Vegetarianism, Neglected Temples, and Dancing Jesus

My weekly letter to my class. Last night's class was a full one, trying to tackle the topic of Christianity as a faith and health care related topics that HC folks might find useful in dealing with clients. On top of that we had several representatives from the local Seventh Day Adventist congregation here in Johnson City who shared with our class.

"So did anyone go out of class last night finding some new found energy to go “vegan” or did you just make your way to the nearest carnivore outlet? I was a mix of the two, finding a spot to have a nice salad, with grilled chicken splayed out atop the salad like the centerfold of a nudie magazine. Adventists always give me room to pause and think about how I eat, what I eat, and ways to better myself because of their influence. If anything, this group helps me to be more mindful of what I am eating. Eating should be more than just shoveling in copious amounts of food; I know that I should be more conscious of what I am putting into my body. If our bodies are “temples of God” well let’s just say that my temple is in need of some upgrades. It’s not all genetics, it’s not all behaviors. Regardless, this “temple” is mine to keep, so I should remember to put forth my best effort in maintaining this “meat bag” (coined from Futurama’s Bender as he is wont to refer to us). Perhaps Adventists are onto something, that is, that there is a connection between spiritual and physical health. What do you think? Does one influence the other? Can we truly be a complete person in the holistic sense if our spiritual lives are thriving but our physical being is neglected to the point of dis----ease? Will god (s) hold us accountable for desecrating our own bodies? Does it matter? What about all those gym bunnies who have the perfect body and yet are as “whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside and yet inside are full of dead men’s bones.” I know that these words are attributed to Jesus and that in the proper context he was talking about hypocrisy, but the mental picture here serves to illustrate my point. Does it matter? Or what if there is nothing beyond ourselves, that is, we are all that there is? Would that perspective have any impact on how we view our bodies? Would it have any bearing on how we treat our bodies? These are just some of the questions that your public health instructor was pondering last night while having his dinner meal.   

Last night’s topic was almost too much to even begin to discuss. All of the belief systems we have discussed are huge. I was happy to get through the first two sections of the slides, the third; well you can review them at your leisure. I find it surprising how little most of us know about our faith, or our faith of origin. As I have said repeatedly this semester, NOTHING happens in a vacuum. Not even religious movements. There is always a back story. There is always context. These things don’t take away from faith, it can help fill in some of the missing pieces and make it a more enriching consideration. I hope some of you will be curious enough to look into this on your own."

( I yanked the following from an earlier entry, I did this to further illustrate some of  our class discussion, that is, the form and ways of modern Christianity are vastly different than how things were functioning in the first century. What I reminded the class of is that we are left with the remnants of what has survived from early centuries. This does not necessarily mean that what we have is more "truthful" or "right." What it means is that this is what we are left with after all the bickering, debating, killing, and various ecclesiastical conferences and Diets. History is written by the conquerors, this is no less true even in matters of faith. I wanted to give them an example of some of the divergent forms of early Christianity).

"Let me add one more thing, I’ve been reading Elaine Pagel’s book on the Gnostic Gospels as of late. Through her research I have stumbled upon something that I find incredibly touching and beautiful. In the book “Acts of John” there is a story that picks up right after John’s Gospel on Holy Thursday.  After eating the Passover meal, Jesus, in this story, taught his disciples a song. This song was to be sung during a group liturgical dance. He taught this to his disciples’ right before he was taken and crucified.  He instructed them to “respond to me with Amen.” And so he began to sing:

Glory to you Father

Amen

Glory to you word, glory to you grace

Amen

I have no temple and I have temples

Amen

I am a lamp to you who see me

Amen

I am a mirror to you who recognize me

Amen

I am a door to you who knock on me

Amen

I am a way to you, passerby

Amen

I don’t know if this account is true. I don’t know this anymore than I know that the sanctioned canon texts are written by those who they are attributed to and that they are true (in the literal absolutist sense of the word). Personally, there’s no way to prove this and so I long ago stopped looking at this and other religious texts as a roadmap and definitive guide for my life. But it doesn’t mean that there’s not “truth” in there. Again, I understand life to be transient and for the most part, it is all subjective. There are things that can be known empirically and it is those things I trust. But religious verse is not one of them. These are narratives. They are stories and stories that I can read symbolically and figuratively. Therein (for me) is where the value and richness of these words lie, that is, what does it say to me? What can it teach me? What can I learn about myself and others here?

I really like thinking that Jesus could have done this with his disciples, and that they participated in this act of praise and dance. I like the idea of a dancing Jesus. I definitely could see this as something he would do. Now whether that says more about what I think of Jesus or perhaps what it says about me, I’ll let you all pass judgment on that."