Week one of our spiritual practice challenge starts with….taking up exercise!
Our principal, Alan Gregory, explains more about how exercise can deepen your connection to God.
Make your exercise challenging but doable
If you’ve already signed up for our March Spirituality and Discipleship course, you’ll find this practice under ‘Personal and Cultural’ on our list of spiritual practices. We don’t tell you how much exercise makes a credible ‘plan’. Something more than occasionally twiddling your thumbs, less than swimming the Channel in a gorilla suit.
If that’s not much help, Google and YouTube offer suggestions, from barely off the sofa to sweating like a pig. As a spiritual practice, this is designedly straightforward. Yet, here is the puzzle. Why is it on this list at all?
Is exercise spiritual?
Why call exercise a Christian spiritual practice? Exercise is hardly a churchy business. All sorts of people exercise in all sorts of places: gyms, village halls, community centres, parks, schools, sports facilities, and so on.
Why on earth pretend it’s spiritual, let alone Christian? That question is a great reason for choosing this practice. Trying to think it through and answer it in practice should sharpen one’s ideas about the ‘spiritual’ and what it means to be you. For starters, the answer to ‘How can exercise be spiritual?’ is not, “Well, it’s spiritual if you say the Lord’s Prayer between every push-up,” or, even worse, “It must be spiritual because it hurts like hell.”
Put bluntly, exercise does not get spiritual when we do it as a basis for doing something else, like praying or meditating. Nor is exercise spiritual because it addresses some higher part of us, for the frustration of which, our bodies set traps. On the contrary.
Spirituality is also about the body
Spirit is a way of being a body, being a body of the kind humans enjoy, bodies having language, having imagination, having reason, and so on. Spirit is the body truly alive.
Most of us exercise to stay healthy, lose weight, build strength, and train for sport. All this is good. Without these beneficial effects, what you are doing is not yet exercise, Christian or otherwise. As a Christian spiritual practice, though, we take up exercise within a larger horizon of awareness and intention. For instance, as you exercise, first attend to these probably unaccustomed movements.
Pay attention to your movements
Notice, first, the points of stress, some breathlessness, a degree of awkwardness and tension about ‘getting it right’. As you settle into the movements, as they become more routine, move your attention further into your body. Recognise that this strange and straining flesh is you in your intricacy, harbouring complexity more than enough for awe and the head-scratching of biologists across centuries to come.
This body is you in your belonging to the earth, in a brother and sisterhood of creatures; in the shared sorceries of DNA and RNA, of histones and amino acids, enzymes, organelles, and nuclei; in the commonwealth of life: the cat brushing against your legs, the coldness of water, relaxing under a tree. Through it all, and most importantly, this is you before God, before the One who creates you because he loves to, who sets you in all this life.
Workout and worship at the same time
As exercising becomes a rhythm that takes you with it, let your attention become an offering. In Jesus, God has shared this flesh with you. So, offer yourself to the God who offers you himself.
Now, as you walk, bend, jump, jog, push, or curl into a ball, give yourself as the person who has found this particular way to get ready, to become more aware, better tuned, and more energetic in living out God’s desire. Of course, don’t think this is all your doing. That’s a ridiculous idea. Your bodily activity forms a juncture of life and grace, spirit and Holy Spirit.
We live from a glory infinitely beyond us, yet closer than a heartbeat. We have no control over this. We put ourselves in the way of receiving, that’s all. In this, exercise is no different from any spiritual practice. We give ourselves by exposing heart and mind in welcome.
Trust in God
We can do nothing without trusting in the generosity of God, who works invisibly and, for the most part, insensibly. This is not to say you will not feel stronger, livelier, or fitter because of your exercise. You should. You may, however, also feel God’s gracious presence in it all. If so, that’s a worthy cause for praise.
You may so experience God, but you may well not. Truly, that isn’t the point, let alone the heart of it, and it really does not matter. All you must do is heave the next weight, stretch the next stretch, and run the next mile.
The spiritual practices – how it works
Each week, we’ll suggest a new spiritual practice to help you open your heart and mind to the mystery of God’s presence.
We’ve got four interesting challenges lined up for February, and we’d love for you to join us.
Share your progress
We’d love to see how you’re doing. Share your progress and inspire others by posting on Facebook or Instagram using the hashtag #StAugSpiritualPractice.
Ready to join?
Check our blog page and socials for weekly challenges, and let’s make February 2025 one to remember!
Watch our short intro video to learn more
In this video, Alan Gregory talks about the spiritual practice element of our upcoming Spirituality and Discipleship taster term, starting in March 2025.
