Enjoying Sensuality

Only when people accept every metaphysical dimension of themselves will they have a right understanding of human nature.  Just as intellectual activity and introspection affirm that we are mental, spiritual, and rational beings due to our consciousnesses, bodily activity affirms that we are physical beings due to our bodies.  To only look to one side or the other trivializes creation.

While the modern church is becoming somewhat more accepting of the fact that humans are intellectual beings (largely due to hostility towards Christian ideas and not the self-motivated application of intelligence, might I add), it still is common for Christians to struggle with appreciating human physicality, thanks to an asceticism ingrained in Christians from a young age.  While the mind is more significant than the body in that there is no self apart from the mind, many have misconcluded that the body must therefore be ignored or denied in order to focus on the spirit.

It can be of great spiritual benefit to perform tasks that emphasize the fact that we are embodied beings.  When we enjoy sensuality, we accept the fact that God intentionally fashioned the human mind to inhabit a physical body.  Engaging in sensual behaviors is nothing more than the pleasing of the senses.  As such, there is nothing to fear about doing so; after all, God made the human body to experience pleasure.  God did not create humans to be nothing more than unembodied consciousnesses.  We are mental and physical beings, not solely one or the other.

To reject physicality is to reject an integral part of creation.  Asceticism has no part in the church, since the church should be the first gathering place where people can acknowledge, celebrate, and savor sensuality.  The only reason this might seem like a revolutionary concept is because evangelical Christians tend to wage war upon miscellaneous aspects of human nature--whether the intellect, emotionality, sexuality, or so on--out of severe misunderstandings of Biblical doctrines.

Any transformation of the church must begin as an individual revolt against irrationality, heresy, and legalism.  As such, individual Christians can exert a great deal of influence over whether others will persist in asceticism or will embrace the physicality of the human body.