Embodiment

The biblical notion of the "heart" (whether the Hebrew Leb or the Greek kardia) implies the full person of a human being—the intellect, emotion, volition, even body. As Karl Barth affirmed: "The heart is not merely a but the reality of man, both wholly of soul and wholly of body" (436). As such, to read with our heart is to employ our whole person. This noticing of particularity, this living in physei, that Hopkins and Dillard recommend is not something that can be done in an abstract, disembodied state. We have to notice the wilting of the washed dandelions underneath the fruitless mulberry on a cold day in October on Nolan River Road. As Malcom Guite observes, "The arts are never discarnate, they always begin and end in the realm of time and sense, however much they give us glimpses of another realm which transcends it. [...] Every effort to incarnate our own thoughts in the web of language is underwritten by God’s expression of his Word in Christ" (32). We sometimes forget that Christianity is a religion of the body. God created the world and called it good; Christ came to us, to sweat, eat, and weep; we are promised a new heaven and a new earth with a resurrection body; we are enjoined to not only fast but also feast.

Gina Bria, in an essay called "A Theology of Things," suggests that God has created human beings to experience truth through our physical senses. Bria, in particular, points to the way our memories are dependent to a large extent on the proximity of physical objects we have experienced. Following the Russian linguist Victor Vygatsky, Bria states that "our memory is stored not only inside our language, inside our heads, but outside of our selves as well, in the visual and tactile cues we receive from the material around us" (10). As such, we often lose our memories because we are separated from things that act as receptacles of them -- a favorite chair, a beloved scarf, a cherished tool or book. She urges,"Taste the bread, brothers and sisters, taste the bread, hold it, sniff it, put in to your lips, and know the incarnate God, who made the earth and put us among things, for our pleasure and his" (13).

It is as "hearts," as embodied beings, that must learn and grow and change in this created life God has made for us. Molly Peacock in her aptly named poem, "Why I Am Not a Buddhist," praises the bodily life: "I love the things I’ve sought--/ you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll/ from my billfold—and love what I want: clothes,/ houses, redemption" (3-6). And she suggests that suffering in this kind of world is just what God has created us for:

But why is desire suffering?

Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
The spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love. (13-18)

In such a world of bodies, we love our families, our lovers, our friends, our neighborhoods. And poetry is part of that love.