Absent from the Body?

Here’s a quote from 2 Corinthians 5:
“Therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (For we walk by faith, not by sight:) We are confident, I say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.”

I like the idea of being “present with the Lord,” but I think I’ve been, at times, rendered ineffectual by confusion of the meaning of being absent from the body. The phrase could be associated with out-of-body experiences, or it could mean that we’re supposed to cultivate an unfeeling state, stolid and stoic, and consort only with our concept of God, which we might assume would reside in our heads. We would read the words in our holy books and not try to associate too much with the experience of the world, since, presumably, we’d take in this information through our bodies, from which we desired to be absent. In our efforts to “translate things into thoughts” we would trade the vibrant, colorful, fragrant world for dusty, abstract, concepts. This would give us a God that we could have intellectual ideas about, but not a God we could really feel.

This can’t be what is meant by the phrase. If our purpose were actually to have no relations with things in the physical world, why would physical healing be part of our ministry? Why would we care what our body was manifesting, if we are supposed to be absent from it anyway?

So it must mean something other than that. Here are some things that shed light on the subject:

Immanuel means “God within.” Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you.” If God is omnipresent, it can’t mean that God is present up to the boundary of our skins, and then there is the part where God isn’t because our bodies are there. God is law, and law permeates and pervades everything. In fact, it’s not just that God permeates and pervades everything – it’s that God is what is. There’s no “everything” first which God then permeates and pervades; everything is within the being of God, and so is subject to God’s law.

So we, here and now, in the place that we may think of as “in our bodies,” are the manifestation of God. Here where we feel joy, where we delight in beauty, where our hearts swell with love, is where we experience God. Here where we walk in our own centered balance, and speak in our own centered truth, we are present with the Lord. We don’t know God by absenting ourselves from all of the glory that is Life – we know God by being Life’s expression, with all the strength, agility, beauty, sensitivity and love that entails.

So what are we to be absent from? More and more I’m seeing that we are to be absent from complaint. What we perceive as our body is a fine instrument for expressing the glory of God, but when it wants to turn around and tell us it needs certain conditions met in order for it to experience or express goodness, it is out of line. If God is creator, and God is good, then good is here now, and there are no conditions on it. If we are present with the Lord, we are aware that good is here now. I think Paul’s sense of being “at home in the body” is the sense of being at the beck and call of all the body’s complaints. I think from this place we can’t be aware of God’s continual goodness, because we’re assuming it’s not there until conditions by the body are met.

Mrs. Eddy says the intercommunication is always from God to man. This to me is a clue that we receive the knowledge of God right where we are, right in what we perceive as our bodies, and we feel present in that goodness, right in our bodies. But the body doesn’t get to be the determiner of anything – it doesn’t get to send information back. This makes sense, since there isn’t any place in consciousness we can go where God isn’t. So there isn’t any source of information or communication other than goodness.

Mrs. Eddy also writes: “If we look to the body for pleasure, we find pain; for Life, we find death; for Truth, we find error; for Spirit, we find its opposite, matter. Now reverse this action. Look away from the body into Truth and Love, the Principle of all happiness, harmony, and immortality. Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts.” I think this means look away not in a spatial sense. Look into Truth and Love not in a different place from where our body is. But look at Truth and Love right where we are, right as we experience it in what we think of as our bodies. Look away from complaint or a sense that there are conditions to be met before goodness is present. Consider that the divine cause establishes everything that we are, including our bodies. Then we will exude the health and glory which are God’s plan for us.