The World's Librarians

The World's Librarians--May 29, 2018

"Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body." [1 Corinthians 6:19-20]

I am a book person.  Let's talk about books for a moment.

Look, I know that we increasingly all have little shiny rectangles of technology (we usually call them cell phones, smart phones, tablets, and computers) from which to read the news, to check the weather, as well as to catch up on your angry uncle's latest bitter tirade commenting on the day's news, interspersed with all the cat pictures your acquaintance from work likes to post.  I know we have ways of reading that don't involve the printed page anymore... but honestly, I don't think that the book, as a physical object with printed pages you can hold in your hand, is going anywhere any time soon.  There is something so... real... about holding a book in your hands, something that feels authentic about the smell of the paper, the heft of the weight in your hands, and the ease of the pages for dog-earing, underlining, and bookmarking for picking up where you left out.  Books are fantastic, wonderful inventions, and they will all survive even if some terrible computer virus or power surge wipes out my shiny rectangles of technology.

Now, here's the thing about a book.  The book itself contains the story--the actual content of the text you are reading--and in a sense, you can think of the text of the book separately from the actual bound pages.  After all, before the words were printed in your book, some author somewhere had to write them, some editor had to pare them down, and some typesetter had to arrange how they would all fall on the printed page, not just of your copy, but of all the other thousands that are out there.  So, yes, in a sense, the text of a book is separable from the physical pages you happen to have in your hand.  

But on the other hand, for you as a reader, the way you experience the text is with the text printed on the particular pages, with the particular paragraphs falling just so, and (in a physical book at least) those are always the same.  So when you keep coming back to, say, a favorite passage in the novel, or a favorite poem in the anthology, or that quote you underlined three times because it was so important to you, it will always be there, in the same spot on the page, the same crinkle at the top from turning to that page so many times, the same crease beginning to wear on the binding from opening it there.

So, for example, when I picture the words of Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If," once taught to me by my grandfather from his very own volume of "Best Loved Poems," I picture the way the stanzas fall in that particular volume.  I picture the way it spills from one page to the next, and the way the paper has yellowed with age.  I smell the old book-glue smell, and I can almost feel the softness of the fraying outer binding.  I know that I can look up the text of "If" on my computer in an instant anywhere, but somehow my brain has now associated those words, "If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you..." with the specific encounter I have had for three and a half decades with that poem in one particular volume of poetry.  It's the same, too, with the old, second-hand volume of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison that I have been wading through again this spring--I picture particular quotations the way they fall on the page, and when I think of the words, I picture the page the way I read it, now often with my added underlining.

All of this is to say that even though we can all concede that the text of a book is a separate "thing" from the physical volume itself that you check out from the library (or buy from the bookstore, or--come on, let's just say it--have delivered from Amazon) at the same time, in a sense the ideas in the text are forever "bound up" (no pun intended... well, maybe a little) with the actual physical object on whose pages you read the words.  The words of the author do indeed exist separately from the printed pages, but you and I can only encounter those words once they have been published, put on paper, and bound.  

I don't think it's a stretch, either, to say that in some real, meaningful sense, when you read someone else's words--especially in the pages of an actual book--you really do experience the presence of the author.  Those words of Kipling's in the poem, they came from his mind, his thought process, his way of seeing the world.  Those letters of Bonhoeffer's were first written in his own hand to friends and family during his imprisonment at Nazi internment camps, and you really get a sense of what he thinks and feels, as he himself is being shaped by the experience of prison while the shadow of an execution looms over him.

In a sense, you could say that the words, ideas, and stories of an author are embodied in a book, and that without the book itself, you would have no real way, short of a face-to-face conversation with the author her or himself, to receive those ideas and words.  The physical, bound book is the channel, and it matters--it becomes a part of the experience of sharing the mind of the author, in a way that would not feel the same if you simply viewed the text scrolling on a screen somewhere.  

So, in a nutshell, that's what it is to be human, as well.  We are embodied beings, and the embodiment matters.  We are not just brains that can walk, and we are not just collections of words and ideas that float in the ether or reside on "the Cloud."  We are embodied, so that the wonderful, complicated, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep thoughts, feelings, words, and stories that make you you, are contained in the specific physical bag of muscle, bone, sinew, and skin that is your body, and in the particular stream of minutes, days, and decades that you call your lifetime.  To be human is to be embodied, and so if human beings matter, our bodies matter.  We don't just "have" bodies--in a very real sense, we are bodies, much the same way an author's manuscript doesn't just float around in nothingness, but comes to you through the pages of a book, and the book itself is an important part of the connection between author and reader.  It would be a mistake, I believe, for me to get rid of my grandfather's poetry book simply because I can always Google the text of the poem if I want it.  And it would be a mistake to get rid of my copy of Bonhoeffer because I have read it once.  The book matters, and so do our bodies.

That by itself it an important point, because Christians are notorious for acting like our physical bodies are unimportant because they are temporal and earthly, and we have been taught to think about "spiritual" things.  And therefore over the centuries Christians have repeatedly made mistakes like saying it doesn't matter whether we eat well or exercise or sleep, because that's all just "body" stuff, and God (we say) only cares about spirits and souls.  Or we have ignored the way we treat other people's bodies--the way some people's bodies are treated as objects, or the way some people's bodies are treated as "less than" because of the color of their skin, or the way we have treated some people's bodies as expendable because they weren't like our bodies.  And on top of that, we have not always been very good and speaking up when the wider culture wants to judge people's worth on the shape, size, height, width, or appearance of their bodies.  

Let's just confess to it: sometimes we religious folks have been so focused on sounding "spiritual" that we forget the inherent beauty and value of the bodies through which we connect to one another.  It is only through the words produced by your mouth in a conversation, along with facial expressions and eye contact, that I get to know how you really think, for example.  It is only in the held hands around a circle of praying friends that I know I am not alone.  It is only in the embrace of someone I know loves me when my world is falling apart and my heart is broken open with grief that I can dare to believe that it will be all right.  And sometimes we church folk haven't treated that gift of embodiment as preciously as it has deserved.

Paul the apostle, however, has been hammering this home since the first century.  Our bodies matter, right off the bat because they are the means by which we connect with one another, much like you experience the actual words of a text through the pages of an physical book.  But even deeper, Paul says, the books that are our embodied selves are also the residence of the Author of all creation, the very living God by the Spirit.  Our bodies are like mobile, walking temples, Paul says, where the very Spirit of God resides.  That means our bodies matter--the same way I treat my grandfather's poetry book with deep respect because it both ties me to my grandfather and Kipling himself.  And because the physical book itself matters, I take care to use it in ways that it was meant for, rather than in ways that do violence to the book, or get in the way of the right connection it allows between me and the author.  I don't use my grandfather's poetry book for a doorstop.  I don't leave it near open flames.  I don't set my palette of paints on top of it, either, because any of those could damage the pages on which good and worthy words are written, and then I would lose the connection to those authors' minds.  So, too, Paul says, that we are called to treat one another's bodies as though they really do bring us into the presence of the very Spirit of God.  That means it matters what I do with my body... and it matters how I regard your body, too.  It means I will not judge your value based on the appearance of the outside cover, as the old proverb reminds us.  And I will not cause harm to your body, as though it doesn't matter.  And I will not treat you as less important a book simply because your pages are different from mine.  We are called, always, to regard each person who comes into our presence as of infinite importance, both because they are made in the image of God, and because it is into bodies such as ours that the Holy Spirit resides.

In Paul's day, the particular issue he was writing about to the Corinthians had to do with treating other people's bodies as objects through prostitution.  But the underlying idea is bigger than just the lyrics to Roxanne.  It's more than just a rule against hookers.  It's about how we regard our own bodies, and how we regard the bodies of others.  It means I cannot treat the bodies of some as expendable or ignorable, simply because they are far away or different from mine.  It means I cannot regard someone else's body as any less worthy of protection, even if theirs is different in melanin or culture or language or gender from mine.  

And, maybe hardest of all in this culture of ours, it means that even my own body is not simply "my possession" to do with as I choose.  I don't have the "right," no matter how many Facebook memes want to fuss otherwise, to do whatever I choose with my person, my possessions, my stuff, and my body--because they aren't really just mine.  They belong to God, who, as Paul reminds us, bought us at a price.  I am God's property--God's residence!--and so are you.  That means I don't have permission to harm you or myself--certainly not under some misguided notion of "but I have the freedom to do what I want."  I don't.  I don't have permission to act as though my body, or my life, is more important than yours, and that I should preserve my life at the expense of yours. I just don't. We are both claimed by Another.  Just like my grandfather's poetry book, which in my mind will always remain "my grandfather's" no matter how long it resides in my custody, isn't really mine to do whatever I want with it, but to care for and steward as a prized possession, we are each called to care for our own--and one another's--bodies, because they are not really purely "ours." We are stewards, the librarians of the whole world if you will, entrusted with both reading and taking care of a world full of volumes.  We are caretakers of one another's bodies, and of our own, because none other than the Spirit of God and the Author of Life resides in the pages of our stories.

O Spirit of God, enable us to be good and faithful stewards of the bodies and lives of the people you place across our paths today.