Christianity and Tai Chi

I have been doing Tai Chi for a couple of years. I started because it was a means of exercise and personal balance that I needed, and I have enjoyed it. I have even used an exercise in a sermon, because it expressed the concept so well. It was about keeping your feet rooted in the earth and your head stretched up to heaven.

Of course, some people have a real problem with this. It is not "Christianity" so therefore it is "wrong". Just recently we have been doing the more "spiritual" or "mystical" side of it, which has made me thing again about whether it is compatible with my faith. I should point out that the way of speaking is not easy to align - there is a lot of talk about "chi" energy; about the way it flows through the body; about how some of the positions can help this energy to move and heal. All fairly typically based in Oriental philosophy.

And yet, when I get down to it, I do it as a form of relaxation, and gentle exercise to loosen the body a bit. The Chi energy is a way of interpreting and understanding how this exercise works that I don't entirely accept. But I understand it as a way of explaining what we do, and it is as sensible and right as some of the explanations within Christianity for things that go on - I don't accept all of them either. I have a strong pragmatic streak, because if it works, I will try to understand why, but accept that it works whatever, and try to adjust my understanding to take this into account. Until I find something that is fundamentally at odds with other parts of my belief, I am prepared to accept things that I cannot understand or explain.

However, there is another issue I have here, that I touched on in a previous post - that Christianity has a strong anti-palagianist sense. That is, for those who are not up on Christian heresies, a rejection of the importance of the physical. We tend to evade the questions of supporting and caring for the body, because the physical is less important than the spiritual. When there is a physical problem, the response is usually to pray for it, not to look at what we can do to help it. We do not look at health, exercise, relaxation, we focus on the spiritual aspects, which is not always where the problems are.

Tai Chi does not necessarily have an answer for why the exercises work, but biology probably does. Christianity does not necessarily have all of the right answers to everything, but that does not mean it is wrong. I am a great believer in drawing from wherever, assessing and analysing, throwing some things out, tentatively accepting some things, and enthusiatically accepting others. Surely that is an honest approach to spiritual development? Surely that is what being an honest seeker after truth means?