matter/self-denial/talking about God/Genesis

This weekend, it hit me that the most important question/decision in my life, and my faith, is what I do with physical matter, what I believe about it and its relations to other parts of me. I see my body now as something that is more interwoven with my "soul", my emotions, my morality, and I don't want to create a hierarchy among these things. That is where I am at with morality right now, that it is one part of me, not necessarily the most important, and that it is a mistake to base all decisions on my moral health, to the cost my physical, emotional, spiritual health and my relationships with others. In other words, I want my decisions to be based on my health in its entirety, and not simply on one part of me.

The immediate question for me is, "What about Jesus' emphasis on self-denial as an expectation of following him?" My answer right now is that self-denial must also mean denying my own moral convictions, or even to do what is, or what most people believe to be, objectively wrong. I am differentiating those two categories. I think that Christians are eager to give up their passions, their bodies, their lives, but they are very reluctant to give up their morals. Who can call unclean what God calls clean?

Incidentally, I have been thinking lately about how disrespectful many of peoples attitudes (which they think of as respectful) towards God are. It's disrespectful to speak dishonestly about God, or to speak dishonestly about my experience of and feelings towards God. I have had the Auden quote "Isn't God a shit?" stuck in my head lately, and thinking of how respectful that phrase is, when most people would think of it as blasphemous. I suspect that God's children are more concerned with this sort of blasphemy than God himself is. Anyway, this isn't the same as being nasty towards God for its own sake, or to hurt other people.

I have also been thinking about Genesis, since I've been reading through that with group. Specifically, I'm very interested in the fact that there is no dialogue between God and humanity until after the fall, where the suggestion is that it is not until sin entered the picture that humanity was able to enter into much of a relationship with God. Additionally, I'm interested in how reading Genesis reorients ideas of what is good, and what is not good, particularly God's silence or absence. When Adam and Eve eat the fruit, God is not there. They hear him walking in the garden after wards. The early Genesis account, then, suggests that God's absence is good as much as his presence is good, whereas many Christians I know interpret God's silence as sin or laziness on the part of believers, that surely if they were good enough or listened more, God would speak, and speak clearly to them.

False.