Embodiment & the Bible by A.C. Seiple预览

Years ago, I went to seminary to study biblical languages alongside a counseling degree. I wanted to know Scripture so deeply that when offering counseling to Christians, I could both provide a safe therapeutic space that would tend to their soul, along with interaction with our faith tradition that wouldn’t just be platitudes, but something deeper, something richer that intersected with the real and raw heartache, trauma, and grief we walk through in life.

Ironically, despite all those years devoted to learning Hebrew and Greek and studying things like Ancient Near Eastern culture and literature, I’ve found that all that education isn’t what I most need to see how Scripture might speak to our embodiment. Instead, the guttural cries from ancient voices in Psalms have been the most helpful intersection I have found between the whole conversation of embodiment that’s happening in the therapy world and our very own faith tradition.

Rather than trying to force embodiment into our faith our figure out how to integrate in, these ancient voices show us what this looks like, in a beautiful, real, and raw way. The Psalms record a faith tradition that was not centered around putting on your Sunday best before coming to God or only singing out the prettiest of songs. Instead, the Psalms hold a legacy of a deeply embodied faith, of people who did not separate their bodies from their thoughts or feelings or the stirrings of the soul—and as all of these were connected, they also told God about it.

These ancient poets didn’t need to read scientific research that’s telling us about how connected we are to our bodies, and how our bodies hold onto trauma and pain, they already knew this down into their bones and didn’t separate from their faith. And what I love most about this is that the Psalms are not some random or obscure hymnal that was adjacent to our faith tradition—the Psalms have been preserved as sacred Scripture, with their voices reverberating through a larger story that intersects with our lives today.

And while I could talk about this all day, I’ll leave you with this curiosity for this day: As you read through verses from the Psalms, see what it’s like to notice just how connected these voices are to what’s happening in their bodies, and any ways that you can resonate with how they describe the interplay between their mind, body, and soul.