The Resurrection Body
How Our Weakness Creates Community
If you’ve been following this space, you may remember that towards the end of my sabbatical, I randomly discovered Henri Nouwen’s Sabbatical Journey in a bookshop. I wrote about the unique journey that led to that find here. Ever since I returned to the US, I’ve been slowly reading through the book, which is Nouwen’s spiritual journal during what turned out to be his final year of life. As you might expect, it is full of spiritual insight, but I was particularly struck the other day when reading his entry for Holy Saturday. As he wrote about the preparations for Easter, Nouwen reflected on the nature of the resurrection, and what it tells us about Christian community. He wrote,
As a community of people conscious of our disabilities, we are held together not so much by the Word as by the body. Although we use many words and there is a lot of ‘talk’ among us, it is the weak bodies of our core members that create community. We wash, shave, comb, dress, clean, feed, and hold the bodies of those who are entrusted to us and thus build a communal body. As we claim our faith in the resurrection of the body, we come to see that the resurrection is not simply an event after death but a reality in everyday life. Our care for the body calls us to unity beyond organization, to intimacy beyond eroticism, and to integrity beyond psychological wholeness.
Nouwen, we must remember, spent the final years of his life living and working at L’Arche Daybreak, a community for the disabled, and it is this community in which he celebrates the Easter miracle. Although he spent that year on sabbatical, away from L’Arche, he returned for Easter, and his reflections are those of a man who has both spent time within that community, and one who has spent time away from it and is stepping back into it.
That being said, we don’t need to be part of a disability community for Nouwen’s words to resonate or have meaning for us. I imagine many who are reading this have spent time caring for someone at some point: raising a child through the first years of their life; caring for a parent or grandparent in the final years of theirs; tending to a family member or friend going through an intense or lengthy illness. Even if you haven’t experienced caring for someone, you almost certainly have been cared for at some point, if only as an infant incapable of caring for yourself. When tending to someone or being tended to, our first thought is usually to the weakness of our current bodies, not the glory of a resurrected one. Yet Nouwen also points out that it is in the care for one another’s bodies, not just care for souls or minds, that creates true resurrection community.
Perhaps the most powerful statement in the passage quoted above is this: “As we claim our faith in the resurrection of the body, we come to see that the resurrection is not simply an event after death but a reality in everyday life.” Nouwen wants us to shift our thinking: the resurrection of the body is not just something to be hoped for in the life to come (though it is that), but it is a reality that works its way backward through history to impact the present moment and the earthly, un-resurrected body, too.
This is not only true of the resurrection body, but of resurrection life as a whole: because the end is not in doubt, and because we have seen the picture of that future, what will be impacts what is in real and tangible ways. Because Christians know that the body will be resurrected, we come together to treat our human bodies with dignity and care, including those bodies that are most in need of resurrection. Because Christ-followers know that God’s justice will prevail, we do not give up in the face of overwhelming injustice. Because the Kingdom of God is coming, subjects of the heavenly King do not despair when that Kingdom seems far from us.
When Henri Nouwen speaks about the resurrection of the body as not only a future promise but a present reality, I believe this is what he had in mind. This is emblematic of the Christian view of history as a whole: not that the past dictates the future with an uncertain ending, but that the telos, the end for which things were designed, is somehow drawing history forward toward itself. The end is not in doubt: the body, however weak or imperfect today, will one day be resurrected along with all of creation. We may not know all of the twists and turns along the journey, but if the end is not in doubt then we can be confident in trust as we live in the present. This doesn’t mean we have no agency; the interplay between the openness of our own story and the certainty of the end of history is a fascinating, paradoxical mystery all its own.
How does Nouwen perceive the future reality of the resurrection to impact our present reality? He lists three ways: “Our care for the body calls us to unity beyond organization, to intimacy beyond eroticism, and to integrity beyond psychological wholeness.” Each of those is worth looking at briefly in turn, but first let’s take note of the word “beyond” in that sentence. Nouwen does not want us to look for unity aside from organization, intimacy that negates eroticism, nor integrity that replaces psychological wholeness. Rather, it is unity that can include but goes beyond organization, intimacy that can include but goes beyond eroticism, integrity that can include but goes beyond psychological wholeness.
Unity beyond organization is a phrase more churches could stand to embrace as a core value. Organization is a structured way of getting people moving in the same direction, but unity beyond that requires us to forgive when people make mistakes, to own up when we make mistakes, to know and be known beyond the surface so that we are more than a group of people working together, but a community united in love. In fact, it requires that intimacy beyond eroticism which Nouwen names next.
It is perhaps surprising that in a reflection on bodily resurrection, Nouwen speaks of a spiritual intimacy beyond eroticism, but on further inspection we can see that this, too, is a bodily intimacy. To know one another intimately, we must become comfortable in physical proximity and sharing space together. This is a declaration that physical intimacy is not reserved only for erotic intimacy, that we are capable of putting human sexuality within its proper context without either enlarging it to the end-all, be-all of intimacy or casting it aside as sinful or unspeakable.
In order to reach that level of balance around intimacy, we must work towards becoming integrated persons. Too often, we reduce personal integrity to a matter of psychology only. And it is true that psychological wholeness is an incredibly important part of personal wholeness, but we must take it one step further and place psychological well-being within the balanced whole of an integrated person alongside physical well-being, spiritual well-being, and everything else that makes us human.
We have seen too often the consequences of Christians who focus solely on “spiritual well-being” (which is often poorly-defined) at the expense of all else: people who live in fear of divine punishment, church leaders incapable of discussing uncomfortable topics and thus creating psychological holes around sexuality, identity, and more. Nouwen, I think, could also see the consequences of those who think only of psychological well-being at the expense of all else: people who mistake personal happiness for wholeness, relationships centered on the fragile and ever-changing sense that they bring personal fulfillment. Both ends of this spectrum ignore real unity, real intimacy, and real integrity for the sake of something cheaper and ultimately less real.
It is the reality of the resurrection, the truth of the telos for which we were made, that can impact our communities in the present and encourage us to find that unity, intimacy and integrity that Nouwen writes about. Because those who are in Christ live in the resurrection, even as we live in the present, we can be bold in our love towards one another, including our bodies that await the fullness of the resurrection life.