I have often thought of books as beacons, marking the currents in my life, the low tides, the high tides.  I can clearly point to the books that infused me with all kinds of ideas, and sometimes I would quietly think that I gained more insights from novels and books of poetry than works of theology. Much later I came to realise that the body is its own book, with stories written all over (and inside) the body.

I enjoy reading poetry. And if I do need to start with a poem, then surely it must be the poem, I sing the body electric by Walt Whitman written in 1855:

I sing the body electric,

The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them,

They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them,

And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the

soul.

Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal

themselves?

And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile

the dead?

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?

And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

Jimmie Killingsworth describes the images of the body electric as “the human body charged with sexual energy, open to the entreaties of companions male and female, driven by consuming desire, containing the sources of psychological, as well as political power”.

In the bodytheology blogs I want to explore this idea of the body electric, not only in theology and narrative therapy, but in poetry books and novels, cognitive science and philosophy, psychology and in the ordinary events of everyday life. The body matters.