If Not There, Here? The Spirituality of CrossFit

 Dear James,

Thanks for the encouragement today at the gym, both reminding me that narrower squat stance protects my lower back in back or goblet squats and in your curiosity and energy about what a crossfit spirituality writing might look like, even provide, for the upcoming months. 

I thought I’d begin with that beginning, as well as a new blog project, because otherwise I bring all my passion and energy into my head, abstracting into things others may or may not be remotely curious about. My first swing at an opening?  What does it mean to live and breathe love into the world while immersed in increasingly hostile polarizations, institutional decline unto rupture, and an epidemic of loneliness across the North American landscape? No one–not even my beloveds–know how I got to that Z from A, back in 2018 when I joined my first box. So…more informal, even epistolary seems the way to begin. Dear James…

I can see the potential of CrossFit methodology and community – more rigorously defined than usual today – for a broadening, welcoming spirituality of CrossFit able to bring mentored method into daily lives, embodied movement/functional fitness, and communal learning as antidote to so much polarization and fragmentation today. There are possibilities here for an antidote to our epidemic of loneliness, methinks. My original error was imagining that this work could find a foothold in an academic setting predisposed against nontraditional spiritual communities!

What might emerge with more informal blog posts and musings…if I allowed this to grow over time into an open-source book easy to share, distribute, consider?

I am a full professor at a freestanding seminary, Protestant Christianity, with a disciplinary orientation in Christian Spirituality, or the Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality (SSCS). My roots are more broadly coined as practical theology, having completed my doctoral work at Princeton Seminary in one of the sub-disciplines of practical theology, educational ministries. All that means is that I’ve paid my dues for a rather establishment orientation to the world–family, civic community, church, academy. None of which could help me confront what my body and spirit needed for wholeness, trauma-informed healing of decades of ingested shames. Hmmm…

A convenient convergence too: I’m teaching a course this summer with low registration–how to live a body-positive, toward-health theological life in decades of ministry? What are the body-positive theological resources students can bring to ‘return to their own bodies’ in contrast to the usual body-dissociative Christian/scriptural dualisms (flesh/spirit, dark/light…)...? 

The fire within me about it is amusing…an editorially tanked essay may be just the goad I need to disregard the academic outlets and move into public theology, grounded contributions folks today need more than the academic essay I had tried to squeeze it all into.

We will begin…