Thursday, July 25, 2013

Nonsecular Girl's "Sermon for Brokenness"

Oscar Wilde: “I drink to separate my body from my soul.”

Casey Fleming's response
Imagine our bodies, healthy or sick or momentarily struggling, as the light of God.
Imagine we might need affliction to illuminate our souls.  (know, in this imagining, the unfairness of such a reality on some, truly sick people)
Imagine we could not have a soul without a body.
Imagine the necessity of Jesus’ human body.
Then the body cannot be a shade of shame or a thing to denounce.  Then the body cannot be a cage, and drinking, dear Oscar Wilde, might be more for marrying our bodies to our souls than separating them.  Then the body has no use for a language of signs and signals and acronyms.
The flesh is the word, the word is the flesh.
Even, and especially, when the flesh is broken.
The whole thing is gorgeous. And it includes readings from Christian Wiman and Mark Doty, two poets with deep connections to Texas.

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