We often get asked why we chose the name “enfleshed” when we launched in 2017. Each Friday for the next five weeks, we’ll share a little bit about what’s behind the word for us.
1. enfleshed - because the significance of god is a material experience
One of the many unfortunate and destructive influences of patriarchal white dominant philosophies on the theological, political, and cultural landscapes we live in today is the ongoing influence of mind/body dualisms. God is associated with the mind, held over and against the flesh. In many Christian spaces, this has shaped the concept of God in the direction of something so other-than, beyond, or outside of material existence that theology – and the ground of spiritual life – becomes first and foremost a thinking-thing. Faith as an abstracted set of beliefs about a singular static story of truth that is unimpacted, unchanging, and entirely unaffected by material life. In this frame, the ideas through which we understand God trickle down to us from a holy realm above our ordinary encounters in the world. Among other things, this implicitly and explicitly encourages understanding by thinking about God, reading about God, talking about God and the heavens as if apart from us. The struggles and pleasures of life become secondary and separate to God – or at worst, theological distractions.
One of the many dangers of this approach is the way it enables claims of objectivity in theologies (The concept of objectivity, a project in and of itself of white supremacies). When revelations about God are found entirely outside of our everyday lives and encounters with material life, claims can be made about God without any accountability for how those claims affect bodily life. (Think, God as anti-queer regardless of impact on queer life).
As a counter to such theologies, we at enfleshed choose to emphasize and prioritize an understanding of and encounter with divinity that begins and remains with material life (within and beyond our known universe and constructions of time). Spiritual life that understands bodies, land, food, health, pleasure, community, human practices and cultures as the landscape of God. Religion and spirituality as an “enfleshed” experience, reality, and commitment. The material consequences of theologies become the primary focus.
When the collective of material life is understood as “the Body of God” (Sallie McFague), then we encounter God by encountering life in the here and now (as past and future shape it). God becomes a set of encounters and practices as diverse as the flesh life bears. What harms the body of God is the evil with which our faith then wrestles. Spiritual liberation is inseparable from material liberation. When enfleshed, our individual orientations toward that liberation are shaped by our places in the body of God – our bodily and material locations – and the singular story of truth becomes instead a story of multiplicities and truths.
None of this is new, of course. Womanist, Black, queer, feminist, Indigenous, Mujerista, Disability justice, eco-, and economic liberation theologies have born witness to these truths for decades within the theological academy and long before they were at-all welcome there. In witness and gratitude to these lineages, past and present, we aim to continue in this spiritual freedom work of god in material and collective life.
2. 'enfleshed' points to our source of hope
enfleshed points to the source of our hope. It has always been and will always be enfleshed. God alive in the people, in the water, in the trees, in the places where ancestors meet those yet to be in and through us.
enfleshed. As in past tense. As in, there is nothing we have to wait for in order to encounter the divine. They have long Themselves known among the mysterious material of life, ordinary and miraculous. Moving through and among faithful ancestors. Moving in our own lives, in memories and relationships past. We have felt. We have encountered. We have heard the stories of deliverance and sustaining presence. The past bears witness to the God already among us.
enfleshed. As in present tense. As in, where to encounter that divinity now. Not in claims that disembody, in denial of feeling or flesh. Not among forces, institutions, doctrines, or practices that repress life. Not in the mind apart from the body – but enfleshed. In tears flowing. In anger burning. In holy disruption of life as usual. We find God around us, enfleshed in neighbors, art, protests, rivers, and meals at table. God as verb. God as relational encounter. God as everything that nurtures life under forces that deaden and destroy. God as tangible, tastable, touchable.
enfleshed. As in, what our faith is, in practice. Ongoingly. An opportunity that unfolds over and over again. Not a static condition, but a matter of active participation. Divinity that is not passive but alive and affected by us and everything. Divinity will be enfleshed yet again. Today. Tomorrow. In future generations. Luring us like a lover. Inviting us to be co-conspirators. Challenging us to lay down alliances, commitments, fears, and resources that keep us from being dwelling places of the divine. It is not as simple as a matter of choice, but neither is it void of one. At times we align with divinity, at times we are misaligned, more aligned with powers that destroy. We practice our faith or betray it by way of what we enflesh. We, individually and collectively, in different ways and from different places in the whole of things, in every moment, partner with or work against the enfleshment of God among us. This is a biased endeavor. God incarnate is incompatible with political neutrality. When we choose to cast our lot, through behaviors and beliefs, with dominance through white supremacy, misogyny, ableism, capitalism, Christian supremacy, or anti-LGBTQIA forces, we close ourselves off to the present and future enfleshment of God. God incarnate is a force of flourishing, always resisting oppressive powers within us and around us. We tend with grace and courage our inner lives, our relationships, our resources, our communities with the aim of being hospitable to God enfleshed, liberation practiced, love embodied.
3. 'enfleshed' disrupts supremacies - human, male, and Christian
When we tell the story of divinity ‘enfleshed,’ we can celebrate the way in which the Divine incarnates in all material life. God enfleshed means humans, yes, but also mushrooms and bumble bees, scaly things and feathered friends, the rich soils beneath our feet, and the places beyond our universe but no less alive or beloved. All the ‘flesh’ of life is a potential site of divinity. enfleshed. Not God becoming Jesus alone, which reinforces Christian supremacy. Not God becoming human – which reinforces human supremacy. Not God becoming man – which reinforces the supremacy of men. God enfleshed. As close as our own breath. As beyond as the depths of the sea, the core of the earth, and the farthest reaches of the cosmos. As the planet groans under colonizing theologies of a God-ordained human ‘dominion,” where the earth’s meaning is derived as a resource for human consumption, ‘divinity enfleshed’ re-orients us toward the sacredness of all material life. Indigenous wisdoms call us collectively back to right-relationship with the land, with interdependence, with the indigenous people and practices within our own texts and the people of the lands we occupy.
4. 'enfleshed' disrupts the singularity and static image of the body
5. 'enfleshed' suggests sensuality
‘enfleshed.’ It sounds a tad scandalous. At least a little salacious. Definitely sensuous. And that is very much a part of the intent. When we center what it means to recognize, interact with, and experience divinity within the realms of flesh, we necessarily confront the need to right our relationship with the more unruly, queer, and carnal aspects of our bodybeing. Flesh that arouses, stinks, flows, aches, cries, grows hair, wrinkles, hungers, delights, screams, and stretches. In and through such, divinity can tingle. Divinity can scream. Divinity can nurse. Divinity can crave rest, a kiss, or protection. Too often, the ways in which our human and animal bodies experience the worst pains and the greatest pleasures are deemed theologically unspeakable. Orthodoxies entangled with systems of oppression teach us to hide, repress, blame, or shame our bodily realities. Afraid of what transformation we might seek, our pain is individualized and pathologized. Afraid of what we might awaken, our pleasure is morally maligned. We are told there are fleshy spaces – within our around – through which we are severed from God. But it is only from the God of dominance through whom theological evils of ableism and cisheteronormativity and capitalism and white supremacy flow. The Divinity we (re)discover in those same depths resists orthodoxies that betray the flesh in its many forms. This divinity loves us as we are, even when we can’t love ourselves. This divinity delights in every pleasure. Companions us through pain. Enables us to practice doing the same for ourselves and each other and the earth. Whatever scandal that is, it is a holy one which we are glad to celebrate and prioritize.