Disincarnation (Wendell Berry)

Take a moment to consider this poem....

Disincarnation

Looking at screens,

listening to voices
in nonexistent distance,
seeing, hearing nothing
present, we pass into
the age of disincarnation,
the death love finally
realized as we become
our pictures adrift,
homeless in deplaced
space of the mind only.

(Wendell Berry)

Berry gets it. Disembodied-ness is ever tempting for reasons I cannot plumb, though the Manichees give us a clue. This Gnostic business enabled by ever-present technology lets us imagine our bodies are secondary, if anything at all, as determining factors. Whatever we decide the body is to be, it is for our pleasure rather than our instruction. Thus we can be "born into the wrong body" and must conclude that human-ness is supra-physical. Otherwise how do we know what the "we" is? What is the I when someone says "I was born in the wrong body." The "I" is a person but the body is secondary to it, subject to it.

But this can never be. It is the same as saying we live in this world but it has zero actual effect on us. A human person is not a person without a body. With our bodies we do all things necessary to life. This is why Orthodox Christian theology insists that God took on flesh: "very God of very God, very man of very man." He would not have been fully human without taking on the body. And because he did become embodied, the human body -- not just the soul -- can be saved and restored for all time. All created things are good, and that "all" includes the body.

This is no trivial consideration. It is at the heart of any true theology of the body. And we desperately need this reminder in our disincarnated world.