Ever since I was a small child, I have laboured under the suspicion that if a priest were to see me anywhere other than in church, he would pass a report on my activities on to God, something like a spy passing stolen documents to his handler in a public park.

 I was, therefore, aghast when my parish priest recently told me he had seen me out running.

On the other hand, exercise isn’t a concept foreign to Christianity. St Paul famously exhorts the early Christians in Thessalonica to be “athletes for Christ”. Running has given me a deeper appreciation of what this entails. A runner has to listen to their body, and understand what it is saying. Your mind and your body must work together. The feminist writer Kathy Acker thought our culture disdains athletic pursuits because modern civilisation lives “under the sign of Descartes”. In what’s called “Cartesian dualism” the human person is bifurcated into body and mind. The mind is the seat of logic, rationality, culture, politics: it is where our real self resides. The body is a place of chance, lust, disease, and death: our dangerous and grubby “other” side.

Get Instant Access

Continue Reading

Register for free to read this article in full

REGISTER

Subscribe for unlimited access

SUBSCRIBE NOW

From just £37.50 quarterly

  Print copy of The Tablet delivered directly to your door.
  Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content.
  Access to the weekly digital copy of The Tablet.
  Full access to The Tablet’s archive – over 180 years of back issues.

Already a subscriber? Login