the joys of the flesh

we forget the wonderful mysteries of incarnation to our considerable danger. especially in the west the church as tended to focus on the cross, as if this were the moment of redemption. but it is the incarnation that starts the process, as we note with our own bodies in the long tradition of bowing or kneeeling at the words in the creed, "incarnate of the holy spirit." jesus died because he was born. he died on a cross between two theives because this is the way our institutions, deluded by their own understanding of power, always respond to truth.

and the church has tended to follow augustine in his continuing manichaeism, and to be secuded by the brilliance of the platonists, in relegating the flesh to a place of unsalvageable evil.

john o'donahue in anam cara puts it very well: "religion has often presented the body as a source of evil, ambiguity, lust, and seduction. this is utterly false and irrelevent. the body is sacred. the origin of much of this negative thinking is a false interpretation of greek philosophy. the greeks were beautiful thinkers precisely because of the emphasis they placed on the divine. the divine haunted them, and they endeavoured in language and concept to echo the divine and fine some mirror for its presence. they were acutely aware of the gravity of the body and how it seemed to drag the divine too much toward the earth. they misconceived this attraction to the earth and saw in it a conflict with the world of the divine. they had no conception of the incarnation, in inkling of the resurrection." (p. 46)