A Unified Whole

It seems to me that having established my purpose in the martial arts and why I am writing in previous posts some time should be spent upon the arenas in which a Christian martial way would be practiced.  A Christian martial way must involve the whole of the human person engaged in it.  It can never be purely physical, or purely spiritual.  It cannot be solely mental.  It must be an integrated path in which a complete person is formed by Christ to a life of service and the protection of others.

The Christian martial artist must therefore train not only the body, but the mind and the spirit.  How does one accomplish this, especially keeping in mind the unique purpose of martial arts to the Christian?  No martial art or martial way I have encountered spends anything like an equal amount of time on these arenas.  The vast majority of martial practice is with the body.  Very little is spent training the mind.  Indeed in most cases the mind is considered trained through the disciplining of the body.  And often spirit is reduced to breathing and vocal exercises.  The training of the body tends to focus, as noted in an earlier post, on how to block, dodge, hit, throw, break, etc. for the sake of one's self.  So not only must the amount of relative training spent on each of these change, but the sort of training we normally subject the body to must also change in the practice of a Christian martial way.

Let us begin.  A Christian martial way is about defending others.  So while that may at times involve the same sorts of techniques upon which other martial arts primarily focus, it will also demand at least one special training, that of accepting being hit.  Now, there are martial arts in which one learns how to take hits.  There are even martial artists who specialize in strengthening or hardening some part (or even all) of their bodies in order to be virtually impregnable.  I am not talking about this kind of training, though it might prove very useful to have.  What I am talking about is training the body not to respond to pain with violence, training the mind not to respond to aggression with escalation, and training the spirit not to respond to humiliation with pride.  To achieve such a thing, it becomes very apparent that the sort of training often practiced within other martial ways will not be enough, for other martial ways eventually give way to the defense of the self.  The Christian martial way is an active training in how to surrender the self to save others.

It is, in fact, relatively easy to accept physical pain from a strike without striking back.  This is something most martial artists can easily accomplish.  Training the mind not to react instinctively and selfishly to aggression towards itself, and training our spirits to accept humiliation as a key to humility rather than as a trigger to rage - these are the difficult tasks which we must somehow accomplish if we are to walk in this way.  Further stressing this need for integrated training of the human person, we can also see that the battlefields upon which a Christian must fight are not simply physical.  We are called to be able to give an account for our hope to any who might ask (1 Peter 3:15), and we are reminded that we struggle not with physical powers, but spiritual powers (Ephesians 6:12).  We are engaged not only in physical struggles, but in mental and spiritual warfare every single day.  In fact, we are more involved in these two than we are with physical struggles.  Therefore, while others might train their bodies almost exclusively, we must train all three, and their training must be integrated at some level, even if they proceed largely independently.  More on how to come.