We are Members
As a musician I’ll sporadically read about anatomy and exercises for healthy playing and singing. I’m learning how the body works as a whole, how bones, muscle and fascia pull and push in support together crafting all that the body participates in, experiences, or produces.
It’s had me thinking about the global Body of Christ and what efforts we put into learning about our how we work together, for good or bad. Our impact in the public space may be dangerously unexamined and unchecked if too many of us are as sporadic in paying attention to this holistic health and work as I have been with one musician’s body! These readings show me how some of my muscles work against others, and those battles work against the music I’m trying to share. Perhaps much of the world’s discord is, similarly, tense and fearful work between and against different parts of the Body of Christ.
It’s had me thinking about the global Body of Christ and what efforts we put into learning about our how we work together, for good or bad. Our impact in the public space may be dangerously unexamined and unchecked if too many of us are as sporadic in paying attention to this holistic health and work as I have been with one musician’s body! These readings show me how some of my muscles work against others, and those battles work against the music I’m trying to share. Perhaps much of the world’s discord is, similarly, tense and fearful work between and against different parts of the Body of Christ.
"There’s still research needed on the subject of support and breathing, and how this relates to us as musicians, as this is a complex interaction and in a partly invisible area of movement that happens deep inside the body.”1
The metaphor forms questions for our convulsive Body of Christ. How can we research the subject of support and breathing, allowing the filling and guiding of the Holy Spirit into such a broken and disjointed body? What are the supports we need to pay attention to together? What practices and learning can both strengthen and grow our actions and participation—our fruitfulness and faithfulness, our courage—as Christ’s body in the public space?
Through God’s marvelous and mysterious designs we are here together. And the human family inevitably bears the burdens and the bruises of all that our Body of Christ gets tangled up in too. But the Body of Christ is a child in this human family with great potential for healing and fruitful participation in the wider world. Like the lessons around the musician’s anatomy, there’s still research needed around support and breathing for us as the Body of Christ, and the complex interaction… in a partly invisible area of movement that happens deep inside… ”
As a student of research, I share a commitment to be part of this study, conversation, the re-formation, and the ongoing participation with the global Body of Christ toward working together more faithfully, fruitfully, and courageously through the power and leading of the Holy Spirit. I invite you to join me in these questions.
Even on the front end of this work, I see growing values and abilities in the digital humanities sectors opening potential spaces for generative, collaborative work and input across the global Body of Christ.2 Plus, we will learn from one another across our vastly different disciplines as well. This first blog post is both my first work with coding and also a small effort to broaden the conversation beyond the academy or clergy.3 It is crucial to hear disciples of diverse voices from across the world for this growth. Your constructive input toward helping us work more faithfully together in Christ’s Spirit is welcome here too!
Imagine the glorious music and healing arts the Holy Spirit might help us perform together as we give ourselves to this learning and growth. And…
the creation waits with eager longing! (Romans 8:19)
Mike Cantley is a PhD student in “Public Theology and Witness” at United Lutheran Seminary in Gettysburg, PA.
2 Tina Margareta Nilssen, Unleashing the Potential of the Musician’s Body : Timani: Anatomy and Exercises for Healthy Playing and Singing (Chicago, GIA Publications, Inc., 2021), 249.
2 For example, we can openly recognize and honor those collaborators bringing their skills for digitization that facilitate our engagement, communication, and data collection. This interdisciplinary collaboration exemplifies some of the better directions Digital Humanities (DH) as a field is growing into as we learn and move away from old practices of separating and making highly visible scholarship over the much more invisible labor and skills of digitization. When we know better, we can do better. “As Patrick Svensson writes, ‘What seems uncontroversial from an internal perspective, can be exclusionary from an outside perspective.’” Astrid J. Smith and Bridget Whearty, “All the Work You Do Not See: Labor, Digitizers, and the Foundations of Digital Humanities” in Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein eds. Debates in the Digital Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 31.
3 This initial effort at elementary coding is new to me, but it is my initial steps in working toward an open access public theology project with genuine collaboration and benefit from and for all of the diverse population that is the global Body of Christ.