August 1, 2011

Dear Members and Friends,

You may have wondered where the “anti-body” teaching and attitude came from in the Christian story. This mischief began with St. Paul, an educated Jew, who wrote to the members of the church at Corinth that to be carnally minded is sin and death, to be spiritually minded is joy and peace. How did Paul ever come to such a conclusion? In this letter he introduces a purely Greek idea, not at all Christian, namely that the human being consists of two parts, a body and a spirit, and that the spirit is always superior to the body. This splitting of the human being is only recently transcended or overcome to some extent by contemporary theologians and physicians. The medical world has known for a long time that the healing of the body depends as much on the spiritual health of the person as on the body’s response to surgery or medicine.

This virus introduced so long ago by Paul today affects even the Unitarians, who pride themselves on having transcended this false dichotomy.

Our recent history, under the presidency of William J. Clinton, illustrated this in a most dramatic way. The condemnation or our President, which led almost to his impeachment, was our nation being infected by the virus of Paul’s teaching, which, alas is still with us, and is even celebrated in some traditional Christian churches, Protestant and Catholic.

At the height of the controversy I had visitors from Belgium, Holland, and Germany. They asked me what all the fuss was about. They did not know our American history very well. Our story begins in Plymouth colony 1620, and the virus was introduced by our founding religious leaders: you need only recall Hawthorn’s masterpiece, The Scarlet Letter, to see how the virus affected those early colonists.

We, too, conclude that from the traditional Christian point of view carnality is a curse, and that we should have as little to do with it as possible. I say that today carnality is both a blessing and a burden. It is a burden for modern people because of the persistence of this infection in our society. Just read the pronouncements and see the votes of some members of Congress and the Senate on the evils of Planned Parenthood. How do you arrive at the conclusion that Planned Parenthood is an evil thing? You can see how convoluted and confused this thinking is, seeing the body as burden and not blessing.

According to “The Gospel of Viola,” we should be accepting our carnality and our spirituality as completely intertwined and interdependent. Remember the words of Robert Browning in his Grow Old Along With Me: “Let us cry ‘All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul.’”

Some weeks ago at our morning service I was very pleased and happy to see some of the lovers in our congregation touching each other all through the service while paying rapt attention to the sermon.

Remember that skin-to-skin is often soul-to-soul.

Wishing you joy and peace,

Love,