Authenticity and Integration

I tend to compartmentalize the elements of my identity. This can feel like straddling a series of contradictions. There are places in my life where I am a prayerful introvert but also an improvisational musician and composer, a respectable business consultant yet also an award-winning comedy writer, a practiced existentialist who is also a somewhat methodical essayist on theism and faith.

I rarely allow these worlds to meet and that is unfortunate and yet very modern. Largely thanks to Plato and Descartes, we have taken to thinking of our lives in separate categories instead of an integrated whole. We tuck away our spiritual life into the worship cubby hole, and our physical life into the gym or office. We even like to imagine that our souls and bodies are separate, the latter carrying around the former until we can finally be released from the dress rehearsal of life and our soul can be swept up into a bright, cloud-littered heaven.

In Christian thought – if not in practice – our identity is not a Frankenstein’s monster of separate parts stitched together, awkward, disconnected and misunderstood. It is a unified whole. We stand before God not as body, soul and spirit but as a single creation living inside the very Ground of Being. This is why the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is so unique to our faith. We don’t seek release from our wholeness, we don’t abandon the body, we are instead transformed in our wholeness.

I’m hoping to embrace this idea now as we move into the new year. I intend to practice this integration so that I can live whole and as authentically as possible. I think it’s part of living my discipleship and trusting that God made me good in all ways.

In Christian thought, the human person is not a stitched-together bundle of separate parts but a unified whole: body, soul, and spirit as a single person. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body emphasizes this wholeness—God’s final redemption does not abandon the body but transforms it (Paul’s “sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body,” and the post‑resurrection encounters with Jesus). That conviction reshapes how we live now: not as people who tuck “spiritual life” into a worship slot and “physical life” into a gym or office, but as persons called to integrate every dimension of life into faithful, embodied discipleship.

I find myself inspired by the thinking of David Bentley Hart and his robust affirmation of the metaphysical unity in our 2,000 years of faith. Like Hart, I’ve been accused of bringing Eastern religious ideas into my faith simply because I think that the entire universe is not a random collection of clockworks, but is a divinely ordered whole born, carried, enlivened and infused with God. God is one and all creation reflects the oneness of God. Reality is not fragmented into soul and body, natural and supernatural. Instead, somehow beyond my limited perspective as a created being, God’s work in creation involved the physical and spiritual together in redemptive atonement.

David Bentley Hart asserts, often in charmingly florid diction bordering on the theatrical, a needed affirmation of metaphysical unity within Christian doctrine. He argues that the cosmos is not a random collection of disparate entities but a coherent, divinely ordered whole. For Hart, the unity of all creation reflects the oneness of God, and this metaphysical vision undergirds his broader theological project. He resists any notion that reality is fundamentally fragmented or that salvation is merely a spiritual abstraction, insisting instead that the physical universe and its history are essential to God’s redemptive work.

In this way, no part of our being is inferior to another. Intellect is not superior to compassion. And thanks to the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, Human embodiment is not an obstacle to be left behind but a site of divine engagement and grace. I cannot now understand it, but in some way God’s plan for us is to grow and expand into greater fulfillment of our purpose as children of God and that involves all these limitations of time, space and human frailty.

Romans 8:19-21

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God, for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hopethat the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

God subjected us to seeming futility because somehow freedom and glory involve dealing with these contradictions and limitations as we grow toward God. Freedom, reconciliation and transformation of our whole being is more important to God than perfection. No where is our imperfection more obvious than our physicality, so it seems natural for the religious types to want to diminish the importance of matter and embodiment. But God values the soul and body as one child. Salvation is the renewal of the whole purpose and so as saved disciples, we should live out our faith and our own gifts in every aspect of our embodied lives.

Thanks to Hart, I’ve been very minimally introduced to Maximus the Confessor, a seventh-century theologian who wrote about theosis. I’ve only recently started reading Maximus and trying to understand theosis and I intend to go deeper into both in the coming year. Theosis is a very Orthodox concept, yet several Lutherans in the Finnish branch of theology have located it in the thinking of Martin Luther as well. Theosis, also known as deification or divinization, is a central concept in Eastern Orthodox theology. It describes the transformative process by which humans can achieve union with God. This idea is famously summarized by St. Athanasius, who stated, “God became man so that man might become God.” It is the way we participate in the divine life through our own transformation.

For Maximus, theosis is not the escape of the soul from the body, but is an holistic journey of the entire integrated being. The ultimate purpose of human life is to be “divinized,” which despite the sound of the word doesn’t mean we become God but means we are united to God and participate in the unity of the divine while still retaining our unique identities. And that is where I do diverge from Buddhist thought in that I think that our unique identities must be important to God, important enough to risk pain, evil and sin to create us all with free will. I don’t think our purpose is to abandon our physical bodies nor our individual identities but instead, to somehow bring them all before God’s grace to live out our intended purposes.

My ideas here are barely formed beyond animal intuition. But why would God create us with unique gifts if our purpose is to abandon our bodies and dissolve into oneness without individual distinction? Why would Christ assume a human nature including a body and spend so much time healing the body in his work unless our embodiment was part of our redemption? Christ could have come as a purely spiritual affair but instead came physically and sent the gift of the Holy Spirit later. (And no, I’m not prepared to discuss trinitarian formulations or the filioque here, my only intent is the assert the importance of our whole existence as modelled by Christ. Somehow our talents, spirit and bodies are important together in our vocations. It’s all somehow important in our theosis – the fun, the pain, the hurt, the joy, the grief – because somehow our transformation toward Christ is the entire point.

It won’t surprise friends and regular readers that my patron saint is Hildegard of Bingen, a visionary mystic and composer from the twelfth century who had a deeply integrated view of the human person, and really, the entire cosmos. She saw a divine vitality connected everything in creation. All things, animal, vegetable and mineral, were part of creation and woven into God’s creative purpose. How could it be otherwise? Yet here we are in a world where we divide our holy identities and exploit our land, resources, animal brothers and each other. For Hildegard, human flourishing mean living in harmony, body and soul, with all the natural world. The physical isn’t separate from the spirit but work together so we can experience God’s grace. God’s grace isn’t simply gifted to forgive our transgressions. God’s grace is ever present and in everything, we’re just sometimes blind to it.

OK, as usual, you have now received a lot of my left-brained words. Too much thinky thinky, I often say. I want to emphasize that I think all of this has some very practical implications. We are formed by prayer and the means of grace, certainly. Spiritual practices are important. But we are also formed by the engagement of our particular talents, minds and bodies. I am informed ethically and spiritually by the work of my body such as marriage, eating, music, art and despite my best efforts to the contrary, work. My hope in the bodily resurrection shapes what I do now to respect the dignity of how I treat my own body as well as the autonomy of how others treat theirs. Their bodily decisions are mine to appreciate, respect and defend. Respect, justice, health, reproductive choices, and gender affirming care are part of experiencing a full meaningful life. Abandoning dualism (i.e., spirit and body are separate) is subversive to our modern script. It is our Christian calling to live authentically in all areas, in our art, our churches, our offices, our gyms and online.

What to do, young people, what to do? First, I’m not big on resolutions. I often write the same goals down each time I rip the cellophane off a new calendar. So, I just stopped doing it. If they work for you, great, but I’m instead just going to try to be more authentic, more whole, more integrated in all that I do this year. I’m going to be consciously aware of my wholeness, not working a to-do list toward wholeness.

For example, I often pray in the mornings in a fairly specific way. I don’t intend to stop doing that, it is healing and I feel very connected to God and our historic faith by doing so. Interestingly, by praying a chaplet, I’m already bringing spirit and physicality together. But I’m going to be more aware that I don’t have to compartmentalize prayer. I can bring faithful attention to everything, even driving, dishwashing, snow blowing and mopping. A brief prayer can belong everywhere and might just mean watching my own breath.

I feel disconnected and focused on generating money when I operate my consulting business which is most of what I do when I’m not here pontificating on my blog or running bebop scales on my grand piano. Nothing completely wrong with that, a man needs to feed his family and all. But I keep my professional and spiritual lives distinct. I’m going to be open with my clients about my spiritual life and my ethical boundaries instead of avoiding those conversations. I’m going to try to understand God’s purpose in my job, where am I bringing redemption and joy to others and go deep into those practices.

I’m very creative, God has gifted me with music, writing and poetry. I’m going to try to use my art as sacramental expressions. I’m not going to handcuff myself to only create some kind of Christian art. That was a big thing growing up in my conservative SDA faith. I never understood why Christian musicians were expected to only compose religious songs while Christian builders were allowed to build all kinds of things, not just churches. I’m going to follow my creativity as a gift from God and let God speak was needs to be spoke through my work. Sometimes that is funny, secular, sacred, thoughtful, or pointed. I won’t censor it; I’ll just try to listen, channel what I hear and be authentic.

Our culture is so focused on optimizing everything. It’s no wonder we compartmentalize our lives. How can I be the best… fill in your blanks. But we’re already the best we can be and just getting better by living the life God intended for us. As a whole. In a very meaningful way, we are being as faithful as possible by embracing our authentic and integrated life that God gifted us. We need to honor that embodiment, celebrate and share our unique talents and bring our authentic selves to every sphere. When we do, we’re participating more deeply in God’s work of renewal and transformation.