Friday, February 18, 2011

Christians and Yoga: Strike or pose?

“Yoga Schmoga.” So goes a window sticker on my buddy’s pick-up truck. I’ve always admired that sticker. In a town where Yoga is as close to being a state-endorsed religion as Christianity was on the eve of Constantine’s coronation, the casual flippancy of “Yoga Schmoga” has an attractive subversiveness to it.

And it’s meant to be funny too. This is important because humour suggests this Christian man has gauged his opinion of Yoga at least a few notches short of sheer panic alarm.

But let’s not kid ourselves, this isn’t just fancy stretching. So what is it then? Isn’t Yoga spiritual?

And there it is. The question that haunts many a pious soul, right out there in the open with no bush to beat around.

That kind of frankness deserves an equally straightforward answer. Is Yoga spiritual? Yes. Of course it is.

And so is everything else.

Everything is spiritual. Of the many things worse than getting caught up in whatever ‘spiritual’ tangle there may or may not be to the Yoga nearby, one of the very worst would be thinking life, the world and everything can be divided neatly into bits that are spiritual and other bits that aren’t. As if there are issues and events that require religious consideration and others that somehow do not. This is about as close to the worst possible per-version of the Christian message that I can presently imagine.

Wendell Berry, an American poet, farmer and cultural crank traces the Christian version of this poison to the pulpit: “No wonder so many sermons are devoted exclusively to ‘spiritual’ subjects. If one is living by the tithes of history’s most destructive economy, then the disembodiment of the soul becomes the chief of worldly conveniences.”

If we are going to live whole and even remotely holy lives, we need to wrest the word from those inverted commas. ‘Spiritual’ means a lifestyle that requires more contortion than a Yogi attempting an upward facing peacock-crane.  But plain-ol’ everyday-spiritual means keeping our feet grounded and firmly in step with the namesake of this buzz-word.

Yes, [insert suspiciously religious activity here] is spiritual. But so is shopping for [insert suspiciously cheap consumer item here]. And so is eating [insert suspiciously tender meat or suspiciously flavourless fruit here].  Deny that and arrive at Berry’s ‘disembodied soul – destructive economy’ scenario. But if we are to take the Apostle’s advice seriously (Rom. 12.1) then all of life is charged-through with spiritual connections; from mundane and seemingly innocuous things like doing the laundry and changing the oil to glorious things like riding fresh snow and casting to rising trout.

The question then is not if something is spiritual but how. And before we even begin to answer that question we see that it will require more than a ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If Christian faith is as big as it claims to be then it includes complexities that resist reduction to binary alternatives. And that means, among other things, that there is space for a range of responses when we wonder about things like Yoga. Alarm and debate can be an appropriate position in some cases. But confident respect can be a healthy posture too. 

1 comment:

  1. Today I feel like a downward dog coming up to a crane like peacock as the sun rises.

    ReplyDelete