Matter matters. It can be easy in religious, intellectual and spiritual circles to downplay, to ignore and forget the importance of the material world. Why is this? There are a number of reasons. Firstly the mental and spiritual realms seem, at first sight, to have little room or need for the material world. To some given to intellectual or spiritual pursuits, the material world might be rejected as offering irrelevant temptations. From a Christian point of view I think that this is a mistake. The central story of Christianity is that of the incarnation of God in Jesus of Nazareth; ‘Incarnation’ meaning ‘in the flesh’, God with us as a material being in Jesus.
The central religious rites of Christianity, Baptism (Christening) and Holy Communion involve matter. In the latter we taste, touch, smell and therefore have union with God by eating and drinking bread and wine, and taking God into our material bodies. In baptism we are joined to the death, burial and risen life of Jesus through the anointing of olive oil and having water poured over us. We hear the falling water; we feel its warmth or cold on our head as well as the mark of cross made in oil on our foreheads. In worship we vibrate the air with our voices and musical instruments to make music as an offering of praise to God. Even as we think about our faith and we think about what we might pray for, the chemistry and electricity in our material brains is at work, the thinking and praying is being done by matter. Matter matters.
The words Spirit, Spiritus, Pneuma and RuAch (English, Latin, Greek and Hebrew respectively) with regard to the human being and other living creatures means breath, “when you take away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. When you send forth your breath, they are created; and you renew the face of the ground”; and breath is a set of gases made up of atoms and sub atomic particles like everything we can see, taste, small hear and touch. It is all profoundly material. Matter matters.
In creation God looked at all that he had made and saw that it was good, it was not bad or even morally neutral, God saw that it was good. Your body, according to St Paul is temple, that is, a place of worship for the Holy Spirit. Matter matters.
We have just celebrated Easter, the festival that celebrates the rising of Jesus from the dead. What did the women and the other disciples find? They found an empty tomb not a body emptied of an immaterial soul. Who and what did Mary Magdalene and doubting Thomas encounter, a ghost or something other than a ghost? I would suggest the latter. In Luke’s Gospel when the disciples encounter the risen Christ ‘They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. [Jesus] said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence’. Matter matters, if it did not, the resurrection of Jesus in this manner would have been unnecessary.
St Paul speaks about two kinds of body, the natural body, the one that is born lives and dies, and the body of the resurrection which is a new creation. What he does not do is tell us what the body of the resurrection is like apart from contrasting it with the natural body, this is subject to death and decay, whilst the body of the resurrection is not, hence the new creation, we are still creatures, but our creatureliness will be transformed; ‘behold I saw a new heaven and new earth for the old heaven and the old earth had passed away.’ Matter matters, and matters to God.
Now all this is far from being immaterial to our daily living, matter matters because it is sacred and if it no longer matters we will be in danger of desanctifiying it. As the late Philip Sherrard wrote.
“By the phrase, ‘desanctification of nature’, I refer to that process whereby the spiritual significance and understanding of the created world has been virtually banished from our minds, and we have come to look upon things and creatures as though they possessed no sacred or numinous quality. It is a process which has accustomed us to regard the created world has composed of so many blind forces, essentially devoid of meaning, personality and grace, which may be investigated, used, manipulated and consumed for our own scientific or economic interest. In short, it has led us to see the world only has so much secularised or desacralised material, with the consequence that we have ruptured the organic links and spiritual equilibrium between humanity and nature.”
But in reality matter matters; so care for the specific configuration of matter that you are, look after it, body, mind and breath; it is God’s gift to you, moreover, care for the other configurations of matter around you, human creatures, other animal creatures, the plant creatures and the creatures of stone, water, air and earth. ‘I tell you’ said Jesus; ‘if my disciples kept silence the stones would shout aloud’.
If matter does not matter then the life death and rising again of Jesus is meaningless, but if matter does matter, then his life death and resurrection means everything and challenges us to see the whole material creation as not only created and beloved by God, but redeemed by God. The God who calls us to participate in the resurrection of Jesus also calls to participate in the protection and renewal of the earth, because the Good News of the resurrection and redemption is for all of creation.
Brislington Community News 