Wendell Berry on Health and Beauty

The Spirituality of Smell, Part 7

The grinding uniformity of synthetic cosmetics is only one of the ways our culture continually depersonalizes both men and women. Another way we do this is through unrealistic notions of beauty. As Wendall Berry observed in his essay ‘The Body and the Earth’:

Wendell Berry argued that we need a holistic
understanding of health that attends to all
aspects of our creaturely embeddedness:

Girls are taught to want to be leggy, slender, large-breasted, curly-haired, unimposingly beautiful. Boys are instructed to be "athletic" in build, tall but not too tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, narrow-hipped, square-jawed, straight-nosed, not bald, unimposingly handsome. Both sexes should look what passes for "sexy" in a bathing suit. Neither, above all, should look old.

Part of the problem, Berry explains, is that we have bought into a wrong paradigm for health. He urges us to return to a holistic understanding of health that attends to all aspects of our creaturely embeddedness:

Smell, Love and Emotion

The Spirituality of Smell, part 6

In her book Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, Helen Fisher shares that during Elizabethan times, it was typical for a girl to put apple pieces under her arm until it absorbed her scent. She would then offer the fruit to her boyfriend as a gift so that, when she was away from him, he could continue enjoying her unique scent.

Even today “in parts of Greece and the Balkans,” Fisher explains, “some men carry their handkerchiefs in their armpits during festivals and offer these odoriferous tokens to the women they invite to dance; they swear by the results. In fact, sweat is used around the world as an ingredient in love potions.”

Expunging Gender from Toy Stores

Earlier this year when I read that London’s most popular toy store, Hamleys, was undergoing a complete overhaul. In a monumental move that was full of symbolic significant, the shop did away with separate girls and boys sections. From then on, there would be no such thing as separate categories for “girls toys” and “boys toys.”

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What is a 'Spiritual Body'?

Paul opened chapter 15 with a defence of our blessed Lord’s resurrection against those who were denying it (1 Cor. 15:1-19; 29-34). But Paul’s mind moved naturally from Christ’s resurrection to the resurrection of all believers (15:20-28; 50-58). Thus, the chapter ends with the famous promise that we will be changed in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet (15:52).

In the middle of this discussion about resurrection, the apostle applied himself to a question that some people had apparently been asking, namely, what will the resurrection body be like? His answer to this question occupies the middle section of the chapter from verses 35-49. The tricky words occur in verse 44 when Paul is contrasting our present bodies with our future resurrection bodies. Paul writes, “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.”

Given the associations we have with the term “spiritual”, it has been easy for many people to assume that the antithesis Paul is talking about here is between a physical body and a non-physical body. For example, in their book "Heaven: A History," McDannel and Lang contend that

“The resurrected bodies of Pauline thought are not material but ‘spiritual.’ The bodies of those Christians who happen to be alive at the time of the resurrection will be changed ‘in a twinkling of an eye’ into spiritual beings that are immortal....The physical body (in contrast to the resurrected body) may be compared to a tent or garment where the ego, the soul, lives. According to Paul, God will prepare another home or garment for the soul after the death of the body.”

Many of our translations of 1 Corinthians 15 do make it seem that Paul is contrasting a natural physical body with an incorporeal spiritual body. For example, the Revised Standard Version even makes this assumption explicit when it translates verse 44 to read: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.” However, this is to completely misunderstand the Greek.

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Scent and Spirit

The Spirituality of Smell, part 4

We live in a culture that has drunk deeply from materialistic notion that the visible world is all there is. According to this narrative, human beings are simply collections of matter and energy.

Aromatherapy, which acknowledges the importance of the human soul, goes against this reductionistic view of the world. As Kurt Schnaubelt writes in Medical Aromatherapy: Healing With Essential Oils:

“Modalities such as aromatherapy, which acknowledge the phenomena of the soul, will be vastly more successful in treating the real problems of our times than conventional medicine….Fragrance has always transcended the material planes of consciousness (science) and communicated directly with those of the soul (the psycho-social plane).” (Schnaubelt, pp 15-16)

Recovering the Spirituality of Scent

The Spirituality of Smell, part 3

In our previous posts, ‘A whiff from which to benefit’ and ‘Scent and the Christian Church’, we began to explore the important role that fragrance plays in spirituality in general and the Christian church in particular. I ended the last post by suggesting that some of these truths have been lost in contemporary religious experience.

It is true that the Christian church has never ceased to use smell in its liturgical piety. In the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, incense made from Frankincense and other odor-producing plants forms an important part of their worship. Nevertheless, it is still safe to say that the spiritual importance of scent has been largely eclipsed in the Western world, especially among evangelical Protestant.

Scent and the Christian Church

The Spirituality of Smell, part 2

In the first post in this series, I cited the 4th century Saint, Ephrem the Syrian, who taught that God conveys His love to us through the smells of our world, which he referred to as “A vast censer exhaling fragrance.”

Saint, Ephrem the Syrian was not alone in his high view of fragrance. When the Church Father Origen (182-254) needed a metaphor for Christ’s love, he turned naturally to the world of smell and perfume:

A Whiff from Which to Benefit

The Spirituality of Smell, part 1


Earlier this year when I wasn't as busy, I took a few days to read about the interface between spirituality and smell. What follows is the first installment in a series of posts drawn from the notes I took during this reading.

A vast censer

St. Ephrem the Syrian

     exhaling fragrance
impregnates the air
     with its odoriferous smoke,
imparting to all who are near it
     a whiff from which to benefit.
How much the more so
     with Paradise the glorious:
even its fence assists us,
     modifying somewhat
that curse upon the earth
     by the scent of its aromas

St. Ephrem the Syrian
Hymns on Paradise, 11:13

Georg Lukacs

In my Salvo article on the sexualization of children, I talked about Wilhelm Reich, an early pioneer of the sex education movement. But I might equally have mentioned Georg Lukacs. In Linda Kimball's article for the American Thinker titled "Cultural Marxism", she notes that

In 1919, Georg Lukacs became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun regime in Hungary.  He immediately set plans in motion to de-Christianize Hungary.  Reasoning that if Christian sexual ethics could be undermined among children, then both the hated patriarchal family and the Church would be dealt a crippling blow. Lukacs launched a radical sex education program in the schools.  Sex lectures were organized and literature handed out which graphically instructed youth in free love (promiscuity) and sexual intercourse while simultaneously encouraging them to deride and reject Christian moral ethics, monogamy, and parental and church authority.  All of this was accompanied by a reign of cultural terror perpetrated against parents, priests, and dissenters. 

Hungary's youth, having been fed a steady diet of values-neutral (atheism) and radical sex education while simultaneously encouraged to rebel against all authority, easily turned into delinquents ranging from bullies and petty thieves to sex predators, murderers, and sociopaths.

The educators of today are more subtle, yet their objectives remain the same.

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Debt Limit Explained

Unrealistic Ideas of Beauty

In her article ‘Beauty and Body Modification’, Martin Donohoe gives numerous examples throughout history of unrealistic ideas of beauty. These include the following:
 

• In ancient China, the 4-inch "lotus foot" was considered a sign of perfect beauty, leading to the barbaric practice of foot-binding.
   
• Women in ancient Egypt, Rome and Persia used applied the heavy metal to make their eyes sparkle since this was considered attractive.
   
• In Elizabethan times a woman with a high forehead was considered beautiful and so women plucked or shaved their frontal hairs to achieve this look.
   
• During the 18th century, vermilion rouge, concocted of sulphur and mercury, was popular for improving a woman’s appearance. Women knowingly embraced this even though they knew it resulted in lost teeth and gingivitis.
   
• From the 14th to 19th centuries, corseting was a popular practice. It involved compressing the bosom and constricting the waist with tightly wound whalebone on a steel frame. This led to difficulty in breathing which caused many women to faint.

Unrealistic ideals of female beauty are seen today in the novel idea that an attractive woman must be thin, and the war against the body that this breeds in such things as unhealthy dieting.

I am told the average woman today devote around 19 minutes per day altering her face. And let’s not forget the whole body modification and tattoo industry.

Huckleberry Picking in the Northern Idaho Mountains

 

Susanna discovered that huckleberry juice makes a good face paint

Should Robots Have Rights?

By 2056, robots may be given the same rights as humans, a government-funded report claimed in 2006.

 

The report was conducted by the British Government’s chief scientist, Sir David King, and was written in conjunction with Outsights, a management consultancy group, and Ipos Mori, an opinion research organization.

If the report is correct, then in less than half a century from now, robots may even be able to vote, pay taxes and be called upon for compulsory military service.

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Neuroplasticity and the Sexualization of Children

The news in Britain has been peppered with stories about the scandal of our youth, who are being sexualized at increasingly younger and younger ages. Blame is being laid at the foot of products and entertainment which is targeted towards the youth and which encourage children to become sexually conscious at alarmingly young ages. The issue has created so much concern that the UK government has got involved to investigate the issue.

 

In an article I wrote for Salvo, I suggested that the government's investigations ought to avail themselves of recent developments in brain science. Without understanding the dynamics of how the human brain works, we will not be able to fully appreciate just how damaging is the environment in which the children of Britain are growing up.

  

I pointed out that recent discoveries have proved that the human brain is in a constant state of flux, a condition known as neuroplasticity. Put simply, the human brain is remarkably adaptable, constantly adjusting itself to the demands of one’s environment.

 

This neurological fluidity is good because it enables people to learn new skills, for stroke victims to recover function and for blind people to compensate for their loss by strengthening a part of the brain associated with other senses.