[Jubilee] Fwd: SOF: The Body's Grace: Matthew Sanford's Story (October 5, 2006)
Chris Steinbeisser-Fitz
cfitz at hampshire.edu
Fri Oct 13 10:05:30 PDT 2006
Friends, related to "embodied faith," this interview/article is
incredibly compelling. It's about a paraplegic who comes to healing and
eventually becomes a yoga instructor. Read on or go to:
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/bodysgrace/index.shtml
Make sure you receive our weekly e-mail newsletter. Add
newsletter at speakingoffaith.org <mailto:newsletter at speakingoffaith.org>
to your "contacts" or "address book."
Click to go to American Public Media's home page.
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,jy5h,73n3,4yuf,eatv>
Click to go to Speaking of Faith's home page.
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,98cf,fpkg,4yuf,eatv>
Speaking of Faith E-mail Newsletter
Click image to visit the Web site for The Body's Grace: Matthew
Sanford's Story.
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,8zhu,4y1j,4yuf,eatv>
Krista's Journal: October 5, 2006
Online Exclusives
SOF Podcast
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,6bhk,8jk4,4yuf,eatv>
Now you can listen to Krista and her guests on /Speaking of Faith/ at
any time and anywhere you like. Just subscribe to the free SOF Podcast.
Then, every Thursday you'll be able to automatically download an mp3 of
the latest program to your computer --- all for no charge.
Complete Transcript
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,25wm,ilbw,4yuf,eatv>
Read the full transcript of "Faith Fired by Literature." Art, life, and
religious faith converge in Paul Elie's unusual biography of the
intersecting religious stories of four literary Americans of the
mid-20th century whose writings still capture readers today: Trappist
monk Thomas Merton, social activist Dorothy Day, and fiction writers
Walker Percy and Flannery O'Connor.
Upcoming Broadcasts:
» */Globalization and the Rise of Religion/* (October 12)
Experts once predicted that as the world grew more modern, religion
would decline. Precisely the opposite has proven true. Two leading
thinkers, Boston University sociologist Peter Berger and Harvard
Business School's Rosabeth Moss Kanter, discuss why religion of all
kinds is increasingly shaping discussions of world politics and the
global economy and political order.
» */A Spirit of Defiance/* (October 19)
In this close-up look at the human dynamics of the war on terror, our
guest speaks about her husband, journalist Daniel Pearl, who was
murdered in Pakistan shortly after 9/11. She talks about Buddhism, her
ethic of spiritual defiance, and her hopes for the future.
Recent Broadcasts
» Faith Fired by Literature
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,49rg,2e5a,4yuf,eatv>
» Listening Generously: The Medicine of Rachel Naomi Remen
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,fupp,a2x8,4yuf,eatv>
» Conservative Politics and Moderate Religion
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,c7nr,lwi0,4yuf,eatv>
with former Sen. John Danforth
» Hearing Muslim Voices Since 9/11
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,lwh1,jyoz,4yuf,eatv>
with Seyyed Hossein Nasr
» Religious Passion, Pluralism, and the Young
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,mcr3,7ztt,4yuf,eatv>
with Eboo Patel
GIVE TODAY!
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,bjvj,68a8,4yuf,eatv>
Your tax-deductible contribution helps support /Speaking of Faith/'s
many services, including free streaming audio and Web exclusives.
About /Speaking of Faith/
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,cg4g,kg38,4yuf,eatv>
Hosted by Krista Tippett, the public radio program is heard weekly on
*radio stations*
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,5rdd,eii3,4yuf,eatv>
around the country, bringing a wide range of intelligent religious ideas
and voices into American life.
Contact Us
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,d5av,c4ht,4yuf,eatv>
We'd love to hear your comments or suggestions about the e-mail
newsletter and our Web site. Let us know how we're doing!
*SOF via Radio*:
» Find your station
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,d8w9,kus5,4yuf,eatv>
*SOF OnDemand:*
» Listen Now
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,bupw,fdbk,4yuf,eatv>
/(RA)/
» Download
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,df8j,5dxr,4yuf,eatv>
/(mp3)/
» Podcast
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,6bhk,8jk4,4yuf,eatv>
*SOF via E-mail:*
» Sign up for the newsletter
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,aczz,gewd,4yuf,eatv>
/This week on public radio's conversation about religion, meaning,
ethics, and ideas:/
*The Body's Grace: Matthew Sanford's Story*
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,8zhu,4y1j,4yuf,eatv>
Matthew Sanford has been a paraplegic since the age of 13. Now 40, he's
an expert practitioner and instructor of yoga, which he also adapts for
students with mental and physical disabilites. He's written a remarkable
book, /Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendance/. He has wisdom for
us all on knowing the strength and grace of our bodies even in the face
of illness, aging, and death.
Krista Tippett, host of Speaking of Faith
*A Fluid Connection Severed and United*
U.S. culture glorifies "perfect" bodies. At the other end of that
spectrum, we champion people who fight when their bodies fail. Matthew
Sanford has charted another way. In his lyrical memoir, he describes how
he learned to live in his whole body again, despite an irreversible
paralysis, in part through the practice of yoga. And like every story
well told, his contains lessons that reach beyond the confines of one
person's experience.
Here is the kind of passage --- one of several Matthew reads in this
program --- that made me want to understand more.
"I am forced to feel death --- not the end of my life, but the death
of my life as a walking person. In principle my experience is not
that uncommon, only more extreme. If we can see death as more than
black and white, as more than on and off, there are many versions of
realized death short of physically dying. The death of a loved one
sets so much in motion... Then there are also the quiet deaths. How
about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or
the Queen of Sheba?... What about the day we began working not for
ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids might have a
better life? Or the day we realized that, on the whole, adult life
is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our
ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet
another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying
so that another part can live."
The "mind-body connection" is a controversial phrase, a new-age notion
to some, though it has been studied and described scientifically in a
multitude of forms in recent years. I have spoken with scientists
engaged in that work, but none of them has impressed me with the reality
of the mind-body connection as Matthew Sanford does by his mere presence.
For over a quarter century, as a result of a car accident that killed
his father and sister, he has been in a wheelchair. Yet I've rarely sat
across from a person so alive, a body so palpably whole and wholly
energetic as his. He has knitted his mind and body back together again
over a quarter century, wresting wholeness through layers of cultural
denial.
As we speak, Matthew Sanford makes me aware of the seamless cooperation
of my mind and uninjured body, a synergy most of us take completely for
granted. I stand up and walk as soon as the desire crosses my mind; I
gesture with my hands to illustrate an idea I am passionate about; I
shake my foot as my own engagement in conversation rises.
This kind of fluid connection was severed in Sanford. Yet as he
struggled to come to terms with his body's new realities during years of
recovery and violent corrective surgeries, he encountered another kind
of mind-body connection that our culture practices instinctively,
reflexively. We celebrate those who battle adversity, triumph over
obstacles, beat the odds. We love the 80-year-old man who runs a
marathon, the injured hero who never gives up pursuing the technology
that will enable him to walk again. This is the mind-body connection
translated as a battle of will over matter.
Matthew Sanford heeded these kinds of images for many years. He accepted
the advice that he should declare the lower half of his body dead and
pour all of his energy into creating bodybuilder arms. He lived for
years, he says, feeling like a floating upper torso. Then in a time of
renewed pain he gave yoga a try. He was fortunate to have a first
teacher who specialized in Iyengar yoga.
Iyengar focuses on precision and alignment, qualities Sanford's body
needed and could grasp. Through yoga, he came to a conviction that
healing, for him, did not have to mean walking again. Yet he learned to
experience his paralyzed limbs in a new way. He describes it as a subtle
sensation of energy to which he has patiently learned to attune himself,
an alternative to the crisp and clear sensation of nerve endings most of
us take for granted. He writes, "My mind can feel into my legs."
Speaking with him about this, coming to a vicarious sense of it myself,
is fascinating.
We also speak at some length this hour about a fascinating central idea
Matthew Sanford has developed in and through his disability. He speaks
of the "silence" he encountered where his mind and body stopped
communicating with one another. But this core silence is within each of
us, only grown more evident through his injury. He describes it
variously in his book and in our conversation, as "the aspect of our
consciousness that makes us feel slightly heavy;" "the place where
stress lands;" and "the source of our feeling of loss, but also of a
sense of awe."
This is the quality of solitary apartness evoked by the existentialist
philosophers. But as Sanford understands it, this silence both separates
us from one another and, in its universality, joins us together. In this
I sense that Matthew Sanford, through an experience of bodily paralysis,
has put new words and a new picture to a core human truth at once both
spiritual and physical.
I often feel that I will never be quite the same again after my radio
conversations, but rarely is that conviction so tactile and embodied as
this time. Through his work with both able-bodied and disabled students
of yoga, Matthew Sanford tells me, he sees that the more alert we are in
our own bodies, the more compassionate and connected we become to the
world around us. Thanks to him, acts like washing the dishes and taking
the stairs become moments of gratitude for the grace of my body and all
of life.
Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendance by Matthew Sanford
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,grh8,808b,4yuf,eatv>
Krista Recommends Reading:
/Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendance/
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,grh8,808b,4yuf,eatv>
by Matthew Sanford
This is a beautiful, life-giving book. It reads like poetry, and takes
the reader inside Matthew Sanford's struggles and insights as a
paraplegic and a man, a son and a brother, a husband and a father. But
the "transcendence" of the book's subtitle is not otherworldliness. This
is a story of moving gracefully within the limits, tragedies, surprises,
and ordinariness of being human and alive.
This message contains graphics. If you do not see the graphics, go to
/http://speakingoffaith.org/programs/bodysgrace/emailnewsletter20061005.shtml/
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,amrx,g7be,4yuf,eatv>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,2qfu,93r,4yuf,eatv>
You received this free e-mail newsletter because you previously
subscribed or because it was sent to you by a friend.
* Unsubscribe or update e-mail preferences
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,5dd7,8ioa,4yuf,eatv&EMAIL_ADDRESS=cfitz@hampshire.edu&State/Province=&First+Name=Chris&Last+Name=Fitz&Address=&ZIP/Postal+Code=17402&Newsletter+Type=&City=&Country=&A+Prairie+Home+Companion=off&American+RadioWorks=off&Composers+Datebook=off&Future+Tense=off&Marketplace=off&Marketplace+Money=&Pipedreams=off&Speaking+of+Faith=on&Splendid+Table=off&The+Bakers+Chronicle=%3CURLENCODE%0AThe%20Bakers%20Chronicle%3E&Weekend+America=off&Writers+Almanac=off&Pretty+Good+Goods=off&Public+Radio+Book+Source=off&Public+Radio+Music+Source=off>
| Report a problem
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,lhes,998a,4yuf,eatv> *
© 2006 American Public Media
<http://www.elabs7.com/c.html?rtr=on&s=fj6,lk4,dv,2nky,64w8,4yuf,eatv>
480 Cedar Street, Saint Paul, MN USA 55101
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.mutualaid.org/pipermail/jubileetroupe/attachments/20061013/5e3d7cc4/attachment.html
More information about the Jubileetroupe
mailing list