In the first part of this series of reflections about our congregation’s sabbatical theme “Joy to the World,” we reflected on “heaven and nature sing.” Joy is an original gift from our Creator. If the sound of wind dancing through the branches of the palm trees is a sound of joy, what, then, is the physical feeling of joy? In other words, what does spiritual joy feel like in the body? Answering these questions became the focus of the middle section my sabbatical quest: the search for embodied spiritual joy.
Our physical bodies are an original gift from our Creator. Historically, the church has successfully created shame and taboo about our bodies, especially the female body, disabled body, LGBTQ body, black, brown, non-white bodies, old bodies, and fat bodies.
All bodies are sacred.
All bodies are created in the image of God.
All bodies are created to experience spiritual joy.
As a survivor of trauma, I know from experience that sometimes the only way we know how to continue living is to live outside of our bodies. Disassociating is a way to float above physical realities so that we are numb to emotions and feelings in the body. Yet, separating the self into compartments is the opposite of wholeness.
I longed to know what it would feel like to experience embodied spiritual joy. One technique that helps me return to my body is yoga, this truth I discovered over twenty years ago while a student at Princeton Theological Seminary.
A classmate invited me to go with her to the local YMCA and try this thing called yoga. So off and on since then, I have experienced yoga as an invitation to show up inside my body and feel what it’s like to have a body and be aware of how I feel in it.
The word “yoga” comes from the Sanskrit and means “yoke.” Although some argue that yoga predates “religion,” the earliest written references to yoga are found in Hindu texts. The Upaniṣads (c. 800–400 BCE ) and Bhagavad Gītā (c. 200 BC–200 CE) describe yoga as meditative practices for yoking the self with the divine. For thousands of years, yoga has used breath and physical movements to connect us to what Christians call God.
From a Christian perspective, the practice of yoga is a way to pray. My yoga mat has become one of my well worn altars, a place where I go on my hands and knees to meet God.
Christian Theological Seminary is training pastors and therapists to use the principles of yoga to help students integrate systems of ethical, physical, and spiritual paths toward health, wholeness, and enlightenment. Since its introduction to the western world over a century ago, yoga has been largely misunderstood in Christian circles.
In its most basic form yoga is not a religion, but a philosophy based on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, a work compiled into 4 sections or “books” around 200 C.E. The practice of yoga can be part of the Christian faith because it is all about stilling the mind, quieting our thoughts, feelings, and egos, in order to become one with God.
In addition to physical and spiritual applications, yoga has therapeutic value for mental health, emotional and psychological healing. For me personally, when I practice yoga, I experience a releasing of emotional and physical pain, including past trauma that I have held in my body.
For the middle part of my sabbatical, I explored through the practice of yoga how body prayer creates a rhythm of joy. Repeat the sounding joy for me was all about the rhythms of embodied spiritual joy. Was it possible, I wondered, for spiritual joy to be integrated into the physical self?
During this time, I spoke with another UCC minister who once led a church retreat on the theme of joy. And she gifted me with the treasure of her discovery of the biblical definition of joy: the awareness of the presence of God’s grace.
What would it be like to be aware of the presence of God’s grace in our bodies?
For each day during this time, my one goal was to practice body prayer in the form of yoga or Pilates. I focused on being inside my body and what it felt like to move my body in rhythms of prayer.
One Sunday morning I lifted my eyes to the blue sky in Holliday Park along with thirty other people as we stretched our bodies for yoga in the park.
Another Sunday morning I sat inside a downtown studio and after rigorous physical movement, sang a prayer song about the sun shining down upon those we love and filling them with peace.
One Saturday night I found myself in that same studio but this time it was packed with people. We came to experience a “sound bath.”
One whole wall of the room was filled with percussion instruments. The musician walked back and forth across the wall of sound and played the bells, gongs, drums, chimes, while listeners received the vibrations into their bodies.
At first I tried lying down like the people around me. We all had yoga mats and blankets and pillows. A few people began to snore.
I found myself overstimulated by the sound bath, with a heightened awareness of the vibrations. I was fascinated by the musician himself and how we seemed to float from one instrument to the next, guided by some invisible muse.
I sat straight up at full attention, my legs folded underneath me. That’s when it happened: the sound of the drums entered into my ears and began to fill my mind. I felt the rhythm of the drums began to beat in my own body, beating in unison with my own heartbeat.
For a moment my heart and the sound of the drumbeat were exactly the same. The barrier between myself and the world around vanished. I was one with the sound. I was one with the universe. I was one with God.
I realized in that moment that my spiritual quest led me here to this moment: embodied spiritual joy makes the sound of my heart beating. The rhythm of joy is the beating heart.
As long as my heartbeats, there is joy because my heart beats with the love of God.
Spiritual joy is not something I can buy on Amazon or chase after or travel to an exotic island to find.
It’s right here, right inside me. And as long as I am alive, as long as my heart beats, as long as I am still breathing, joy is here. I became awareness of the presence of God’s grace in my body.
And a deep peace washed over me. My shoulders relaxed. A white light filled me with a sense of well-being.
The musician ended the sound bath with these words: if anything came to you that you wish to release and let go of, then set it free. If anything came to you as a gift to guide you, then receive that gift and let it bless you.
That was it. I had received a gift. Repeat the sounding joy. It’s something we all have, already within us. No matter what else is happening in the world or in our own world, spiritual joy is also there.
Too often joy lost and forgotten, overshadowed by tragedies, big and small. What if, all this time, joy has always been inside of me? Inside of you, all this time?
Like the presence of God’s grace, when we become aware of it, we realize the good news of God’s love. In the beginning, God created us, in God’s image, God made us good.
In Jesus we are given another example of embodied spiritual joy. How Jesus’ heart must have beat with joy when he saw the children coming to him.
How Jesus’ heart must have beat with joy when the hungry were fed, the thirsty given something to drink, and the dead rise again.
And how Jesus’ heart must have beat with joy when he saw Mary Magdalene in the garden waiting for him outside the tomb.
This is why Jesus’ message to the disciples was about their hearts. Jesus wishes for them joy in their hearts, he wishes for the disciples to know that his love would always be with them.
Jesus, in the Gospel of John 14:25-27, says, “This much have I said to you while still with you; but the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit whom Abba God will send in my name, will instruct you in everything and she will remind you of all that I told you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you; but the kind of peace I give you is not like the world’s peace. Don’t let your hearts be distressed; don’t be fearful.”
Jesus knew there were plenty of reasons to be fearful. What he hoped the disciples would never forget was that God’s love was within them, the very rhythm of joy within their hearts.
Perhaps the true power of the resurrection of Jesus is that it brought his beating heart back to life. The resurrection is the return of joy. The promise that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, neither death nor life. Nothing can separate us from embodied spiritual joy, the awareness of the presence of God’s grace.
At the end of this middle section focused on the rhythms of joy, I went on a yoga retreat on a lake in north Michigan. Each day began and ended with yoga, with hiking and picnics in-between.
On the third day, I became seriously ill with a fever and knew that finally, after three plus years, my body had contracted COVID-19. I drove myself the five hours home, took a covid test that showed positive results, called the doctor, and then put myself into quarantine for the next five days.
I isolated in my home office at night and in the backyard during the day. It was very quiet and peaceful in my backyard on a lounge chair staring up at the trees.
Even though I was sick, I felt blessed. My heart kept beating and I knew a strange kind of joy.
I was still alive and so many people were not. I was one of the lucky ones. I had been vaccinated. I had accesses to good medical care. I would recover and be ok.
I was on sabbatical. It was my job to rest and like Mary, the mother of Jesus, ponder these things in my heart.
This I know to be true about embodied spiritual joy: God comes to us in human form as a reminder that our hearts beat together as one.
Joy to the world: repeat the sounding joy. May it be so. Thanks be to God. Amen.
(A sermon preached at First Congregational United Church of Christ of Indianapolis on October 22, 2023)
Rev. Dr. Sarah Griffith Lund 