A Journey Through the Book of Job (Part 5): Job 8:1-22

Going to the Gym with God (Part 7): On Exercise and Koinonia

<<< previous post

In a passing scene in the classic 1989 film, Dead Poets Society, Mr. Keating leads a group of young men out onto the soccer pitch for their first practice. If you’ve never seen it or perhaps forget this gem of a film, Mr. Keating is the larger-than-life English teacher whose “seize the day” philosophy is lighting fires among the students and wreaking havoc with the administration at a stuffy New England prep school called Welton Academy. Played by Robin Williams, Mr. Keating does not strike an imposing figure as an athlete, but as he leads his team out onto the field, he shares with them his philosophy of sport.

“Now devotees may argue that one sport is inherently better than another. For me, sport is actually a chance for us to have other human beings push us to excel.”

He then leads his team through one of the most unorthodox soccer practices they’ve every experienced, reciting lines from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Joys,” while they kick soccer balls to the strains of Handel’s “Water Music Suite No 2, in D Major.”

I have shared in a previous post how fraught my own journey with athletics has been over the years. As a child, I never felt I belonged on the ice, the court, or the field. I was rather clumsy as a kid, and never had enough interest in sports to take the time to learn how to do a proper lay-up. I broke my arm at the start of my grade 7 year, and so I missed almost 3 months of gym class in that formative season of my life. In my high school years—I confess this now to my chagrin—attendance in gym class was not closely monitored and I skipped more classes than I attended. The result of all this was a growing narrative that I lived by, that sports were not for me. I was an artist (I told myself), not the athlete.

Of course, as Mr. Keating so powerfully reminds us, those two fields of human endeavor—the arts and athletics—are hardly at odds with one another. Properly understood, at least, they need not be.

When I started my teaching career, back in 1997, I was tapped to coach the senior girls high school basketball team. In those days, they might as well have tapped me to coach the open-heart-surgery-society, I knew so little about the sport. But what I found, as I poured myself into the task, was that Keating’s philosophy rang true. Coaching basketball became an opportunity to have other human beings (in this case, a team of 14 teenaged human beings) push me to excel.

I would get to work around 6:30 in the morning and practice my three-point shot for a full hour, almost every morning. This was because I knew that however well I avoided it, a time would come when I would be required to make a shot, as the team’s coach. And I didn’t want that time to be a dead give-away that I had no clue what I was doing.

The time came, by the way. It was the exhibition game between the senior basketball teams, boys and girls, versus the teachers; the whole school had turned out to cheer their classmates on, and that’s when it happened. I dropped down low on the post, and then moved back behind the three-point line, ready for a pass. The head of the phys-ed department was bringing the ball down the court and feed it to me. And like I had practiced every morning since November, I put up the ball, with a prayer on my lips, and before the entire assembled student body of our school, the most satisfying “swoosh” I’ve ever heard rang out over the gym.

That may have been the day I started to rethink the artist/athlete dichotomy I had been living by.

Not long after that I discovered the sport of squash, which is now adays my game of choice. For almost a decade now, I’ve had a standing Thursday morning squash match with a good friend (one of the losses I’m grieving during Covid is not having been able to play for almost a year).

When I started squash, I was all heart and little skill on the court, but once again, Keating’s dictum proved true. Playing once a week with a great partner has pushed me to excel. It’s built my endurance, my determination, my mental toughness, all of which are qualities that carry over into other domains of my life. More importantly, it’s given me the kind of friendship in my life that you can only form when you are pushing another human being to test their limits, while they, in turn, push you in the same way.

All of this is a round-about way of getting at my topic for today’s addition to the “theology of exercise” we’ve been working on here at terra incognita for the last few months. Besides its health benefits, exercise builds community. It certainly does when it’s done together, and even when your exercise of choice is a solo sport, to pursue it well, you have to step into a community of like-minded afficionados of the sport, who can help you to grow as you go.

There is something about physically exerting ourselves with other human beings—having them push us to excel—that binds us to them in a unique way.

In this, I think, exercising together is a helpful metaphor for church life. The Bible often uses the term koinonia to describe the mysterious spiritual bond that binds people together in the community of the church. Koinonia means “fellowship,” or “partnership” (originally it was a term that referred to business partners in the ancient world). When I think of times I’ve experienced real koinonia in the church, however, the bond was not unlike that connection I feel with my squash partner, when we step out onto the court to push each other to the limit for an hour or so.

Maybe there’s even more than a metaphor in there. Given the argument I’ve been making in this series, that our bodies and our spirits are intricately interwoven, and that what happens to us physical affects us spiritually and vice versa, perhaps one way to build koinonia in the church is just to encourage the community to do physical activity together every once in a while.

Kononia, mind you, is a gift of the Holy Spirit, that comes to us only if and as we are focused on Christ, serving and worshiping him together; so I don’t want that last paragraph to suggest that “exercise” could ever serve as a replacement to that. But even so, when I look back over times when I felt most bonded to the other Christians in my life, there was usually some sort of physical activity happening together, as part of our community life: setting up and tearing down a school gym for our church plant to use in its worship—playing games together with the campers at Bible camp—volunteering together at the church to fix, renovate, or construct something.

These things are all, to borrow from Mr. Keating, opportunities to have other human beings push us to excel. And to borrow a term from the New Testament, if it’s done in the Lord, and for the joy of knowing him, these things are also opportunities to form rich bonds of koinonia between us as we do them together.

next post >>>

The Joy of Discipleship, a devotional thought

In an effort to stave off the growing ennui of the Covid-19 Pandemic, my wife, daughter and I have recently been experimenting with oil painting, using the paint-along videos of Bob Ross as our guide. Even if you don’t recognize the name Bob Ross, you may remember him as the iconic painter the puffy perm, whose public broadcasting program, The Joy of Painting taught hundreds of would-be landscape painters how to gill their canvases with “happy little trees” and “majestic mountains,” in the 80s.

All his shows are now available online, and so, after a bit of research into what art supplies get the best results, a quick online order from the local Michaels store, and a long, leisurely afternoon at the easel, we had recreated one of Bob Ross’s classic landscapes.

We had googled “best beginner Bob Ross paintings,” and this article (here) suggested his special episode, called “Grandeur of Summer,” as the place to start.

Here’s the original Bob Ross masterpiece:

And here’s what my wife, daughter, and I all came up with, following his step-by-step instructions. Not bad for a first time, I hope:

Here’s my wife’s:

Here’s my daughter’s:

And here’s mine:

And here’s why I’m sharing about our recent family date with Bob Ross, on a blog dedicated to reflections on “God, life, faith, love, words and spirituality,” of all things. It’s because our three different versions of “Grandeur of Summer” are now hanging in our dining room, and the other day while looking at them, side by side like that, it occurred to me that they provide us with a really powerful metaphor for Christian discipleship.

One of the mysterious paradoxes about following Jesus is that he calls us to conform ardently to his way of being in the world. We can’t call him Lord and not do what he says, and if we’re to follow him we must take up our crosses, like he did, and come after him. Following Christ requires earnest obedience to his Way. At the same time, of course, following Jesus means we are set free from all forms of legalism—we live under grace and not law—and under grace we discover that the Way of Jesus is “open” to infinite variety, a million individual applications, and endless contextual interpretations. We each stand before our own master, Paul says; and each will give his or her own account of how we applied the truths of Christ to our own individual story.

So which is it: strict obedience, or boundless grace?

And here’s where an afternoon following Bob Ross as he paints his way through the grandeur of summer comes in handy.

My wife, my daughter, and I were each following Bob Ross’s how-to video earnestly, faithfully, and seriously. We were each painting the exact same painting, in that sense: his theme, his color choice, his design. And yet, as another quick review of the finished paintings makes crystal clear, each one of us painted very different paintings. None of them are so different that you can’t tell they were each painted under the master, so to speak, but they each reflect our own unique choices, brush-strokes, and “happy little accidents” (to quote Mr. Ross).

Each painting is the same as the Bob Ross original, and each is, at the same time, entirely unique.

I wonder if, when we all stand before the Lord, to give our account of how we obeyed his command in our context, for our time, and our circumstances, if it will be like comparing a billion different Bob Ross paintings, all painted strictly following the instructions of the master.

To put it a bit less metaphorically: I expect that when the final account is given and Jesus pronounces his “well done good and faithful servant” to each one of us, we will each be commended for different things—some of them may even be so different that we might be tempted to wonder how they could both receive a commendation at the same time—and yet however different they are, we will all be commended for the same thing: faithfully following the True Master.

A Journey Through the Book of Job (Part 4): Job 4:1-21

A Journey Through the Book of Job (Part 3): A Good Cry

On Going to the Gym with God (Part 6): The Dark Side of Exercise

<<< previous post

In the 5th Century BC, a Greek sculptor known as Polyclitus wrote a now-lost treatise about sculpture in which he described his innovative approach to the artform. Polyclitus designed his nudes using an intricate theory of ideal proportions, based on a principle of symmetria, which expressed both balance (isonomia) and rhythm (rhythmos) together. His treatise has been lost to the sands of time, but other ancient writers have quoted him as saying, “Perfection (in the human form) comes about little by little, through many numbers (i.e. on the basis of carefully designed mathematical ratios).” Polyclitus’s most enduring contribution to the world of art is the famous “contrapposto” pose which we see in so many Greek statues from the 5th Century onwards, the well-known pose of an athlete balanced between movement and repose, with the hips tilted and the weight poised.

It wasn’t just Polyclitus, of course, who believed back then that the human form could be used to represent an idealized vision of divine beauty. The ancient Greeks in general held this thought dear. They were “fixated with the human body,” and believed that “the perfect body was an athletic body.”[1] The gods of ancient Greece came in human form, after all, and so the temples of ancient Greece—where you went to worship the divine—were filled with life-sized, life-like representations of human bodies, all of them carefully proportioned, beautifully sculpted, and perfectly balanced.

Some historians refer to this the “cult of the body,” the prevailing idea in ancient Greece that a beautifully-formed human body—or at least a representation of it—could be an object of worship. The worship of the body didn’t stop when you left the temple, either. The Greeks were the ones who invented the gymnasium, after all, where you went to keep your own body perfectly proportioned. They also invented the Olympics, where you worshipped the gods through a festival of athletic endeavors designed to push the human body to its limits.

In the Greek view of the body we glimpse something we might think of as “the dark side” of exercise, the idealization, the fixation, even obsession with the body that sometimes accompanies it. Those of us who have spent any consistent amount of time going to the gym will probably be nodding along at this point. It is possible—and this is especially true if our exercise is detached from a healthy self-image and a satisfying world-view that keeps it in perspective—for exercise to become a neurotic form of self-worship.

I had a friend a few years back who had become so obsessed with going to the gym that it began to negatively affect their mental well-being, their relationships, their family, and their health. He had come through that dark season, by the time I met him, and he used the term “big-ism” to describe it. “It’s like reverse anorexia,” is how he explained it to me, “where you are so obsessed with your body-size that you always look ‘too small’ when you look in the mirror and are driven to continually ‘bulk-up.’”

It turns out “bigism” is an actual disorder, known in the literature as “muscle dysmorphia,” and defined as “the delusional or exaggerated belief is that one's own body is … insufficiently muscular" [2]. It may be unfair or inaccurate to connect this modern psychological disorder to the ancient Greek cult of the body, but if there is a connection between the two, it is probably this: a distorted belief that the body itself is a source of ultimate meaning, which leads to an obsessive quest to perfect its shape.

We have been exploring the “theology of exercise” over the last few weeks here at terra incognita. We’ve looked at themes of incarnation, stewardship, embodiment, and the exercise routines of Jesus himself. Any honest theology of exercise, however, will have to face squarely this “dark side” of the topic, the dangers of narcissism, body-worship, neuroticism and even muscle dysmorphia that an unhealthy view of exercise can lead us into.

This isn’t to say that there’s not something theologically rich to be discovered in physical exercise. If anything, I would say it’s the opposite. The reason it’s crucial to take a theological view of exercise is the same reason it’s crucial to take a theological view of any aspect of human life: because when we look at something theologically, we put it in its proper place in relation to God.

I said earlier that exercise can become a neurotic form of self-worship, if it is detached from a healthy self-image and a robust world-view that gives it meaning. That “if” was the crucial word in that sentence. A Christian’s self-image is based, or at least it should be based on the fact that her or she is the fearfully-made child of God, unconditionally affirmed as his beloved, regardless their weight, their BMI, or how much they can bench-press. A Christian world-view is one where God is at the centre, giving joy and delight to his creatures, who in turn do all things for his glory.

This worldview has the power, I think, to transform how we think of physically exercise, and why we do it in the first place. When we are truly able to see ourselves as God’s beloved creatures, living in and though and for his glory alone, we are set free to enjoy all aspects of a good, godly life, including the joy of using our body to move and lift and run and play. A theological perspective on exercise, in other words, has the power to deliver us from any “cult of the body” that might distort or corrupt it for us, and frees us instead to do it for God’s glory, as creatures delighting in the body he gave us, however it may look and whatever its shape.

next post >>>

How Long, a devotional thought

The other day I was talking to a friend about some struggles she’s been going through lately, and as we were talking, this line from Psalm 13 came to mind for me. It’s more a phrase, than a line, actually; or maybe better yet, a question.

It is, incidentally, the fundamental question that the authors of the Bible asked, whenever they came into contact with the brokenness of this world—the evil, the suffering, the trials, and the tribulations that seems so regularly to beset the people of God.

The question is: How long?

In Psalm 94 it says it like this: “How long, O Lord, will the wicked be allowed to gloat? How long will you hide your face from me?”

In Psalm 35 it says it like this: “How long, O Lord, will you look on [as the wicked gnash their teeth at me]; how long till you rescue my soul from their ravages?”

And In Revelation, the martyred saints, slain for their witness to Jesus, cry out to God from beneath the heavenly alter, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You avenge our blood and judge those who dwell on the earth?”

In Psalm 13, the one that came to mind as my friend and I were chatting, it says it four times in a row:

How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face form me?

How long must I take counsel in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day?

How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

As an answer to the problem of pain, this question may feel profoundly unsatisfying to modern-day Christians like us, who have grown up in a technocratic culture with a decidedly litigious bent to it. In a world like ours, where problems have causes and effects, legal liabilities, and technological solutions, we don’t intuitively ask “how long?” when we encounter pain or suffering.

Instead, our default questions are “who?” (who is responsible?), “why?” (why did it happen?), and “how?” (how do we fix it?)

The question “how long” is entirely off the radar for us, because it presupposes that the solution to the problem of pain, whatever yours or my particular encounter with pain may be, is not within our control. Short term solutions, of course, are well within our control; and so were they in Bible times. We can salve, balm, soothe, and medicate our pain. We can legislate against it. We can optimize our responses to it. 

But the the deeper problem—that bend in the very warp and woof of creation that we intuitively know to be wrong, but can’t explain or resolve hard as we try—the solution to that very real pain is always frustratingly beyond our grasp.

This is why the Bible’s response to suffering is so disarmingly unexpected, on the one hand, but poignantly wise, on the other. Because the default posture of the biblical authors, when confronted with the suffering that is beyond us, was to cry out to the Lord with ache and urgency: how long, O Lord, till you fix this!

This is an utterly unsantized cry, by the way.  Most of the Psalms that ask “how long” like this are aching songs of lament, because the question “how long” does not minimize or deny the ache; if anything it expresses it in all its rawness. To ask God, how long till this ends, is to confess, in the very same breath, how desperately we long for it to end.

I think the modern world, politically conflicted and economically imbalanced and environmentally devastated and covid-harried as it is, would do well to develop a “biblical reflex” when it comes to our response to evil, and start asked “how long?” more consistently when we brush up against the brokenness of this world.

It doesn’t need to stop there, mind you. There still comes a time when it is altogether appropriate to ask “who is responsible?” and “how can fix what’s been broken?” Those questions must follow the “how long?” question though, rather than preempting it, or preventing it from being asked at all.

I say this because when we ask “how long?” what we’re really doing is confessing our deep down belief that God still is at work in the world, our belief that he has promised in the end to fix the hurt of this world in Jesus Christ, and that we are taking him at his word on the matter. To ask “how long,’ is to remind ourselves that in the end, the only thing that will truly and fully heal this hurting world, is His divine acting on our behalf. Human ingenuity and creativity, however much it can accomplish, cannot accomplish a lasting fix to the hurt of this world, on its own.

But thanks be to God that in the offer of New Creation he extends to us in Jesus Christ, God has promised to do for us what all our scientific know-how, and bureaucratic policies, and psychological methods, and social engineering combined could never do without him, and wipe every tear from every eye, while the leaves of his heavenly tree sprout for the healing of the nations.

Ours is first and foremost to long for that day, heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to cry out “how long?” as we wait for Him to do it.  

A Journey Through the Book of Job (Part 2)

On Going to the Gym with God (Part 5): A Brief History of Muscular Christianity

<<< previous post

In 1844, a London draper named George Williams was concerned by the influx of young men he saw moving to the city of London, looking for work at the height of the Industrial Revolution. There were not many healthy activities for these young men to spend their time on in those days, and many were turning to the taverns and brothels for entertainment. Williams wanted to provide a healthy, wholesome alternative, a place where young men could develop their “body, mind, and spirit” together. As a result—and as a concrete expression of his faith—he founded the Young Men’s Christian Association.

Today the YMCA is so closely associated with that catchy tune by the Village People that few realize it was actually founded on Christian principles, and grew out of Williams’s conviction that having a healthy body is just as important as having a healthy spirit for a thriving Christian life. 

Whether you share that conviction or not, its notable how quickly Williams’s idea caught on. It was part of a growing cultural trend that started in the mid-1850s known today as “Muscular Christianity.”  Muscular Christianity marked a move away from the asceticism that characterized the traditional Christian view of the body, the idea that the flesh was a distraction from the things of God and ought to be denied or suppressed. Proponents of muscular Christianity argued instead that a physically fit body could be an expression of one’s faith in God.

Thomas Hughes, one of the early advocates of muscular Christianity, argued that:

The Muscular Christians have hold of the old chivalrous and Christian belief, that a man's body is given to him to be trained and brought into subjection, and then used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men. 

There’s a lot in there to make a woke Christian of the 21st Century cringe, I suppose. The idea of “subduing the earth,” though biblical, needs a lot more nuance than Thomas gives it there; and the sentence simply smacks of machoism and sexism though out.  That said, the core tenet—that our bodies are not shameful “prison-houses” for the soul, but are in fact gifts of God which we need in order to serve him—has at least a glimmer of truth to it. Perhaps even a full ray of light.

Whatever the case, the idea grew pretty rapidly through the early decades of the 20th Century. Other clergy men started following Williams’s lead and built gymnasiums and boxing rings in the basements of their churches. Meanwhile the YMCA itself started planting chapters all over the world.

In America, Muscular Christianity would find its way into the preaching of evangelists like D. L. Moody (ca. 1850-90) and others. President Roosevelt (ca. 1909)—who held that “there is only a very circumscribed sphere of usefulness for the timid good man”—was also a strong proponent of the concept. Even today we see the vestiges of the movement in the work of organizations like Athletes in Action (founded 1966) and the Promise Keepers (founded 1990).

I suppose any “theology of exercise,” like the one I’ve been trying to assemble in this blog series, will have to wrestle with the tenets of the “muscular Christianity movement,” at one point or another. Though it's over 150 years old now, its influence still lingers in the church, both for the good and the bad.  It’s there whenever a well-meaning but misinformed preacher decries the so-called “feminization of the church” (which, to be clear, I find to be a deeply offensive term).  It’s there in the worst of “men’s ministries,” that make “being a Christian guy” all about a narrowly-defined set of supposedly “masculine” interests, tastes, roles and abilities (which, again to be clear, I often find offensive). It’s there in the worst of the theology coming out of neo-conservative organizations like “The Counsel of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood” (which I also find offensive, on the whole).

Because here’s the thing: men come in all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of interests, predilections,  aptitudes and body-types. When I was growing up, I often felt like I did not fit in among the other “Christian guys” in church, because I had so little interest in the traditional “guy things” that advocates for muscular Christianity seem to want to use as their litmus test. I was artistic, not athletic, into books not body-building, played music not hockey. 

Any version of Christianity, muscular or otherwise, that makes its definition of “a Christian man” so narrow that only a handful of guys really fit the bill and the rest are left wondering where they belong, is not Christianity at all, in my view.  

That said, in the ten years since I first started going to the Y—an organization, remember, that began as an expression of one man’s Christian faith—I have found that my spirit has grown healthier, on the whole, along with my body. 

I have learned how to push myself spiritually to do things I’m not naturally inclined to do, by pushing myself physically to do exercises I'm not inclined to do. I’ve discovered that the limits of what my physical body is capable of are often far higher than I ever assumed before I started pushing them. This, in turn, has inspired me to explore the spiritual limits of what I might attempt for God in other areas of my life, too.

These things are also part of the legacy of the muscular Christianity movement, I think, and it's one of the reasons why, even though as a young man and growing up, athleticism was the last thing I ever felt any interest in, these days I very much look forward to my trip to the gym, or my hour on the squash court, or my 20 minute exercise routine in the basement of our home (which is all I can manage in these days of pandemic).

Because when I put my body to work like that, I find, among other things, my spirit is being stretched and grown in ways I never could have imagined.

next post >>>

On Waiting for the Plan, a devotional thought

 The other day I was reading through Psalm 106 and I came across a line that gave me pause. The Psalm recalls Israel’s exodus from Egypt, how the Lord brought the people out of slavery and delivered them through the Red Sea. It explains how, having seen the Lord sweep away their enemies with the water of the sea, the people “believed his promises and sang his praise” (v. 12).

So far so good; but things make a sudden U-turn in verse 13: “They soon forgot what he had done,” it says, “and did not wait for his ‘plan to unfold.’” The story should be familiar to anyone who has a working knowledge of the Book of Exodus (which the Psalm seems to be referencing here). Israel had seen the Lord’s mighty act of deliverance, but because they couldn’t see a way through the desert they began to grumble, forgetting the mighty acts of deliverance he’d already accomplished for them.

It’s a familiar story. What was less familiar to me was the wording of the second half of the verse, “they did not wait for his plan to unfold.” I’ve never quite heard it put that way: in their grumbling for bread and their longing to return to Egypt, the people were “unwilling to let the Lord’s plan unfold in their lives.” Such a curious but powerful way to put it. 

I looked it up to be sure, and it turns out that my translation (the NIV) is on its own in this rendering.  Most translations say something like “they did not wait for his counsel.” “Counsel” is probably a more literal translation there. The Hebrew word in question is ‘aṣaṯ, which usually refers to the counsel an advisor might give a king.  When it’s applied to the Lord specifically, however, it usually has the sense of “purpose,” “intention,” or (roughly) “plan.” After all, God keeps his own counsel. No one acts as his advisor, and when he gives his counsel to us it’s not as an advisor to a king, but as a master to his servants. 

So the NIV is paraphrasing, but only slightly, when it says that Israel’s problem in the desert was that they were unwilling to wait for his plan to unfold. And even though most other translations render the verse more literally, and simply say that Israel refused to “wait on his counsel,” I prefer the NIV’s take on the matter.

Not just because it seems to handle the context for the word ‘aṣaṯ better, but because it rings so true on a spiritual level. How many of us, I wonder, have found ourselves facing a difficult trial like Israel did in her desert wanderings, and like Israel, we too started grumbling against God because we couldn’t believe that God had a plan? We couldn’t see how all the difficulties fit into his plan, or how his plan was unfolding through it; and even if we could see it, abstractly, we we’re willing to wait for it to unfold in front of us.

It’s a sobering thought. Especially for the church today, facing all kinds of challenges and question-marks because of covid restrictions and pandemic lockdowns. Does God have an ‘aṣaṯfor us in this, Psalm 106 verse 13 might ask us to ask? If so, can we see that he does?  And if we can, are we willing to wait for him to unfold it in our lives?