“Spa” and “spirituality” may seem disconnected concepts. Spas exist for the body, the senses. We visit them (those who do, in varying degrees of frequency; for me, it is a historically rare event) for the sensual pleasures they afford, the improvement of the body’s appearance or feel. From soft New Age music in the background to fountains of water cheerfully dancing over carefully arranged rocks, from the aromatherapy of incense, candles, or perfumed lotions to that glorious feeling of tired and tense muscles suddenly and blissfully “letting go”…what is remotely spiritual about such things?
A few years ago my son gave me a Christmas present- a gift certificate for a spa in a nearby town that was so generous that I made several trips for different services before it was used up. I had a facial, a massage….then decided to try something I’d never heard of, some kind of a mud mixture body wrap that hardened and had to be peeled off.
I felt just like the ornery boy Eustace Clarence Scrubb must have felt in C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan peeled away layers and layers of dragon skin (he had turned into a dragon after sleeping on a dragon’s pile of riches, dreaming covetously all night) to get to the penitent boy beneath. The sensation of having the mask stripped away felt wonderful, powerfully cleansing, like getting new skin.
Scripturally, we are to “put on the new self” (Colossians 3:10), “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14), “put on the full armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11). Before that, however, we must present ourselves as a living sacrifice and let the Holy Spirit take care of the old nature, the sin that clings and weighs us down (see Romans 12, Hebrews 12, and basically anything written by the apostle Paul).
Last week, I really splurged. Wednesday I had a Swedish massage with Samantha, the new masseuse at Bella East in Lillington (no charge for the promotion, ladies). Friday I took advantage of their July special on facials. As I lay back with the fountain burbling nearby, Kim expertly applying hot towels, creams, a mud mask, I thought about how unusual it was (for me) to pay so much attention to my head and face. Daily cleaning, sporadic damage control, and make-up is accomplished as quickly as possible…this was an entire hour devoted.
Which led me, head swathed in a hot towel, to think of Christ being the head of the Church, his Body. Our bodies do the work throughout our days, muscles straining, heart pumping, lungs exhaling and inhaling, feet walking, hands typing, but bodies can only function as they are connected to the head, to our brains which send out the appropriate signals and commands. Without the head, we are powerless and ineffectual.
Perhaps my mind went in that direction because of a funeral I’d attended a few days earlier, that of a woman about my age who had been in a vegetative state for eleven years. Although family visited, read to her, held her hands, there was never a response…a connection between brain and body had been forever lost.
Some people are uncomfortable with discussing the body, as if the fact that we can (and do, on a regular basis) use our bodies to sin makes the body itself a thing of shame and embarrassment. They forget that God pronounced its creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) and chose to clothe himself within human flesh to restore our broken relationship to him, in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Bible, far from any agreement to that line of thought, is full of references to the physical nature of all that God created “good”. The Word tells us that our prayers rise to heaven as incense. The Revelation portrait of Jesus says his voice is like the “sound of many waters.” As the old song goes, the Lord “poured in the oil and the wine, the kind that restoreth my soul…he found me bleeding and dying on the Jericho road, and he poured in the oil and the wine.” Sensual pictures, all, appealing to the God-ordained abilities to touch, taste, smell, hear.
When God creates and blesses physicality and sensuality…it is spiritual. And he can use anything and everything around us…even a mud mask…to remind us of his love and truth.
A few years ago my son gave me a Christmas present- a gift certificate for a spa in a nearby town that was so generous that I made several trips for different services before it was used up. I had a facial, a massage….then decided to try something I’d never heard of, some kind of a mud mixture body wrap that hardened and had to be peeled off.
I felt just like the ornery boy Eustace Clarence Scrubb must have felt in C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan peeled away layers and layers of dragon skin (he had turned into a dragon after sleeping on a dragon’s pile of riches, dreaming covetously all night) to get to the penitent boy beneath. The sensation of having the mask stripped away felt wonderful, powerfully cleansing, like getting new skin.
Scripturally, we are to “put on the new self” (Colossians 3:10), “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14), “put on the full armor of God” (Ephesians 6:11). Before that, however, we must present ourselves as a living sacrifice and let the Holy Spirit take care of the old nature, the sin that clings and weighs us down (see Romans 12, Hebrews 12, and basically anything written by the apostle Paul).
Last week, I really splurged. Wednesday I had a Swedish massage with Samantha, the new masseuse at Bella East in Lillington (no charge for the promotion, ladies). Friday I took advantage of their July special on facials. As I lay back with the fountain burbling nearby, Kim expertly applying hot towels, creams, a mud mask, I thought about how unusual it was (for me) to pay so much attention to my head and face. Daily cleaning, sporadic damage control, and make-up is accomplished as quickly as possible…this was an entire hour devoted.
Which led me, head swathed in a hot towel, to think of Christ being the head of the Church, his Body. Our bodies do the work throughout our days, muscles straining, heart pumping, lungs exhaling and inhaling, feet walking, hands typing, but bodies can only function as they are connected to the head, to our brains which send out the appropriate signals and commands. Without the head, we are powerless and ineffectual.
Perhaps my mind went in that direction because of a funeral I’d attended a few days earlier, that of a woman about my age who had been in a vegetative state for eleven years. Although family visited, read to her, held her hands, there was never a response…a connection between brain and body had been forever lost.
Some people are uncomfortable with discussing the body, as if the fact that we can (and do, on a regular basis) use our bodies to sin makes the body itself a thing of shame and embarrassment. They forget that God pronounced its creation “very good” (Genesis 1:31) and chose to clothe himself within human flesh to restore our broken relationship to him, in the person of Jesus Christ.
The Bible, far from any agreement to that line of thought, is full of references to the physical nature of all that God created “good”. The Word tells us that our prayers rise to heaven as incense. The Revelation portrait of Jesus says his voice is like the “sound of many waters.” As the old song goes, the Lord “poured in the oil and the wine, the kind that restoreth my soul…he found me bleeding and dying on the Jericho road, and he poured in the oil and the wine.” Sensual pictures, all, appealing to the God-ordained abilities to touch, taste, smell, hear.
When God creates and blesses physicality and sensuality…it is spiritual. And he can use anything and everything around us…even a mud mask…to remind us of his love and truth.
Permission to use with acknowledgement of source.
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