Not of This Flesh

Nov 6

Written By ESSOESS

The Gospel of Flesh

If the body is blasphemy, then divinity has always been obscene.

For centuries, we have been told to transcend what we can touch. Flesh was labeled dangerous, desire shameful, beauty suspect. Religion made purity the prize for restraint, while capitalism made it the reward for purchase. Between the two, the body became both battlefield and billboard—a site of sin and salvation, of worship and war.

Across temples, churches, and mosques, the spirit was exalted while the flesh was disciplined, yet every sacred act still required a body: fasting, praying, bleeding, birthing, kneeling, dying. Every ritual was choreography in skin. The contradiction was never lost on us. The same mouths that told us to renounce the flesh demanded that we cover it, perfect it, or sell it.

Western theology calls this “dualism,” the belief that mind and matter, soul and skin, belong to separate realms (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). But this thinking has always been political. Once holiness was defined as incorporeal, anyone whose holiness was too visible black, queer, trans, disabled, or adorned—was cast as unholy. The separation of body and spirit was not enlightenment; it was control.

Philosopher bell hooks once warned that to cling to binaries of good and evil, flesh and spirit, is to stay loyal to “the very logic of Western metaphysical dualism that is the heart of racist binary thinking.” (goodreads.com). Dualism gave empire permission to enslave, convert, and mutilate under the guise of saving souls. It told the colonized, “Your skin is temporary; our God is eternal.” It told women, “Your beauty is temptation; your silence is virtue.” It told the queer, “Your transformation is sin; your denial is holy.”

But across the world, bodies have been whispering a different gospel. The Suri women of Ethiopia carve raised scars across their shoulders and arms as rites of strength and erotic power (Oryx Photo: Suri Scarification). The pain is not punishment—it is participation. The scar does not erase the spirit; it reminds it where it lives. In India, Buddhist monks learned transcendence not by rejecting the body, but by stilling it (Buddhist Insight Institute). In Yoruba cosmology, the Ori—the head—is the seat of divine consciousness, linking heaven and human. The sacred has always required a vessel; the vessel has always been divine.

Modern theology continues to wrestle with this inheritance. “Spirituality,” one scholar wrote, “remains challenged by the age-old opposition between matter and spirit.” (Taylor & Francis Online). Yet the body has never waited for theory’s permission to be holy. It knows its worth instinctively. It remembers touch before thought.

The preacher said the flesh was weak, but the body is what carried us through every trial. It bore the lash and the laughter. It delivered children and revolutions. It kept us dancing when the world demanded despair. To deny it now would be to erase the evidence of our survival.

As Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.” (goodreads.com). Silence about the body is still silence about power—who holds it, who fears it, who profits from it.

So if the spirit is to be saved, it must come home to the flesh. Because the flesh was never the mistake. The mistake was believing that divinity lived anywhere else.

We rise in this skin, breathe through it, bruise and bless it. The body is the scripture, the spirit its translation.

If the body is blasphemy, then let it preach.

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The Body as Rebellion

If the body is the altar, then every mark you make is prayer.

Across centuries, beauty has been framed as obedience—something to be earned, refined, and contained. But beauty was never meant to be a cage. In its oldest form, it was ritual. The painted face before war. The scarred arm of initiation. The tattooed thigh marking triumph or grief. Every incision, every pigment, every pierce of the skin was once a language of Spirit.

From Ethiopian scarification to Japanese irezumi to Polynesian tatau, the world has always written its stories on flesh. The Smithsonian reminds us that “tattooing has appeared independently in almost every culture on Earth… as both adornment and affirmation.” (Smithsonian Magazine) What Western culture calls “body modification,” other societies have long known as becoming.

In Hindu cosmology, the body is not illusion but instrument—sharira—a field where karma is worked out through choice and change. To alter the body is not to deny divinity but to participate in it. Among the Arawak and Taíno peoples of the Caribbean, body paint and piercing signified spiritual rank and seasonal renewal, the skin serving as living testament to one’s covenant with the earth and ancestors. These traditions understand what the West keeps forgetting: the Sacred does not hide from form; it inhabits it.

Yet in the West, holiness is still equated with restraint. The altered body is seen as rebellion, the trans body as betrayal, the scarred body as sin. The irony is that the same culture that condemns bodily change also profits from it—plastic surgery, wellness industries, beauty empires—all built upon our longing to be seen.

Psychologists note that the urge to alter one’s body is not rooted in vanity but in meaning. According to the American Psychological Association, “body modifications can serve functions of control, identity formation, and self-expression for those whose lives have lacked agency.” (APA PsycNet) In other words, what society calls brokenness can often be reclamation.

bell hooks wrote, “Our bodies know they are precious even when the world tells us they are worthless.” (bell hooks) The decision to cut, to tattoo, to transition, to augment—to claim the body—is not about vanity; it is about visibility. It is about rewriting divine design when the version we inherited was written in someone else’s image.

Still, the moral panic around transformation remains. Every augmentation is pathologized when it appears on the wrong kind of person. A white woman’s facelift is called self-care; a black woman’s BBL is called desperation. A cis man’s muscle surgery is “enhancement”; a trans man’s chest reconstruction is “extreme.” Labeling certain bodies as unnatural has always been a means of control—a way of keeping holiness behind a paywall and divinity in the hands of the approved.

Among the Nuba people of Sudan, body painting and scarification are not performed for beauty alone but as spiritual declaration—each pattern, color, and cut a testament of identity and belonging. (Pitt Rivers Museum) The paint fades, but the meaning remains. The art is not rebellion; it is reverence.

To modify the body is to mark that you were here. To ink your skin is to confess that the soul needed more room. To transition is to finally recognize the face that mirrors your truth. These are not sins of flesh—they are sacraments of becoming.

And what is spirituality, if not transformation made visible?

If the body is the altar, then the offering has always been you.

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The Machinery of Judgment

If the body is the battlefield, then holiness was the first weapon ever drawn.

We say God doesn’t make mistakes, but we punish everyone who dares to correct ours. For centuries, the body has been the testing ground for purity—disciplined by doctrine, auctioned by empire, sold back through the algorithm as self-love. Colonialism claimed it in chains. Capitalism priced it in trends. Religion anointed its suffering and called it salvation. Every institution found a way to profit from the flesh, and every sermon found a way to shame it.

The Church built an empire on sin, the State built borders on skin, and both learned to call it order. The body became the currency of belonging. Too dark and you were cursed. Too light and you were suspect. Too fat, too thin, too queer, too loud, too free—every adjective became an indictment. As Audre Lorde warned, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” (Uses of the Erotic – PDF) And yet, those tools keep getting sharper, sanctified, and sold at a markup.

According to The Conversation, religious teachings continue to shape body image and self-worth, particularly among women and queer people, where “purity culture and modesty doctrines perpetuate cycles of shame.” (Verywell Mind – Purity Culture Impacts Mental Health) The moral policing of bodies is not about holiness—it’s about hierarchy. Every judgment disguised as virtue is a business plan. From billion-dollar diet industries to ministries built on repentance, the profit margin of guilt is infinite.

UNESCO defines the colonial gaze as the system by which empire “framed, catalogued, and hierarchized bodies through race and desire,” a visual politics that still shapes beauty and belonging today. (UNESCO – Unmasking Racism: Guidelines for Educational Materials) Colorism, fatphobia, and transphobia are not individual biases; they’re inherited technologies of control. A system built on hierarchy cannot survive without hierarchy of flesh.

The prosperity gospel promises abundance, but only if your appearance looks like grace. The church pew and the fashion runway sell the same illusion: salvation through aesthetics. One promises heaven, the other promises followers—but both require your submission. As James Baldwin wrote, “If the concept of God has any use, it is to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.” (James Baldwin — “Letter from a Region in My Mind,” The New Yorker, 1962)

Underneath the choir robes and Instagram filters, judgment masquerades as holiness. We’ve confused discipline with devotion, conformity with faith. The Church tells the trans woman she is deluded. The influencer tells the fat woman she is unfinished. The law tells the black body it is threat until proven innocent. Every voice speaks the same language: you must be corrected.

But across cultures, transformation has always been sacred, not shameful. In India, devotees of Shiva pierce their bodies during Thaipusam as offerings of endurance and release. In Brazil’s Candomblé rituals, the body is mounted by Orisha—divinity entering matter as celebration, not punishment. In Haiti’s Vodou ceremonies, possession is communion, the divine inhabiting flesh in rhythm and color, drums and breath. In these spaces, God does not demand your disappearance—God dances inside you.

Perfection was never the point. Reverence was. And the most radical act of reverence is to stop apologizing for being seen.

If the body is the battlefield, then peace begins when we stop waging war on ourselves.

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Flesh as Portal, Spirit as Proof

If the body is the key, then every breath is a doorway.

Maybe the body was never the cage—maybe it was the way through. We’ve spent lifetimes trying to ascend, fasting our way into holiness, detaching our way into peace, and yet the proof has always been here: skin, pulse, hunger, sweat, sound. The miracle was never outside of matter. It was matter itself.

The mystics knew this long before theology learned to tremble. In Tantra, enlightenment is not escape but expansion—the Divine experienced through sensation, not denial. As a scholar writes, “Tantric practice uses the body as the path, not as an obstacle to overcome.” (Tricycle – “Liberating Sexuality”) In Yoruba cosmology, Asé—the life force—moves through all things, breathing divinity into even the most ordinary act. The body, through the Ori, does not block the sacred; it channels it.

Western religion told us to leave the body to meet God. Indigenous and African traditions remind us: you must return to it. The earth does not separate spirit from soil. The drumbeat does not separate rhythm from bone. When the dancer moves, divinity doesn’t watch from above—it moves with them. As the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion explains, “Embodiment is not a metaphor for spirituality—it is the mode through which the sacred becomes known.” (Oxford Research Encyclopedia)

To live fully inside the body is the final initiation. It is where prophecy becomes personal. Where every orgasm, every cry, every breath is revelation. Where the erotic is not sin but sacrament. As black trans poet J Mase III writes, “God made me in Their image—and They didn’t make mistakes.” (Refinery29 – “What It’s Like to Be a Trans Person of Faith”) Embodiment is resistance; embodiment is prayer.

This is what the mystics of flesh understood: that spirit is not light without shadow—it is the shimmer born when both are held at once. You cannot shame the vessel and still praise what flows through it. You cannot condemn the skin and still claim to worship creation.

Maybe salvation was never about leaving. Maybe holiness was never about purity. Maybe heaven was always the courage to stay.

If the body is the key, then divinity was never lost—it was only waiting for us to return home to ourselves.

We were never meant to transcend the flesh—we were meant to remember it. Every scar, every curve, every breath is the hymn, proof that divinity never lived apart from us. To worship the body is not vanity—it is remembrance. The Spirit needed somewhere to live, and it chose you.

One love, ESS xo

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