I Sing the Body Electric - Music Sunday

Today with music, singing, movement, words and silence,
with the sight and sound of one another,
we want to celebrate the body and the soul.

Walt Whitman’s great praise of the body begins,
“I sing the body electric…
The body conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more…
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing
flesh is enough…
These please the soul well….”

Whitman’s great lists and litanies catalogue and celebrate the body.
He seems to really see the body and all of its parts with amazement.

“Look on this wonder,” he sings,
“In this head the brain…
hair, ears, life-lit eyes, eye-fringes, iris of the eye,
pliant backbone and neck…muscle…
flesh…hands…knees…ankles, heels, foot.”

Not the body alone, he celebrates,
but how the body is the wholeness of the person,

“Exquisite sense, pluck, volition,” he sings.
“all attitudes, all the shapeliness,
all the belongings of my or your body
or in any one’s body.”

The external and the internal, he celebrates,
“lungs, the circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out,
stomach, bowels sweet and clean, heart-valves, sexuality,
the bones and marrow in the bones, the skin,
And wonders within there yet.

Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! The same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart,
there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations…”

His praise of the body celebrates the generative power of being.
At the time he wrote in the mid 1800s,
his poem was considered immoral,
shameful and profane,
but Whitman cried out,
“If any thing is sacred the human body is sacred.”

Not profane, but profound.

Some of the lines of the poem are lovingly familiar.
But many of us can forget that his poem was a response to slavery,
to the enslavement of bodies.

He saw a human body at auction, at slave auction
and he was outraged, ashamed-
Human beings selling other bodies like so much meat.

“The man’s body is sacred and the woman’s body is sacred.
No matter who, it is sacred.
Each belongs here or anywhere just as much as anyone else.”

Each body is to be honored, respected.
“Each has his or her place in the procession.”

His poem is a response to enslaving other bodies,
“O my body!
I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women.”

I dare not desert the likes of you in other beings.

Selling and buying human flesh now that’s immoral, that’s shameful.

As Jonah Lehrer writes in his chapter on Whitman
in his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist,
Whitman knew “To whip a man’s body was to whip a man’s soul.”

Whitman says, “O my body! I dare not desert…
the likes of the parts of you.
These are not the parts and poems of the body only,
but of the soul.
These are the soul!”

Using and abusing the body
that’s immoral; that’s shameful.
To touch another violently or without respect
is to do violence to the soul.

Violence to one body increases violence to everybody.

The way poet, essayist, farmer Wendell Berry says it is,
“You cannot devalue the body and value the soul-or anything else…
Contempt for the body is invariably manifested
in contempt for other bodies-
the bodies of slaves, laborers, women, animals, plants, the earth itself.”

One way of honoring the body is by respecting boundaries,
granting the body's owner its privacy, wholeness,
honoring its health and safety.

Whitman became a nurse, a great ministering angel
to the wounded in the Civil War hospitals.
He saw dying soldiers, unclaimed corpses,
stumps of arms, amputated hands.
“Whitman tried to heal what the surgeon couldn’t touch.”
[Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, p. 12]

Whitman fed soldiers, read them poetry,
treated each body and soul with reverence.
Each body was one to be celebrated, to be sung.

When we feel out of touch with our bodies,
out of touch with our emotions,
distant from the spirit,
we can breathe.

Many spiritual traditions teach
that we can bring to our awareness
the union of our bodies and our spirit through our breath.

Attention to our breathing brings us to now.
“Lungs, the circling rivers the breath, and breathing it in and out.”
We aren’t thinking of the past or the future.
Our attention is present.
Breathing calms us and brings peace to body and soul.
A being at peace, knowing peace, cannot harm life.

Throughout the week, when you are hurried or harried,
distraught or distracted,
I invite you to practice awareness of your breathing.

Something as simple as breathing,
some moments of conscious breathing,
first thing in the morning, last thing at night,
may bring you some peace.
Between now and next Sunday, I ask you to give it a try.

Conscious breathing brings us into our physicality, into our bodies.
Reverence for the body
is manifested in reverence for other bodies,
healthy and afflicted, weak and strong, young and old,
male, female, transgender, gay and straight,
Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jew, all the colors of the race,
reverence for the earth itself.

Conscious breathing tends body and soul.

Over and over again Whitman tries to tell us-
the body and the soul are one.

The divine world doesn’t wait to open us until the body’s life ends.

The physical world is the divine world.
Our physical lives are our divine lives.

It is not just that spirit enlivens our bodies, through our bodies
we come so close to knowing the divine
through the sensations on our skin, the beauty and pain of exertion,
the sights, sounds, smells, delights of the body.
Look around at all the beauty.
When you really look,
the flowers, the faces, the organ pipes, everything,
the worn places on the rug, on the pew, on your life,
all have their beauty.

And listen to your heart beat, the circling, cascading river of your breath,
the reverberation of the cello, voices joined in singing.

“Everything is alive and singing,” writes W.A. Mathieu in The Musical Life.
What we recognize as the vibrancy of our minds
is at the heart of everything created,
pervading and binding mice, minerals, and gravity.
Each order vibrates in its fashion;
Each octave sings.
Everywhere the oscillating flux is crooning its heart out.”

Everything is crooning its heart out.
All can awaken, nurture, call forth your soul.

Today we sing of the body, of sensuality, of spirituality.
We come here for this time set aside
to remember to see, listen, breathe now.

To love your body and that of others,
to love the body of the earth is to fall in love with life.

Ray Bradbury took Whitman’s phrase “I sing the body electric”
as a title for one of his stories.
Bradbury connects the body with spirited aliveness
with this description of a boy’s awareness,

“Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head.
He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear,
the third heart beating in his throat,
the two hearts throbbing his wrists,
the real heart pounding his chest.
The million pores on his body opened.
I’m really alive! he thought.” Really alive.

To love the body is to love the spirit.
To be in love with life is to be present,
to be in the present,
as well as to transcend time and space,
to know what is eternal right now.

We sing the body electric, the soul alive-
now and always,
now and always.