Lenten fasting is not so much a denial of our bodies as it is a heightened awareness that our spirituality cannot be anything other than incarnational.

By viewing people incarnationally---sacred embodiments of God's image, physical temples for the Holy Spirit, fleshly expressions of the souls Christ died for---our contemplation of the human body, naked or clothed, will become so devotionally pure that any thought of misusing its beauty for selfish gratification would repulse us. This alone is the measure of true freedom from porno-prudery.

God's personal adoption of human flesh in Jesus Christ not only defies our culture's shameful, obscene, and lustful imaginations about the body, but also silences the deceptive rumors Satan started in Eden that not all our body parts are 'very good,' as God originally said they were.

The Christian hope of salvation isn't to become like the angels of the spiritual world, but to remain true humans, eternally at home in fleshy bodies of cosmic dust, reigning forever in a restored physical universe beside the God-Man, the Divine-Human King over both worlds, because His own glorified human body of resurrected earthly flesh points to the destiny of our own.

The highest compliment ever paid to the entire human body, and the clearest commentary on its decency, dignity and sacred worth, is the bodily manifestation of God's Son, our Savior Jesus Christ, in truly 'human' flesh by His Incarnation, Resurrection, Ascension and predicted Second Coming.

When we, in our humanity, fail to sense God's presence, it helps to remember that He who promised, 'I am with you always,' also felt the human perception of abandonment, when He said, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.'