Our Bodies, Our Souls, Ourselves Part I

Note: The following is the first part of a devotional homily/series I wrote for a queer Christian retreat





An Invocation to the Holy Spirit


(St. Symeon the New Theologian)


Come, true light.


Come, life eternal.


Come, hidden mystery.


Come, treasure without name.


Come, reality beyond all words.


Come, person beyond all understanding.


Come, rejoicing without end.


Come, light that knows no evening.


Come, unfailing expectation of the saved.


Come, raising of the fallen.


Come, resurrection of the dead.


Come, all-powerful, for unceasingly you create,


refashion and change all things by your will alone.


Come, for your name fills our hearts with longing,


and is ever on our lips.


Come, for you are yourself the desire that is within me.


Come, my breath and my life.


Come, the consolation of my humble soul.


Come, my joy, my glory, my endless delight.





“By this everyone will know you are my disciples, if you love one another”


-John 13:35






“The strangeness of the phrase ‘To make love’ strikes me now and reminds me of that aphorism of St. John of the Cross, ‘Where there is no love, put love and you will find love.’”


-Dorothy Day, “The Long Loneliness”





Let’s talk about incarnation. In the grand sense, the term is most often used to talk about Jesus coming to earth. God became flesh, took on a body, and dwelled (the Greek term σκηνοω means roughly “to pitch a tent”) among us. But I think there is value also in reflecting on how we are also embodied people who are incarnate of God. The Church has sometimes undermined the value of the human body in service of honoring “spiritual” things over “worldly” things. In the midst of this rhetoric, it can be easy to forget that God created our bodies, and God has called them “very good”. Even through our human failings and sin, we remain as image-bearers of the God of the universe. Christ’s birth into a human body made our bodies radiant. By living through each stage of human life and death, Jesus renewed the cycle of human living and infused it with God’s divinity. By rising from the dead, He destroyed the power of death and sin in our lives.





This truly good news has a lot of implications, but I want to focus on a few in particular. How might this more holistic view of the body help us live together in relationships? Dorothy Day, a Catholic activist, writes, “We have all known the long loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love”. John Zizioulas, a contemporary Orthodox theologian, talks about love as the core of our being: “True being comes only from the free person, from the person who loves freely - that is, who freely affirms [their] being, [their] identity, by means of an event of communion with other persons.” Love comes in many forms, from platonic to romantic/sexual and all the shades in between. The witness of creation and Jesus coming to earth suggest to me that not only are we deeply loved by our Creator, but that we are created for love. As body and soul combined, we are blessed to support each other through love expressed in many ways. Physical affection, emotional intimacy, spiritual sharing. One of my favorite things about our community is that we are on the whole not afraid to be physically affectionate with one another. I think we have a lot of love to give to a world that is so often scarred by loneliness. Honoring each other’s God-given bodies and personhood, we can begin to reach out across the space between our souls and embrace one another with God’s love.