. Is there anything in that paragraph that you resonate with where if you were being honest you might admit. Yeah, that I resemble that. You know, that's that's what I think I know about myself. So he goes on to say his own personal experience. He says for many years as a pastor I was godly and dysfunctional at the same time. If you had come to live with me for a week in January 2015, slept on my couch, shadowed me throughout my day, you would have come away thinking. He's a godly guy. He loves Jesus. He loves the Bible. He loves the church. He cares about his wife and his children and making a difference in the world for Jesus. But you would have also seen that I was dysfunctional. And so later on in that year he was going a three month sabbatical and of course as he began like many leaders do, he had the idea of a writing a book or something. I mean so many leaders take those sabbaticals, hoping they're going to accomplish something and they don't take it for the rest that it is and the rest that they need it to be. And he said that as he tried to enter into his sabbatical, he started to become unglued, almost like coming away from substance abuse or some other sort of chemical addiction. And he says that he went through the real physical signs of withdrawal, irritability, uncontrolled cravings, edginess, desperation, not for booze or drugs, but for accomplishment, achievement and getting stuff done. He said I was going crazy like an addict who needed a bit, a hit, like an addict who needed a hit. I made my wife crazy on Thursday. She leveled with me and she said, Todd, you have to do something about this. And so he said he knew just what to do and he went back to work, which of course was a mistake. So anyway, the article goes on and on, but I think the point that he's making is really significant is that in every single way before that sabbatical he would have thought of himself as being a spiritual person. People around him might have thought of him as being a spiritual person, but deep inside he had lost touch with his humanity. He had lost touch with limits. He had lost touch with, you know, his ego-drivenness and how that was killing him in his body. And so then he did, you know, really need to go to a therapist and try to explain why he was there and why he was so addicted to his deep-seated compulsions for achievement and busyness and control and all the things that come out when we let go of our work for a little while. And he named it as disintegration and that many of us are out of touch with the fact that we are not a unified whole inside. And he says the first step is to take the body more seriously and to pay attention to what's really going on there and to let God speak to us through our bodies. And so a lot of times when a leader has really hit up against a wall or has failed significantly in some way, in moral failure, poor decision-making, things like that, or just is so burned out that they just walk away from the whole thing. One of the reasons that that can even happen is because we get out of touch with our bodies. We don't have anyone to help us pay attention. We don't know how to get other people to pay attention to how we're really doing and how serious it is. And we don't know how to make the appropriate changes in our lives. So this idea that paying attention to the body is where we begin. In becoming more healthy spiritually because the body is the tuning fork for the divine. And so some ways that we can be looking at this right now early on because we'll probably take some more time with this later on as we go. But first of all, to even accept the fact that being a healthy leader means being a leader who's in touch with your body. You are in touch with what your body is saying. You are in touch with the actual state of your body, with your exhaustion, with what's draining life from you. I mean, that's something else that Deuteronomy 30 instructs us that we as leaders can do. We can pay attention to what gives us life and what is death to us. And we can make sure that our lives are not full of too much death. And what gives us life and what gives us death is not, it's not right or wrong. This is the consolation and desolation as we talk about spiritually. It just is what it is. It just is what your body is telling you because your body was created by God to be able to tell you these things, to be able to keep you grounded in truth. I also think that many leaders, pastors and leaders, tend to be sort of head space people at least early on. And so they're all up in their heads doing their theological study and their theological work. And seminary training actually can contribute to this, to where we think that our theological training is just what we learn about God and how we develop our theologies. But in many seminary programs for pastors and leadership graduate school things, we have never been taught as part of our leadership to pay attention to our bodies or to integrate our sexuality in a healthy way into our spirituality and into our lives with others. We actually set it aside and push it down for as long as we can. And when that is our approach, eventually it is going to be like the beach ball that pops up in the water and it's going to, it is going to pop up and it is going to cause trouble. And so we're still in a period of time where pastors in particular don't seem to be in touch with their spirituality and their sexuality enough to keep them from making grave mistakes in terms of sexual infidelity or sexual abuse, the abuse of power. And so we still see pastors falling. And I believe a lot of it is because they're up in their heads and they haven't paid attention to their bodies and especially their sexuality and how powerful that is. No one's taught them what to do with it. And so eventually it comes out in a way that's really unhealthy. And that takes place for other kinds of leaders as well, the fact that we've had two congress people in the last 24 hours resign for in one case, sexually abusive behavior in another case, marital infidelity. And they've had to resign and that's in a secular setting they've had to resign because it's considered to be inappropriate for leaders. Inappropriate behavior for leaders and they're out. And so we as leaders simply must connect our lives and our bodies with our leadership and stay really close to God, really connected with our spirituality and pull our sexuality in and pull life and our bodies into our spirituality and pay attention in a significant and serious way. So this is where we're headed as we go into this season. We've got some really beautiful gas lined up. so that we can talk about things like the human experience of race in America, the experience of being sexual and gendered, the experience of being differently abled in our bodies, or the experience of our bodies betraying us, the experience of aging and diminishment, which is going to come to all of us, the experience of death and loss, which is part and parcel of the human experience, but many of us are unprepared for it. And so these are the, this is the landscape. This is a terrain that we're going to be navigating in the next season, and I could not be any more excited. I think we've been dreaming about this season, maybe for two years, at least, and it keeps coming up. We don't feel ready, so we set it aside. But now we are ready, and I'm ready, and I really want to do this with all of you. I really want us to get into these deeper waters. And we're going to support you over on our sub-stack with some other resources and potentially some other experiences. So just know that we're going to support you the best we can. We're going to list resources in our show notes as we always do. And we have resources that will help you to be grounded, actually, in some writing, if you would like. So Sacred Rhythm, chapter five, has a whole chapter on honoring the body as a spiritual practice. And so that might be one thing to have sort of in front of you as you go. And we are looking forward to all that God has for us. I even pray that you have a friend you can talk to. We are going to stir up a lot of stuff here. And so I'm just praying that as stuff gets stirred up, you have either a therapist or a spiritual director or a spiritual friend who you can go to and really open up about what God is stirring in your life. I don't want this to be an isolated journey for anyone out there. I want us to take this journey together with others who are ready to take the journey. And so friends, as we conclude this episode, and as we get ready to embark upon this exciting, and I will say deep season of spiritual reflection here on the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast, I want to conclude with a beautiful poem that we have used in the Transforming Center in our retreat number five, where we do the whole retreat on the body. We always use this poem as a way of grounding ourselves in the goodness of life in our bodies. It's also a hymn, but I'm just going to read it to you, the words of it are so beautiful. And if you're not driving or if there's any way that you can stop and kind of locate yourself in your own body with your feet on the floor, with your back straight, with your hands open, going ahead and breathing, closing your eyes or opening your eyes, whichever one is good for you. But definitely to settle into the goodness of your body, your current reality in your body, not the body in general, but your body. As it exists today, I would like you to hear this prayer and poem just read over you as a blessing for you as a body. You are not someone who has a body, you actually are a body. And that is the Hebrew way of understanding it. There's no distinction between the parts of ourselves as human beings, but that we are embodied spirits. And so let's hear this poem as a blessing on our lives as bodies. It's called Good is the flesh by Brian Rinn. Good is the flesh that the word has become. Good is the birthing, the milk in the breast. Good is the feeding, caressing and rest. Good is the body for knowing the world. Good is the body for knowing the world, sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground. Feeling, perceiving within and around. Good is the body from cradle to grave. Growing and aging, arousing, impaired. Happy and clothing or lovingly beared. Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh. Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh, longing in all as in Jesus to dwell. Glad of embracing and tasting and smell. Good is the body for good and for God. Good is the flesh that the word has become.