A Body of Work

"By now, most of us have noticed. And either we or someone we know is talking about it. Zoom fatigue. Irritability. No fever, cough or body aches necessary. Just the normal, run-of-the-mill symptoms of social distancing. And mostly, people are describing how much more exhausted they are at the end of their days compared to what their lives were like before three weeks ago. All of this highlights one element of what it truly means to be human that our encounter with the coronavirus has drawn our attention to: our bodies.

For many reading this, your days have become a continual stream of Zoom or FaceTime or Skype meetings at work or with family and friends. What used to be a convenient and at times even delightful technological means of connection has become something else entirely. For some of us, Zoom is a new four-letter word. We all know something isn’t quite right.

In the language of interpersonal neurobiology, the mind is understood as an embodied and relational process. As Christians what this is hinting at is the fundamental reality of the Genesis account of creation: that God “formed the man out of the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.” (Gen. 2:7). We are dirt, and we are breath; we are embodied and we are spirited. Take either one away and we stop being fully human. And what we are experiencing is the act of living disembodied lives ..."