Ineffable
Love eBook Club: Day 1
Monday 13th
April 2020
Welcome to Day 1 of our Good
Omens-themed week, with Alex Booer and Emma Hinds – authors of Ineffable
Love: Exploring Christian themes in Good Omens! We’re assuming our readers
will have watched the TV show, but there’s probably something in here for those
of you who haven’t. Join us this week as we share some extracts from the book
and invite you to bring your own thoughts and creative ideas on social media!
Our book, Ineffable
Love – out now on Kindle and eBook from DLT! - is an individual study guide
that explores life and the Christian faith through the lens of the hit TV show,
Good Omens. We explore themes of Justice, Bodies, Power, Belief, Hope, and
Love and Renewal in six chapters, through commentary on the show, Bible
studies, creative suggestions for our readers and our own creative reflections.
It’s full of questions to invite thought and discussion, as well as ideas for
further study. Today’s book club showcases part of Chapter 2.
Chapter 2 of Ineffable
Love is all about bodies and matter! We’ve seen a lot of anxiety going
around about our bodies during this time of crisis.
Some of us are afraid of
getting seriously ill, very understandably.
Some of us are concerned
that restricted access to foods and our usual routines will mean we can’t maintain
our bodies in the way we or society think is ideal. This is, in a different
way, understandable too. Are we going to stay in, eat takeaway and get fat? If
we can’t get to the hairdressers or the waxing parlour, are we going to become
unattractive? And if so,
what does that mean for our worth?
In Good Omens, the angel
Aziraphale navigates the realities of having a body and enjoying earthly matters
of music, theatre, food and drink. If you’ve got access to Episode 1 of Good
Omens, have a watch from around 12 minutes 50 seconds to 14 minutes 30
seconds.
We’ve summarised the scene here:
Aziraphale is getting sushi, inhaling in
blissful anticipation, when his superior, the Archangel Gabriel, appears to
spoil the moment. Gabriel asks Aziraphale why, as an angel – presumably not
needing the sustenance – he consumes that. Aziraphale’s explanations
cycle through initial delight in something he seems to think should be
self-evident (‘It’s sushi!’) and then a description of the benefit (‘It’s
nice!’) and then, resigned and subdued, an excuse (‘It’s what humans do’). If
he’s going to pass, Aziraphale has to keep up appearances, of course. Gabriel
eschews both food and drink – ‘I do not sully the celestial temple of my body
with gross matter’ – but he does like the clothes. What a shame Armageddon will
be along soon to end it all …
A question to our
readers: What does the idea of our bodies being ‘temples’ mean to you? How does
it impact your self-image?
Alex has thoughts about
this! This is an excerpt from our book.
There’s a moment in the
2008 Guillermo Del Toro film Hellboy II: The Golden Army where the
hard-living and jovial hero encourages his lovesick best friend to drown his
sorrows in cheap beer. ‘My body is a temple!’ objects the flustered and
usually ascetic humanoid amphibian, Abe Sapien. ‘It’s an amusement park!’
growls Hellboy, good-naturedly, before the two go off and get sozzled together.
‘I do not sully the
celestial temple of my body with gross matter,’ says Gabriel in Good Omens, and
it’s a damning indictment of Aziraphale’s simple joy in his meal!
Temples, for me, bring to
mind the Parthenon, the Forum in Rome and empty Victorian follies by sculpted
lakes. That classical look: all white limestone: unused, unlived in and empty.
Heaven, in the universe of
Good Omens – Gabriel’s external ‘celestial temple’, if you will – is a
similarly barren, clinical and pristine space. It’s bright, and white and full
of light. There’s no clutter. Nothing personal. No signs of life or something
as necessary to living as food, or a body, which Gabriel seems to take to mean
as something less than spiritual, not holy. Sully, he says. Gross matter. His
disgust is palpable.
We often use this phrase –
‘my body is a temple’ – as Gabriel does, to mean we should be careful what we
let into our bodies in case we irreparably distort something fragile and easily
besmirched. Matter, we’re expected to understand, is dirty. Food is
particularly dangerous. It’s everywhere – advertisements for ‘clean eating’,
images that stoke the fear of putting things inside us and the consequences of
consuming too much. Much of it is in the service of selling us things that we
can purchase or do to absolve us of our fear of falling short of Gabriel’s inhuman
pristine ideal. This is what we are supposed to be, a neo-classical temple:
clean, sharp, vertical columns of whiteness. Free of wobbles, or melanin, or
blemishes, or wrinkles, or disease, or variety in shape. God, or indeed
Gabriel, forbid that we age, or we are born – or stray – outside what society
wishes us to be, or that our bodies change through circumstances or our own
choices. As Gabriel points out, ‘It’s so … human.’ We wear the proof of
our imperfect humanity in our bodies, and we, like Aziraphale, are often
shamed.
This use of the metaphor
of the body as a temple is not a godly one. Not in the show, where God’s
purposes are very different from those of Heaven’s. And not in the Bible, where
the metaphor means something very different.
The temple that the
apostle Paul, from whom we get the phrase (1 Corinthians 6:19), and Jesus (John
2:19, Mark 14:58) refer to, is the place where God is present in this world
made of matter. New Testament scholars Paula Gooder (Body, SPCK, 2016)
and N. T. Wright (Creation, Power and Truth, SPCK, 2013) have written in
depth on this. For Jews, the inner room of the Temple was the one place where
God’s presence physically existed on earth. For Paul, post-Pentecost, it is our
bodies that are the place where the Holy Spirit makes Her home. Our bodies are
temples because, here on earth, they are the place God is.
In this model there’s
little point in a celestial (i.e. heavenly) temple because, as noted for
example in the vision recorded in Revelation 21:22, God’s presence is
everywhere.
Despite the popular
vernacular, Christian beliefs and practices centre bodies as the mucky vehicle
through which we experience God. There is to be a bodily resurrection; a
restoration of the earth; Jesus was born as human, with a body, God incarnate –
God embodied; and most Christian traditions adopt a meal as the central
practice of worship.
You, as your body, are
holy not because you have never been touched by corruption, or – despite the
Old Testament purity laws! – stretched by pregnancy, or because your body
doesn’t work the way you wished, or doesn’t measure up to the expectations you
and others have for it. Your body is holy because it is where God is.
Jesus seemed to go out of
his way to subvert the more exclusionary purity rules anyway: touching lepers,
eating, drinking, and generally crossing boundaries that existed to diminish
and shame people for being simply people (Matthew 11:19). Gabriel is – as
becomes apparent during the course of the show – entirely wrong about the desires
of God as pertaining to bodies and food.
As Jesus himself points
out, ‘What goes into someone's mouth does not defile them, but what comes out
of their mouth, that is what defiles them.’ (Matthew 15:11) He goes on to
explain to Peter: ‘Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the
stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of a person's
mouth come from the heart, and these defile them.’ (Matthew 16:17–18)
Eat that, Gabriel.
A follow-up question to
our readers …
What images, feelings and
thoughts did Gabriel’s temple metaphor bring to mind for you? Did you relate to
anything in Alex’s reflection above? If not, what else did it bring up? If you
want to share your thoughts, tweet us! @IneffablyLovely on Twitter.
Get Creative!
Throughout Ineffable
Love, we invite you to explore the show using your own imagination and
creativity.
Pick a small (or
not-so-small!) thing to do, to rebel against any insidious voices you have that
undermine your embodied identity as the place where God makes Their home. Do
whatever that looks like for you, if you feel able to do so. Have sushi! Paint
those nails!
Make a cup of tea! Have sex! Wear your favourite hat. Finally get
that tattoo! Well … maybe not that last one right now … But soon, we hope!
Soon!
Let your bodies show that
you lived and do not be ashamed!
***
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