ABSTRACT
Sharon Betcher, an American Lutheran theologian currently working in Canada, who has had a leg amputated, tells the story of one day when she was scheduled to lead morning worship at her school of theology. One of the assigned texts was the story in John 5 where Jesus heals a paralytic, telling him to ‘Pick up your bed and walk’. She writes, ‘given my disabled body as unavoidable backdrop for this text, I would have to address the glaring perceptual incongruity of how I sat there leading morning worship – from a half-lotus position on the floor of the chapel – while trying to inflect my reading of the miracle account with, well, spiritual authority’ (Betcher, 2007, p. 68). This and many other experiences of being the broken body in a culture searching for health and wholeness have led Betcher to construct a theology of Christian Spirit that moves away from the ideal of wholeness to take seriously the experiences of those whose bodies do not match the ideal. My own work in areas of new religious movements that rely on holistic understandings of the world, such as contemporary Paganism and nature spiritualities, lead me to read Betcher’s theology as a jumping off point to think about the language of wholes, wholeness and holism in relation to material experiences of body. The concept of holism in health, spirituality and ecology is beset by similar limitations as is wholeness in Christianity, as discussed by Betcher. While appreciative of the direction in which the discourse of holism moves, I suggest the language of permeability and trans-corporeality is more useful for avoiding the pitfalls of colonial othering and normalising embedded in the modern concept of the whole.
