God Map/Body Map

Today I was supposed to turn in an assignment for my theology class called the God Map/Body Map.  The only instructions we were given were as follows:

The purpose of the project is to map your view of youself and to map your view of God.  In many ways this is a creative exploration of the connection/distinction between humanity and God.  Use your imagination.  Mediums may vary.  It can be anything frm a collage to music to flow charts, etc.

Em, ok.

So what I didn't realize (and that I am realizing more and more everyday), is how disconnected I am from my body.  What I have realized especially in this whole process so far is that I really don't connect my body to spirituality whatsoever.  Yet, as Christians believe, human beings were created in the image of God.  Therefore, it was no mistake that God would have put us in these fleshy bags of bones, only to later become incarnate in one of the bags of flesh himself.

And as my previous post implied, what we do to our bodies, what we put in them, what we do with them - it's all significant with regard to how we view ourselves, the world around us, and God.

Again, these are not things I normally think about.  I have grown up in the church hearing "your body is a temple" and "you are the hands and feet of Christ."  These were the only references to a physical spirituality that I ever got.  Two important notes: First, I never took it literally.  I figured that if so many other parts of the Bible were metaphors, then why would my body literally be a temple?  That was just absurd.  Second, these proclamations were never freeing or invigorating; instead, they boxed in my body.  They told me what I could and could not do with my body (mostly with regard to sexual promiscuity and tattoos).  While the lessons I learned were certainly valuable and kept me out of trouble, also embedded in my brain was that everything important about me was invisible - nothing physical had significance in the kingdom of God.  "Be in the earth, not of it."

Therefore, as I began to start thinking about this assignment for my theology class, I was literally dumbfounded.  I had nowhere to begin.  No direction in which to even take a first step.  Unfortunately, I waited long enough that I still had nothing the day before the assignment was due and sent an e-mail to my professor asking for advice; I told her that I wanted to take the assignment seriously since it was apparently a significant topic for me to address.  Graciously, without me even asking, she has given me an extension on the project.

So I was walking home from class today and suddenly the images of my face below came into my mind.  I'm not exactly sure what it all means just yet, but there is something significant about allowing myself to see with eyes open, and then what happens in the darkness of my closed eyes.  The first couple of pictures are of our dining room table as I was preparing for the project.  I'll let you know what comes of it.

FYI - the images that do not have a totally black background will be fixed.  It's tough taking self-portraits!