Embodied

I've been stuck with these thoughts, unresolved, but I've decided to share anyways. Here it goes...

"As children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads, and slightly to one side," says Ken Robinson, the genius behind one of my favorite TED Talks: "How Schools Kill Creativity." He continues on to criticize, specifically, university professors. He explains, "They live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied. You know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a type of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their head to meetings."

I was watching this video for the fourth or fifth time with some other instructors before I left Longview on Thursday evening and headed for home, and it had me twitching with the need for change, and for movement. The dancer in me was ready to stand up and put my body into shapes, pull beats out of the air, find rhythm, find movement, and color, and lines, and meaning, and words, and align myself with all of it.

The artist within me experiences the world in this way. It's like playing connect the dots with everything sensory. So on the drive home, I turned up "Carry Your Name" and I sang as loud as I could, and I danced as much as I could, and I enjoyed the feeling of being embodied—the flesh and bone limits that the soul crosses over when a heart bursts in worshipping the Lord.

I think that what Ken Robinson was saying is not isolated to academia; it's rampant in the church as well. I remember one night before the service started I was meeting with friends over coffee and we were talking about the various poses of worshipers and trying to figure out if any of these physical representations mattered. Why do we do what we do anyways? I had to admit, however, that I seem to pay more attention to what we don't do; I mean, it perplexes me—if the Lord, the maker of the stars, is literally in our midst, than why do we seem so subdued? So zombified? That night, as we worshiped, I asked God, "Is it okay to dance?" In the secret place between my mind and my eyelids, he appeared, two feet in front of me, smiling, dancing with me as we celebrated all that He has done to conquer death and bring peace and restoration to my soul. It was an intimate moment—lighthearted, compassionate, and shattering in terms of my previous perceptions of what the God of the universe might be like.

I realized how much fun it can be to spend time with Jesus.

The scriptures say, "Wisdom is far more valuable than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with it" (Proverbs 8:11). But I am thinking it is important to remember, as Robinson expresses, that intellect is diverse and dynamic. That God is the God of our minds and our bodies, and that He wants all of us. That wisdom, as far as God is concerned, cannot be limited to the intellectual pursuits that we humans have invented. That music can capture God's wisdom; that painting can capture God's wisdom; and poetry, and prose, and dance, and every other creative, embodied outlet that the Creator has given us. Maybe even sports :)

I warn myself today, not to spend the year in my head only. Not to agonize too much over the compatibility between the scriptures and my brain. I have an entire body, and in the presence of the Spirit, it seems to know things about Him that my mind has yet to learn.