“Don’t be so heavenly-minded that you’re no earthly good.” It’s a familiar admonishment and warning against over-spiritualizing responses to common issues. You can be “heavenly-minded,” but only to a point.

The reprimand suggests being “heavenly-minded” does not produce practical or realistic results. The argument is that spiritual thinking should produce beneficial or advantageous results. If not, then what’s the point?

While not directly quoted from the Bible, I wonder if the exchange between Jesus and Peter inspired the phrase. Matthew records their interaction this way:

“From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and be killed and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, ‘God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’” (16:21-23, NRSV).

Perhaps not wanting to be called Satan or a hindrance to Jesus, we pit the two, “heavenly minded” versus “earthly good,” against each other. A false binary, one outweighs the other. 

Head in the clouds or feet on the ground, the statement implies that one is better than the other. But what if one is done in service to the other?

Theology as technology, not to be confused with a theology of technology, could serve as the machinery or equipment for a more advanced idea of the self that includes its supernatural qualities. Of course, this would not incorporate its hardware and assume an automated way of living. 

I am not advocating that we be automatons. Instead, I believe we could be much farther along if we hopped off the conveyor belt of capitalism in pursuit of an expanded awareness of human being, beyond competition, control, separation and domination.

Our understanding of theology should include human transcendence, which is not a religious way to say escapism. Instead, I write to remind us of a state of being that moves us beyond our physical realities and social conditions. Centering us in our sacredness and delivering us from totalizing narratives of marginalization is an expected outcome of The Raceless Gospel Initiative.

The shorthand of it is somebodiness. But the long way around to it requires inner strength and the realization that the body is the locus of liberation, the site of rebellion and redemption. It is also the realization that we are more than “this here flesh,” to employ the words of Cole Arthur Riley.

To be sure, this is not a new concept but one that bears repeating lest we forget who we really are— the children of God and, thus, otherworldly. We are more than skin and bones. 

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we belong to the earth, yet there is a world within us. We are heaven in earthen vessels. Emily Dickinson reminds us:

“The Brain — is wider than the Sky —
For — put them side by side —
The one the other will contain
With ease — and you — beside —

The Brain is deeper than the sea —
For — hold them — Blue to Blue —
The one the other will absorb —
As sponges — Buckets — do —.”

My grandmother, Sister Eva Mae, used to speak of herself as “a pilgrim passing through.” For her, this world was temporary and a passageway to another that was her destination. She passed along her faith, which doubled as a passport.

I don’t want us to forget to walk this way, but I am afraid that we forget the self beyond the natural world and its microcosms. I am worried that we have become detached from the reality of our divinity and have forgotten this wisdom in the Age of Information. Consequently, the words of religious teachers, philosophers and writers bear repeating.

All three in one, James Baldwin’s words discern the difference in his book “No Name in the Street.” “There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as before an ancient friend,” he wrote. And therein lies the distance and the difference between the selves, at least for me.

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