Finding God in the Body

For a long time, I thought God lived in my thoughts.

That prayer happened in the mind. That holiness was abstract. That my body was just… extra. Flesh to be controlled. Silenced. Transcended.

But Zen pulled me down, into my breath, into my belly, into my bones.

And Christ met me there.

Not as an idea, but as presence.

Not as a concept, but as touch.

Not as a faraway king, but as something pulsing behind my ribcage.

Christianity talks a lot about incarnation, God made flesh.

But we forget that means this flesh.

This anxious chest. This trembling hand. These tired shoulders that carry too much.

Zen doesn’t ask you to believe in the body.

It asks you to feel it.

To return, again and again, to the breath as teacher.

To the spine as altar.

To the sacred rhythm of inhale… exhale… surrender.

I didn’t know how disembodied my faith had become until I sat still long enough to feel everything I’d been avoiding.

The grief I’d bypassed in worship.

The shame buried under doctrine.

The simple truth that God wasn’t out there, God was here. In me. As me. Through me.

That’s not ego. That’s incarnation.

Jesus didn’t just visit the body. He became it.

He ate. He sweat. He wept. He touched people.

And then he said, “This is my body, broken for you.”

He wasn’t pointing to an idea. He was pointing to this.

So when I sit in Christian Zen, I’m not escaping the world.

I’m entering it through the only doorway I have, this body, this breath, this moment.

And somehow, in the silence between heartbeats, I hear it:

You are already holy.

Not someday. Not once you heal.

Now. In this skin.

So don’t run from the body.

It’s where God lives now.