Prayer and the Body

By
Esther Brazil

There is a curious disconnect in mainstream Christianity between our bodies and our spirituality. The flesh is sinful and corrupt, we’ve been told; we must resist its temptations. Don’t eat too much, don’t drink too much, don’t get too fat (or too thin). Don’t be lustful or hedonistic – and if you are, you’d better feel guilty about it.

As a singer, a lot of my professional life has involved paying close attention to my breath and my body, and all the fleshy details of singing (can I get my soft palate any higher? I must steam to restore la voce!). A year ago I thought that investigating a vocation to the priesthood meant deliberately turning away from all of this: choosing the spiritual over the corporeal. I was pretty smug about it, which should have been a clue that God had a twist in store.

As it turns out, using your body merely as a vehicle to carry your brain around isn’t the best idea. “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”, after all, and when I noticed a couple of months ago that I seemed to have entered a spiritual drought, I grudgingly decided to try a different way. Turning back to my body felt like failing, but it was actually both interesting and effective. I’m doing ten minutes a day of guided meditation, and I’ve added some sensible exercise, all of which has improved the quality of my attention during prayer.

What works for me won’t work for everyone, but what I’ve discovered is that being prayerful doesn’t mean ignoring my body. Christianity has clues to this, of course: there is a great tradition of connecting the physical and spiritual by incorporating physical acts into prayer. Holding something, singing or chanting prayers out loud, or counting prayer beads can be the key to keeping your attention on the prayer itself.

Jesus didn’t reject the physical – far from it. The most moving parts of Jesus’s ministry are often depictions of his physical interactions with people: eating with them, healing them with his hands. He didn’t transcend the mortification of his body, but endured physical pain to the very last. As a memorial of this sacrifice, he left us the Eucharist, at the centre of which is that very physical act of consuming bread and wine as we meditate on the words at the heart of the Eucharist: ‘This is my body’, ‘This is my blood.

This week, challenge yourself to pray a little more physically. It might make all the difference.